Whenever the representatives of the international community of states meet somewhere in the world to prepare new or renewed international agreements, there is almost inevitably talk of “marathon negotiations”.

Linguistically quite worn, but the texts that are being haggled over in these negotiations are really not about beauty.

Katja Gelinsky

Business correspondent in Berlin

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Inka Gnittke does not run a marathon.

But if anyone knows what a feat it takes to bring together the ideas of more than 190 countries in a treaty, then it's Germany's top diplomat for saving global biodiversity.

Gnittke is leading the German delegation in the negotiations on a new global framework agreement to protect nature.

A Herculean task.

It's about fighting species extinction, preserving ecosystems and genetic diversity, and restoring natural habitats.

From the beginning, since 2018, the head of the nature conservation sub-department in the Federal Ministry for the Environment has led the negotiations on the project for Germany, which has been invoked as “historic”.

The final leg now takes place in Montreal.

The official start is on Wednesday, December 7th.

Aim for measurable goals

However, Gnittke and the entire group of pre-negotiators arrived earlier.

Working groups met again from December 3rd to 5th because too many questions were still unanswered.

Officially, the World Nature Summit is supposed to end on December 19 with the signing of the agreement, one day after the World Cup final in Qatar.

But it is quite possible that the negotiating delegations in Canada will need extra time before it is clear whether the international community will succeed in formulating ambitious and measurable goals for the conservation of biological diversity.

It is also very important that mechanisms for the implementation of the goals are defined, emphasizes Gnittke in an interview with the FAZ.

"It doesn't help nature and us if the goals are only on paper."

Diplomat without pathos

The negotiations on the protection of nature are therefore about the big picture.

However, Gnittke would back down when it came to the wording.

Pathos does not correspond to her nature.

She has that in common with her current minister, Steffi Lemke (Greens).

Gnittke weighs her words carefully and then presents them with resolute seriousness.

And one suspects that the head of the delegation has also mastered the instrument of accentuated silence.

It sounds all the more emphatic when the ministerial councilor says soberly: "What we lose with biodiversity is our own livelihood." It is therefore not enough to just find the lowest common denominator.

"It's about our common interests, which not everyone wants to admit." You have to work on that in the next few days.

The pressure on the negotiators is a little noticeable: "We are in a dramatic situation and now have to deliver," says Gnittke.

Scientists have been demanding this from politicians for a long time.

They predict that by the end of the century around a million species will have disappeared forever.

With what consequences for mankind, nobody can say at the moment, but experts already estimate the annual global economic loss due to the extinction of species at around 4 trillion dollars a year.