Building a global ecological civilization is a shared responsibility that cannot be shirked

The address President Xi Jinping made via video link at the opening ceremony of the High-Level Segment of the second part of the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity on Thursday shows the great significance China attaches to the event and the cause it represents.

It is estimated that more than 10,000 scientists, government officials and activists are gathered in Montreal for the world's most important biodiversity conference co-hosted by Canada and China — with its first part held in Kunming, Yunnan province, in October last year — eager to work for the conclusion of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, and identify targets and pathways for global biodiversity protection in the future.

It is good to see in an increasingly volatile world countries have chosen to come together to pool their efforts to find ways to better protect the planet's biodiversity — on which we as a species depend and of which we are part — and foster a more nature-friendly way of development.

As President Xi has repeatedly urged, countries need to take the development of an ecological civilization as the guide to coordinate the relationship between man and nature. That requires solving the problems brought by industrial civilization, keeping human activities within the limits of the ecological and environmental constraints, and carrying out holistic conservation and systematic governance of the Earth's ecosystems.

The new biodiversity targets agreed in Montreal need to be ambitious on the one hand and pragmatic on the other. What we have managed to achieve as a species has been remarkable. But at the same time catastrophic. We have been the harbinger of doom to many other species, and may yet be the harbinger of our swan song as a species. We are already living on a borrowed future, as the Earth's annual capacity to generate renewable materials and absorb waste cannot keep pace with our insatiable demand and abuse of its resources.

China has been striving to step up to the plate in playing an exemplary role in building an ecological civilization. That involves painful changes to behavior. But it recognizes that those pains will be relatively short-lived while the gains will be long-lasting. China is willing to contribute its wisdom, experience and practices and join hands with the rest of the world to launch a new process of global biodiversity governance, and advance the building of a community with a shared future for all life on Earth.