Must do better: A blue lion fish. The marine realm has been disproportionately hit by biodiversity losses, but a new protected area is aimed at deep sea species.

Credit: iStockphoto

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BONN: U.N. talks have yielded a package of measures aimed at staving off a mass extinction of Earth's species and blocking irreparable damage to the ecosystems on which human life depends.

After a 12-day conference, 191 nations attending the Convention on Biological Diversity agreed on Friday to set up the first-ever deep-sea nature preserve. They also agreed to expand reserves on land to an area that, if combined, would be nearly twice the size of Germany.

In another first, a long-stymied effort to compensate developing nations for "genetic resources" extracted to make drugs and cosmetics also gained traction. German Environment minister Sigmar Gabriel hailed progress on this so-called access and benefits-sharing regime as a "real success."

No to ocean fertilisation

Other measures passed included a de-facto ban on sowing oceans with chemicals, an experimental process championed by some nations – notably Australia – as a potential carbon-reducing solution to global warming.

And the conference also took the first steps toward setting global standards for developing biofuels, a renewable energy that has been accused of accelerating deforestation and widening hunger as farmers swap food crops for fuel crops.

Green groups were critical, though. They slammed the outcome as badly failing the U.N. Millennium Development Goal which sets 2010 as the deadline to "substantially reduce" biodiversity loss.

The bloc of 77 developing countries and China approved the consensus package but issued a warning. A major reduction of biodiversity loss by 2010 "is unlikely at the current rates," they said. "Let history not say about our age that we were rich in resources but poor in will."

They also called for benefit sharing from genetic resources to be given legal teeth. This was an issue that divided the industrialised north and the developing south.

Gabriel acknowledged that Bonn meeting "achieved less than we should have, given the dimension of the problems." But, he argued, "achieving unanimity among 191 states is difficult."

The conference agreed on criteria for marine protected areas in the high seas and deep-sea habitats. On land, tens of millions of hectares are to be earmarked for nature preserves, under initiatives unveiled Indonesia, Malaysia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Bosnia.