17 December 2008: On the occasion of the fifth annual UN Day for South-South Cooperation and the Launch of the Global South-South Development Expo, organized by the UN Development Programme on 17 December 2008, Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), drew attention to statistics coming from climate-related natural disasters.

He stressed that biodiversity loss can worsen the effects of climate
change, and deplored that, despite the demonstrated ability of
biodiversity to both stabilize the climate and mitigate the effects of
climate change, efforts to halt its loss are proceeding slowly, while
climate change itself is accelerating these trends.
He noted that South-South cooperation is an important way for the
countries that will be hardest hit by climate change to share
strategies for assessing and reducing climate change risk, adding that
the importance of incorporating the many values of biodiversity into
the process of South-South cooperation was explicitly recognized in
2006. [The Statement]