Berlin, 2 Decem­ber 2025 — An alliance of envi­ron­men­tal and farm­ing organ­i­sa­tions protest­ed today out­side the Fed­er­al Chan­cellery against plans to dereg­u­late genet­i­cal­ly mod­i­fied plants cre­at­ed with new genet­ic mod­i­fi­ca­tion (GM) tech­niques. The groups urged the Ger­man gov­ern­ment to reject any deal emerg­ing from tomorrow’s EU tri­logue nego­ti­a­tions unless essen­tial safe­guards are includ­ed.

At the World Con­ser­va­tion Con­gress in Abu Dhabi, the Inter­na­tion­al Union for Con­ser­va­tion of Nature (IUCN) nar­row­ly vot­ed against a “pre­cau­tion­ary defer­ment” of the release of genet­i­cal­ly engi­neered wild species into nat­ur­al ecosys­tems. How­ev­er, a slim major­i­ty of IUCN mem­bers sup­port­ed a call for “addi­tion­al pre­cau­tion­ary safe­guards” on such releas­es. The Con­gress exposed deep divi­sions with­in the con­ser­va­tion com­mu­ni­ty over whether genet­i­cal­ly engi­neered wild organ­isms should be released into nature.

Abu Dhabi, 15 Octo­ber 2025 — In a wide­ly antic­i­pat­ed but deeply con­cern­ing deci­sion, IUCN mem­bers have implic­it­ly endorsed the use of genet­ic engi­neer­ing in nature con­ser­va­tion — despite insuf­fi­cient sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence and the absence of effec­tive reg­u­la­tions to man­age its risks.