A summit aimed at forging an international plan to reverse nature loss and preserve biodiversity will be delayed for a second time because of the pandemic, organisers said on Wednesday. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature said its 2020 congress, which had already been rescheduled for January 2021, would be postponed to an unspecified date owing to "the sanitary situation associated with the Covid-19 pandemic". The announcement follows a series of dire warnings from scientists over the state of nature, with the United Nations saying on Tuesday nations were set to miss every single biodiversity target they set themselves a decade ago. Last week the WWF's biennial Living Planet Index found that populations of wild animals, birds and fish had plummeted nearly 70 percent in the last five decades. The IUCN congress is one of the biggest biodiversity summits on the global calendar, with conservationists urging nations to use the opportunity to commit to preserving vast wild spaces in order to halt species decline. abd-pg/jxb