SCB Policy Blog

Signed by 150 government leaders at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is one of the most important international agreements regarding conservation of the earth’s biota. The Conference of the Parties (COP) is the governing body of the CBD, and advances implementation of the Convention through the decisions it takes at its periodic meetings. The Tenth meeting (COP10) was held in Nagoya, Japan (18 – 20 October 2010). SCB, in collaboration with other scientific societies, played a key role at the Nagoya meeting. Below is a report from John Fitzgerald, the SCB Policy Director.

The Society’s Executive Office and that of the Society for Ecological Restoration worked informally with IUCN in the summer as IUCN prepared its extensive recommendations for the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity.  Building on a letter prepared by the European Section SCB prepared and sent recommendations for the Conference of the Parties in advance of the COP where we were represented by a delegation of Policy Director Fitzgerald and four other SCB members.

We found SCB members on several delegations of party states and NGOs all of whom welcomed SCB’s presence.  We worked with them and others during the two weeks of intensive negotiations.  We highlight some of what we successfully proposed or demonstrably advanced here but we also achieved the goal of being a helpful presence within and between several different venues (e.g., negotiating sessions called Working Groups and Contact Groups) in the conference.

The most important outcome of this meeting was probably its success on many fronts, compared with the failure within the UN system at Copenhagen which saw a few big nations negotiate a non-binding agreement whose targets are driven not by current science nor by a process that will use future science, but by what was politically acceptable to each at that moment.  Our progress at the CBD helps keep us on track to build a system of binding laws that respond to science as it evolves and protect vulnerable biodiversity while we improve our understanding of it.  In agreeing on a Protocol on Access and Benefits Sharing the parties broke the logjam and allowed for agreement on a new and more practical strategic plan.  Thanks in part to us, this new plan includes more than one reference to the laws or policy instruments that parties must report to the future Conferences of the Parties that they have put in place in order to achieve the conservation targets and the overall implementation of the Conventional.

1)  We prompted the EU to insert “and the precautionary approach” as the final phrase in the single paragraph on the Mission of the 2010-20 Strategic Plan (See excerpt below).  Near the final day, we noticed that “decisions based on sound science” had been added to this key paragraph.  Before Rio that phrase had been used to stop precautionary conservation measures in the absence of definitive data.  At Rio, in Agenda 21 and in the preamble to the CBD, in non-binding form, all nations agreed to err on the side of caution in such cases.  The EU has adopted this principle in law and is rightly proud of it.  I immediately brought this issue to the attention of the EU delegation and they succeeded in inserting the precautionary approach in our contact group on the final day of our work in that group after several parties grumbled but none dared oppose it on the record.

2) Costa Rica’s delegate, an environmental lawyer and former Minister, successfully advanced our suggestion that the plan specifically include reports to the Conferences of the Parties (implying every two years hereafter and not just by 2015) on “policy instruments” as well as strategic plans overall.

3) Our delegation member Christine Real de Azua, who led the effort to persuade the World Bank to publish green GDP figures for each country in the mid-1990s, rose to the defense of the EU when no one else could speak authoritatively about the proposal that all nations be expected to incorporate the values of biodiversity and ecosystem services into the systems of national accounts (such as having accounts that complement their standard Gross Domestic Product accounts to reflect natural capital (forests, fish, ecosystem services, etc. – stewardship or lack thereof).  Her interventions persuaded the EU to continue to fight to require that parties include nature in national accounts AND in other reporting.  She and I also made connections with the UNEP officials who plan now to work with SCB in developing additional uses for the TEEB report and the accounting numbers that will flow due to the CBD plan, that we can use to enhance investment and procurement policies of nations and corporations.

4) We provided copies of the SCB/Africa Section’s position paper on Agro-fuels to a grateful African delegation and others who were working hard to maintain precautionary approaches in the statement on Bio-fuels as Brazil and others sought to weaken them.

5) We defended references to IPBES in several documents, including the formal statement on the Science Policy Interface, so that the request of Venezuela and others that it be discussed at this CBD COP has been fulfilled positively and it should now proceed to approval in the UN General Assembly and in the UNEP Governing Council meetings over the next year.

6) After we spoke with several delegations key phrases in the statement on Biodiversity and Climate Change were moved so as to indicate, we hope, that the Executive Secretariat and the CBD’s working bodies will not defer indefinitely to the UNFCCC with regard to climate mitigation, especially through ecosystem management (e.g. REDD+), but work with the other conventions, cooperate on the road to “Rio plus 20” in 2012, and report back at the next COP (in India in 2012) on what more the CBD can contribute to climate change mitigation.

[mappress mapid="3"]