World Bank to lead economic push on nature protection
Richard Black, BBC News
The World Bank has launched a global partnership aimed at helping countries include the costs of destroying nature into their national accounts.
Ten nations will take part in the pilot phase, including India and Colombia.
The bank’s president Robert Zoellick said environmental destruction happens partly because governments do not account for the value of nature.
The partnership was launched at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meeting in Nagoya, Japan.
“We know that human well-being depends on ecosystems and biodiversity,” said Mr Zoellick.
“We also know they’re degrading at an alarming rate.
“One of the causes is our failure to properly value ecosystems and all they do for us – and the solution therefore lies in taking full account of our ecosystem services when countries make policies.”
Norway’s Environment Minister Erik Solheim said re-valuing nature in this way would force business practices to change.
(28 October 2010)
Related: The business of bio(cultural) diversity? -KS
A Planet In Square Brackets
George Monbiot, georgemonbiot.com
As the summit begins, I’ve finally got round to reading the draft declaration on biodiversity* the governments meeting at Nagoya in Japan will discuss. It’s 195 pages long. If it were a thesis about the causes and consequences of the decline of the world’s wild species, I would give it a fairly high mark. As an action plan for doing something about this decline, it’s a dead loss.
It begins by reminding us of the comprehensive failure of the last big declaration, in 2002. Then the governments agreed to “achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss”. The new declaration begins by saying this hasn’t been met “in full”. Later, it concedes that it hasn’t been met at all:
“The diversity of genes, species and ecosystems continues to decline, as the pressures on biodiversity remain constant or increase in intensity mainly as a result of human actions.”
It warns that, unless something changes pretty drastically, there will be “continuing high levels of extinctions and loss of natural and semi-natural habitats throughout this century”. There’s a danger, it says, that certain critical thresholds could be crossed, leading to the collapse of ecosystems, with serious consequences for the human communities that depend on them…
…The declaration also suggests a fairly reasonable list of what should, in principle, be done to defend biodiversity. It proposes 20 targets, which include recognising the value of biodiversity in national planning, getting rid of incentives to destroy it, switching to sustainable farming and forestry, protecting coral reefs from climate change, creating more protected areas, giving special help to threatened species and eradicating invasive species. There’s only one problem: the governments agreeing to these measures don’t actually have to do anything.
All these targets, virtuous as they are, are merely “aspirations for achievement at the global level” and a “flexible framework” within which countries decide what they want to do. The governments signing up to them are “invited” to set their own targets, and only for those measures they deign to adopt. There are no sanctions and no specific measures to which particular governments must agree.
Any text which might imply acting on these proposals, even voluntarily, is in square brackets – meaning that it has been contested and might not be adopted…
Having read this draft, it’s obvious to me that our Biodiversity100 campaign, which presses governments to declare at Nagoya that they will adopt specific targets of their own, is more necessary than ever…
(18 October 2010)
Japan offers hope to biodiversity summit with $2bn conservation fund
Jonathan Watts, The Guardian
Hopes for a new global deal to conserve life on earth received a much-needed boost today with the announcement of $2bn (£1.2bn) in funds from Japan and signs that negotiators are narrowing their differences at the United Nations conference on biodiversity in Nagoya.
Delegates said 15 of the 20 conservation targets in a draft strategic plan to ease the loss of habitat and species have been agreed, up from eight just 24 hours before. The moves mark a considerable acceleration after the grindingly slow progress of the past 10 days.
Britain added to the momentum by earmarking £100m for forest protection, but delegates tempered their optimism with warnings that the biggest political hurdles have yet to be crossed and there are only two full days left until the end of the meeting.
Environment ministers from 193 countries have gathered in Nagoya to draw up a protocol that will have three main strands: a strategic plan for global conservation, an arrangement for funding and monitoring, and a system for regulating and sharing the benefits of genetic resources.
Finance – a major stumbling block until now – was said to have nudged slightly closer to a resolution today amid growing signs of flexibility. The host nation pledged $2bn over three years to developing countries for the management of ecosystem management and sustainable resource use. This headline figure represented an almost tenfold increase on its previous biodiversity outlays, but it was unclear how much of this was fresh money and how much diverted from other areas of the aid budget.
However, wide differences remain on the most important goal of the conference: the establishment of a strategic conservation plan for the coming decade. The EU’s aim of halting biodiversity loss by 2020 is being blocked by Brazil, which says a more realistic target is to reduce biodiversity loss to at least 50% and, where feasible, zero.
Similarly, efforts to expand protected marine areas to 15% of oceans are being blocked by India and China. The ministers of these two fast developing nations do not arrive until the final days, which has narrowed the time for a compromise.
Even if these problems can be resolved, the overall package could still fall through if no agreement is reached on the third strand, which aims to prevent biopiracy and establish rules for accessing genetic resources and sharing their benefits with local people. This topic remains entangled due to legal wranglings and conflicts between the views of environmental ministries and the commercial interests of big pharmaceutical companies
(27 October 2010)
and see here today: Biodiversity talks hang in the balance
Also related: Three Major Reports and Biodiversity loss seen as greater financial risk than terrorism, says UN The UN website on the Convention is here.-KS
