Biodiversity conservation stressed

Islamabad: Federal Minister for Education Shafqat Mahmood emphasized the importance of conserving biodiversity in the face of global climate change, and lauded the development of a big health data repository under the Biodiversity and Big Health Data Alliance (BHBD) initiated by the Beijing Institute of Genomics, China.

The Minister was addressing as the chief guest the opening session of the International Symposium on Global Biodiversity and the 2nd Annual Meeting of the BHBD Alliance Meeting at the Secretariat on Thursday.

The event has been organized by the National Centre for Bioinformatics, Quaid-i-Azam University in collaboration with COMSTECH and Beijing Institute of Genomics (BIG), Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The Minister expressed Pakistan’s appreciation of this scientific alliance formed in 2018 that has institutions from China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Thailand.as founding members.

Dr. S. Khurshid Hasanain, Advisor COMSTECH (OIC Ministerial Standing Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation) identified the role of COMSTECH as advancing S&T in OIC member states through cooperation, collaborations and support for scientific initiatives.

Considering the crucial importance of this alliance in providing its members access to a vast data base of biodiversity and its genomic sequencing, COMSTECH was very keen to see other OIC member States becoming a part of this alliance.