Scientists say replacing just 10 percent of global vegetable intake with seaweed-derived products could free up large portions of land. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
NAIROBI, Aug 13 2025 (IPS)

Current rates of land degradation pose a major environmental and socioeconomic threat, driving climate change, biodiversity loss, and social crises. Food production to feed more than 8 billion people is the dominant land use on Earth. Yet, this industrial-scale enterprise comes with a heavy environmental toll.
Preventing and reversing land degradation are key objectives of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and are also fundamental for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

These three conventions emerged from the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to address the interconnected crises of biodiversity loss, climate change and land degradation. A paper published today in Nature by 21 leading scientists argues that the targets of “these conventions can only be met by ‘bending the curve’ of land degradation and that transforming food systems is fundamental for doing so.”

Lead author Fernando T. Maestre of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia, says the paper presents “a bold, integrated set of actions to tackle land degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change together, as well as a clear pathway for implementing them by 2050.”

“By transforming food systems, restoring degraded land, harnessing the potential of sustainable seafood, and fostering cooperation across nations and sectors, we can ‘bend the curve’ and reverse land degradation while advancing towards goals of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification and other global agreements.”

Co-author Barron J. Orr, UNCCD’s Chief Scientist, says, “Once soils lose fertility, water tables deplete, and biodiversity is lost, restoring the land becomes exponentially more expensive. Ongoing rates of land degradation contribute to a cascade of mounting global challenges, including food and water insecurity, forced relocation and population migration, social unrest, and economic inequality.”

“Land degradation isn’t just a rural issue; it affects the food on all our plates, the air we breathe, and the stability of the world we live in. This isn’t about saving the environment; it’s about securing our shared future.”

The authors suggest an ambitious but achievable target of 50 percent land restoration for 2050—currently, 30 percent by 2030—with enormous co-benefits for climate, biodiversity and global health. Titled ‘Bending the curve of land degradation to achieve global environmental goals,’ the paper argues that it is imperative to ‘bend the curve’ of land degradation by halting land conversion while restoring half of degraded lands by 2050.

“Food systems have not yet been fully incorporated into intergovernmental agreements, nor do they receive sufficient focus in current strategies to address land degradation. Rapid, integrated reforms focused on global food systems, however, can move land health from crisis to recovery and secure a healthier, more stable planet for all,” reads parts of the paper.

Against this backdrop, the authors break new ground by quantifying the impact of reducing food waste by 75 percent by 2050 and maximizing sustainable ocean-based food production—measures that alone could spare an area larger than Africa. They say restoring 50 percent of degraded land through sustainable land management practices would correspond to the restoration of 3 Mkm² of cropland and 10 Mkm² of non-cropland, a total of 13 Mkm².

Stressing that land restoration must involve the people who live on and manage the land—especially Indigenous Peoples, smallholder farmers, women, and other vulnerable people and communities. Co-author Dolors Armenteras, Professor of Landscape Ecology at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, says land degradation is “a key factor in forced migration and conflict over resources.”

“Regions that rely heavily on agriculture for livelihoods, especially smallholder farmers, who feed much of the world, are particularly vulnerable. These pressures could destabilize entire regions and amplify global risks.”

To support these vulnerable segments of the population, the paper calls for interventions such as shifting agricultural subsidies from large-scale industrial farms toward sustainable smallholders, incentivizing good land stewardship among the world’s 608 million farms, and fostering their access to technology, secure land rights, and fair markets.

“Land is more than soil and space. It harbors biodiversity, cycles water, stores carbon, and regulates climate. It gives us food, sustains life, and holds deep roots of ancestry and knowledge. Today, over one-third of Earth’s land is used to grow food – feeding a global population of more than 8 billion people,” says Co-author Elisabeth Huber-Sannwald, Professor, the Instituto Potosino de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica, San Luis Potosí, Mexico.

“Yet today,” she continues, “Modern farming practices, deforestation, and overuse are degrading soil, polluting water, and destroying vital ecosystems. Food production alone drives nearly 20 percent of global emissions of greenhouse gases. We need to act. To secure a thriving future – and protect land – we must reimagine how we farm, how we live, and how we relate to nature – and to each other.”

With an estimated 56.5 Mkm² of agricultural land, cropland, and rangelands being used to produce food, and roughly 33 percent of all food produced being wasted, of which 14 percent is lost post-harvest at farms and 19 percent at the retail, food service and household stages, reducing food waste by 75 percent, therefore, could spare roughly 13.4 Mkm² of land.

The authors’ proposed remedies include policies to prevent overproduction and spoilage, banning food industry rules that reject “ugly” produce, encouraging food donations and discounted sales of near-expiry products, education campaigns to reduce household waste and supporting small farmers in developing countries to improve storage and transport.

Other proposed solutions include integrating land and marine food systems, as red meat produced in unsustainable ways consumes large amounts of land, water, and feed and emits significant greenhouse gases. Seafood and seaweed are sustainable, nutritious alternatives. Seaweed, for example, needs no freshwater and absorbs atmospheric carbon.

The authors recommend measures such as replacing 70 percent of unsustainably produced red meat with seafood, such as wild or farmed fish and mollusks. Replacing just 10 percent of global vegetable intake with seaweed-derived products could free up over 0.4 Mkm² of cropland.

They nonetheless note that these changes are especially relevant for wealthier countries with high meat consumption. In some poorer regions, animal products remain crucial for nutrition. The combination of food waste reduction, land restoration, and dietary shifts, therefore, would spare or restore roughly 43.8 Mkm² in 30 years (2020-2050).

The proposed measures combined would also contribute to emission reduction efforts by mitigating roughly 13.24 Gt of CO₂-equivalent per year through 2050 and help the world community achieve its commitments in several international agreements, including the three Rio Conventions and UN SDGs.

Overall, the authors call for the UN’s three Rio conventions—CBD, UNCCD and UNFCCC—to unite around shared land and food system goals and encourage the exchange of state-of-the-art knowledge, track progress and streamline science into more effective policies, all to accelerate action on the ground.

A step in the right direction, UNCCD’s 197 Parties, at their most recent Conference of Parties (COP16) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, have already adopted a decision on avoiding, reducing and reversing land and soil degradation of agricultural lands.

The Findings By Numbers

• 56%: Projected increase in food production needed by 2050 if we stay on our current path
• 34%: Portion of Earth’s ice-free land already used for food production, headed to 42% by 2050
• 21%: Share of global greenhouse gas emissions produced by food systems
• 80%: Proportion of deforestation driven by food production
• 70%: Amount of freshwater consumption that goes to agriculture
• 33%: Fraction of global food that currently goes to waste
• USD 1 trillion: Estimated annual value of food lost or wasted globally
• 75%: Ambitious target for global food waste reduction by 2050
• 50%: Proposed portion of degraded land to be restored by 2050 using sustainable land management
• USD 278 billion: Annual funding gap to achieve UNCCD land restoration goals
• 608 million: Number of farms on the planet
• 90%: Percentage of all farms under 2 hectares
• 35%: Share of the world’s food produced by small farms
• 6.5 billion tons: Potential biomass yield using 650 million hectares of ocean for seaweed farming
• 17.5 million km²: Estimated cropland area saved if humanity adopts the proposed Rio+ diet (less unsustainably produced red meat and more sustainably sourced seafood and seaweed-derived food products)
• 166 million: Number of people who could avoid micronutrient deficiencies with more aquatic foods in their diet

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Hector Alan Valdes Suarez from the Global Youth Biodiversity Network speaks about the youth perspective being an invaluable asset in the implementation of the Biodiversity Plan. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
NAIROBI, May 13 2024 (IPS)

The triple planetary crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and waste are escalating. At the current pace, the world is on track to lose one quarter of all plant and animal species by 2030, with one species already dying out every 10 minutes. One million species face extinction. Human activity has already altered three-quarters of the land on Earth and two-thirds of the ocean.

Against this backdrop, the 26th session of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) opened today in Nairobi, Kenya.

Hector Alan Valdes Suarez from the Global Youth Biodiversity Network told IPS that SBSTTA “seeks to build momentum to achieve global and national ambitious goals to halt and reverse the ongoing monumental biodiversity crises.”

Multidisciplinary and open to participation by all parties to the convention, SBSTTA comprises government representatives competent in the relevant field of expertise to ensure that policies are informed by the best available science at the time. SBSTTA has met 25 times to date. The ongoing 26th meeting will acknowledge contributions to the implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework—also known as the Biodiversity Plan—hashed out at meetings in Kunming, China, and Montreal, Canada, in 2022.

As an open-ended intergovernmental scientific advisory body set up to provide the Conference of the Parties (COP) and, as appropriate, its other subsidiary bodies, with timely advice relating to the implementation of the CBD, SBSTTA “provides a platform for actors outside the Convention, such as youths, women, non-government organizations, and Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs), to observe negotiations on crucial science and also assess how they are or could contribute to, the Convention on Biological Diversity. The Convention is unique as actors outside the CBD can lobby for their views to be included through a Party to the Convention,” he says.

The Convention, which entered into force in December 1993, is the first global agreement to cover all aspects of biological diversity. Senka Barudanovic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chair of the SBSTTA Bureau, said the 26th meeting of SBSTTA is “especially important as we are at a critical moment in time to ensure that our actions are guided by a robust foundation of scientific and technical knowledge, tools, and guidelines.”

“The good news is that there is a wealth of knowledge and experience for us to use and build on as we walk this journey together for effective conservation, sustainable use, and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits from the use of biodiversity.”

The six-day meeting seeks to forge agreement among delegates from 196 parties to the CBD on issues pertaining to the implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, also known as  The Biodiversity Plan. Hard science and a multi-disciplinary approach are high on the SBSTTA 26 agenda as pertains to the implementation of the plan, specifically how the scientific and technical needs of all parties, including the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), among other developing countries, will be met.

Suarez said as parties to the CBD resume negotiations on crucial science and technology, “it is to develop and agree on a monitoring framework to track progress and implementation of the Biodiversity Plan. There are four goals and 23 targets so the indicators are globally uniform to track whether these targets are being achieved and they should be flexible and adaptable to the national context. In my view, many of these indicators are addressing actors outside the convention, such as youths, women, and Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs), and their representation at the meeting to hear what the parties are saying is critical.”

“These actors are contributing to the goal of the Biodiversity Plan at local levels, and their contributions ought to be recognized too, so they matter, and the decisions taken by the parties affect these actors the most, especially women and young people. The process is much more than agreeing on the right science and technical skills to reverse biodiversity loss. Increased accountability and transparency are key even as we gather to agree on how to measure success towards reaching set goals and consistency of reporting at the global level, hence the need for parties to continuously consult,” she said.

The gathering recognizes these concerns, as there are at least 80 representatives of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, as well as observer organizations, participating in the meeting. Indigenous people’s voices are key, as they suffer disproportionately from loss of biodiversity and environmental degradation. Their lives, survival, development chances, knowledge, environment, and health conditions depend on the successful implantation of the plan.

Cyri Wafula Nyongesa from the International University Network on Cultural and Biological Diversity agrees, telling IPS that even as scientists hash out hard science, technical, and technological knowledge to support the implementation of the Biodiversity Plan, there is a need to look at existing gaps in its implementation framework. These gaps include the need for capacity building and reporting frameworks that are simple and also draw connections between global and national plans.

As agreed in a landmark decision of CBD COP 15 in December 2022, the UN-driven strategy is the world’s masterplan to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030, and sets out a pathway to reach the global vision of a world living in harmony with nature by 2050 using four goals and 23 targets. The goals are to protect and restore nature, to prosper with nature, to share benefits fairly, and to invest in and collaborate for nature’s benefit.

“One year and a half after the Biodiversity Plan was historically adopted, parties to the CBD must now fine-tune the important details that will take the world from agreement to action,” said David Cooper, Acting Executive Secretary of the CBD. “The subsidiary body is leveraging science and technology to help the parties to the CBD deliver on their commitment to people and nature.”

Ongoing discussions are firmly framed within the CBD overall agenda to address all threats to biodiversity and ecosystem services, including threats from climate change, through scientific assessments, the development of tools, incentives, and processes, the transfer of technologies and good practices, and the full and active involvement of relevant stakeholders.

Delegates have resolutely set the ball rolling towards reporting on the monitoring framework, the national status of implementation, and the mobilization of financial resources for the Biodiversity Plan. The ultimate goal is to fast-track the implementation of sustainable solutions to biodiversity loss, restore ecosystems, and protect indigenous rights.

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Government delegations celebrate the close of the historic negotiation at COP15 of the New Global Framework on Biodiversity in the early hours of the morning on Monday Dec. 19, at the Palais des Congrès in Montreal, Canada. CREDIT: Mike Muzurakis/IISD

By Emilio Godoy
MONTREAL, Dec 19 2022 (IPS)

The pillar coral (Dendrogyra cylindrus), which takes its name from its shape, is found throughout the Caribbean Sea, but its population has declined by more than 80 percent since 1990. As a result, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has listed it as “critically endangered” due to the effects of the human-induced climate crisis.

Its fate now depends on the new Kunming-Montreal Global Framework on Biodiversity, which was agreed by the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) on Monday Dec. 19, at the end of the summit held since Dec. 7 at the Palais des Congrès in Montreal.

Now, the world’s countries must translate the results into national biodiversity strategies, to comply with the new accord. In this regard, David Ainsworth, spokesman for the CBD, in force since 1993 and based in Montreal, announced the creation of a global accelerator for the drafting of national plans, with the support of U.N. agencies.

COP15 of the Convention on Biological Diversity approved a new program to protect the world’s natural heritage for the next 10 years during the summit held in the Canadian city of Montreal. The picture shows a statue of a polar bear, whose species is threatened by melting ice and habitat loss, on a street in Montreal. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

The menu of agreements

COP15, whose theme was “Ecological Civilization: Building a shared future for all life on earth”, approved four objectives on improving the status of biodiversity, reducing species extinction, fair and appropriate sharing of benefits from access to and use of genetic resources, and means of implementation of the agreement.

In addition, the plenary of the summit, which brought together some 15,000 people representing governments, non-governmental organizations, academia, international bodies and companies, agreed on 23 goals within the Global Framework, for the conservation and management of 30 percent of terrestrial areas and 30 percent of marine areas by 2030, in what is known in U.N. jargon as the 30×30.

This includes the complete or partial restoration of at least 30 percent of degraded terrestrial and marine ecosystems, as well as the reduction of the loss of areas of high biological importance to almost zero.

Likewise, the agreement reached by the 196 States Parties at COP15 includes the halving of food waste, the elimination or reform of at least 500 billion dollars a year in subsidies harmful to biodiversity, and at least 200 billion dollars in funding for biodiversity by 2030 from public and private sources.

It also endorsed increasing financial transfers from countries of the industrialized North to nations of the developing South by at least 20 billion dollars by 2025 and 30 billion dollars by 2030, and the voluntary publication by companies for monitoring, evaluation and disclosure of the impact of their activities on biodiversity.

The Global Environment Facility (GEF) will manage a new fund, whose operation will be defined by the countries over the next two years.

With regard to digital sequence information (DSI) on genetic resources, the Global Framework stipulates the establishment of a multilateral fund for benefit-sharing between providers and users of genetic resources and states that governments will define the final figure at COP16 in Turkey in 2024.

The Global Framework also contains gender and youth perspectives, two strong demands of the process that was initially scheduled to end in the city of Kunming, China, in 2020. But because that country was unable to host mass meetings due to its zero-tolerance policy towards COVID-19, a first virtual chapter was held there and another later in person, and the final one now took place in Montreal.

The states parties are required to report at least every five years on their national compliance with the Global Framework. The CBD will include national information submitted in February 2026 and June 2029 in its status and trend reports.

With some differences, civil society organizations and indigenous peoples gave a nod to the Global Framework, but issued warnings. Viviana Figueroa, representative of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity, and Simone Lovera, policy director of the Global Forest Coalition, applauded the agreement in conversations with IPS, while pointing out its risks.

“It’s a good step forward, because it recognizes the role of indigenous peoples, the use of biodiversity and the role of traditional knowledge,” said Figueroa, an Omaguaca indigenous lawyer from Argentina whose organization brings together indigenous groups from around the world to present their positions at international environmental meetings.

“It has been a long process, to which native peoples have contributed and have made proposals. The most important aspects that we proposed have been recognized and we hope to work together with the countries,” she added.

But, she remarked, “the most important thing will be the implementation.”

Goal C and targets one, three, five, nine, 13, 21 and 22 of the Global Framework relate to respect for the rights of native and local communities.

Lovera, whose organization brings together NGOs and indigenous groups, said the accord “recognizes the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities, and of women. It also includes a recommendation to withdraw subsidies and reduce public and private investments in destructive activities, such as large-scale cattle ranching and oil palm monoculture.”

But indigenous and human rights organizations have questioned the 30×30 approach on the grounds that it undermines ancestral rights, blocks access to aboriginal territories, and requires consultation and unpressured, informed consent for protected areas prior to any decision on the future of those areas.

Discussions at the Convention on Biological Diversity summit intensified in the last few days of COP15 and ran late into the night, as in this session on health and biodiversity. But in the end, agreement was reached on a new Global Framework on Biodiversity, which will be binding on the 196 states parties. CREDIT: IISD/ENB

Major challenge

While the Global Framework has indicators and monitoring mechanisms and is legally binding, it has no actual teeth, and the precedent of the failed Aichi Targets casts a shadow over its future, especially with the world’s poor track record on international agreements.

The Aichi Biodiversity Targets, adopted in 2010 in that Japanese city during the CBD’s COP10 and which its 196 states parties failed to meet in 2020, included the creation of terrestrial and marine protected areas; the fight against pollution and invasive species; respect for indigenous knowledge; and the restoration of damaged ecosystems.

Several estimates put the amount needed to protect biological heritage at 700 billion dollars, which means there is still an enormous gap to be closed.

In more than 30 years, the GEF has disbursed over 22 billion dollars and helped transfer another 120 billion dollars to more than 5,000 regional and national projects. For the new period starting in 2023, the fund is counting on some five billion dollars in financing.

In addition, the Small Grants Program has supported around 27,000 community initiatives in developing countries.

“There is little public funding, more is needed,” Lovera said. “It’s sad that they say the private sector must fund biodiversity. In indigenous territories money is needed. They can do much more than governments with less money. Direct support can be more effective and they will meet the commitments.”

The activist also criticized the use of offsets, a mechanism whereby one area can be destroyed and another can be restored elsewhere – already used in countries such as Chile, Colombia and Mexico.

“This system allows us to destroy 70 percent of the planet while preserving the other 30 percent,” Lovera said. “It is madness. For indigenous peoples and local communities, it is very negative, because they lose their own biodiversity and the compensation is of no use to them, because it happens somewhere else.”

Figueroa said institutions that already manage funds could create direct mechanisms for indigenous peoples, as is the case with the Small Grants Program.

Of the 609 commitments that organizations, companies and individuals have already made voluntarily at COP15, 303 are aimed at the conservation and restoration of terrestrial ecosystems, 188 at alliances, and 159 at adaptation to climate change and reduction of polluting emissions.

The summit also coincided with the 10th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety and the 4th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits from their Utilization, both components of the CBD.

Images of the planet’s sixth mass extinction reflect the size of the challenge. More than a quarter of some 150,000 species on the IUCN Red List are threatened with extinction.

The “Living Planet Report 2022: Building a nature-positive society”, prepared by the WWF and the Institute of Zoology in London, shows that Latin America and the Caribbean has experienced the largest decline in monitored wildlife populations worldwide, with an average decline of 94 percent between 1970 and 2018.

With a decade to act, each passing day represents more biological wealth lost.

IPS produced this article with support from Internews‘ Earth Journalism Network.

The executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, highlighted on Friday Dec. 16 the results of the Nagoya Protocol on access to genetic resources and fair benefit sharing at an event during COP15 in the Canadian city of Montreal. But the talks have not reached an agreement on the digital sequencing of genetic resources. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MONTREAL, Dec 16 2022 (IPS)

In addition to its nutritional properties, quinoa, an ancestral grain from the Andes, also has cosmetic uses, as stated by the resource use and benefit-sharing permit ABSCH-IRCC-PE-261033-1 awarded in February to a private individual under a 15-month commercial use contract.

The permit, issued by the Peruvian government’s National Institute for Agrarian Innovation, allows the Peruvian beneficiary to use the material in a skin regeneration cream.

But it also sets restrictions on the registration of products obtained from quinoa or the removal of its elements from the Andean nation, to prevent the risk of irregular exploitation without a fair distribution of benefits, in other words, biopiracy."The scientific community is willing to share benefits through simple mechanisms that do not unfairly burden researchers in low- and middle-income countries." -- Amber Scholz

The licensed material may have a digital representation of its genetic structure which in turn may generate new structures from which formulas or products may emerge. This is called digital sequence information (DSI), in the universe of research or commercial applications within the CBD.

Treatment of DSI forms part of the debates at the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which began on Dec. 7 and is due to end on Dec. 19 at the Palais des Congrès in the Canadian city of Montreal.

The summit has brought together some 15,000 people representing the 196 States Parties to the CBD, non-governmental organizations, academia, international bodies and companies.

The focus of the debate is the Post-2020 Global Framework on Biodiversity, which consists of 22 targets in areas including financing for conservation, guidelines on digital sequencing of genetic material, degraded ecosystems, protected areas, endangered species, the role of business and gender equality.

Like most of the issues, negotiations on DSI and the sharing of resulting benefits, contained in one of the Global Framework’s four objectives and in target 13, are at a deadlock, on everything from definitions to possible sharing mechanisms.

Except for the digital twist, the issue is at the heart of the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization, part of the CBD, signed in that Japanese city in 2010 and in force since 2014.

The delegations of the 196 States Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity have failed to make progress at COP15 in the negotiations on new targets for the protection of the world’s natural heritage, in the Canadian city of Montreal. In the picture, a working group reviews a proposal on the complex issue. CREDIT: IISD/ENB

Amber Scholz, a German member of the DSI Scientific Network, a group of 70 experts from 25 countries, said there is an urgent need to close the gap between the existing innovation potential and a fair benefit-sharing system so that digital sequencing benefits everyone.

“It’s been a decade now and things haven’t turned out so well. The promise of a system of innovation, open access and benefit sharing is broken,” Scholz, a researcher at the Department of Microbial Ecology and Diversity in the Leibniz Institute’s DSMZ German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures, told IPS.

DSI stems from the revolution in the massive use of technological tools, which has reached biology as well, fundamental in the discovery and manufacture of molecules and drugs such as those used in vaccines against the coronavirus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Aichi Biodiversity Targets, adopted in 2010 in that Japanese city during the CBD COP10, were missed by the target year, 2020, and will now be renewed and updated by the Global Framework that will emerge from Montreal.

The targets included respect for the traditional knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities related to the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity, their customary use of biological resources, and the full and effective participation of indigenous and local communities in the implementation of the CBD.

Lack of clarity in the definition of DSI, challenges in the traceability of the country of origin of the sequence via digital databases, fear of loss of open access to data and different outlooks on benefit-sharing mechanisms are other aspects complicating the debate among government delegates.

Through the Action Agenda: Make a Pledge platform, organizations, companies and individuals have already made 586 voluntary commitments at COP15, whose theme is “Ecological civilization: Building a shared future for all life on earth”.

Of these, 44 deal with access and benefit sharing, while 294 address conservation and restoration of terrestrial ecosystems, 185 involve partnerships and alliances, and 155 focus on adaptation to climate change and emission reductions.

Genetic havens

Access to genetic resources for commercial or non-commercial purposes has become an issue of great concern in the countries of the global South, due to the fear of biopiracy, especially with the advent of digital sequencing, given that physical access to genetic materials is not absolutely necessary.

Although the Nagoya Protocol includes access and benefit-sharing mechanisms, digital sequencing mechanisms have generated confusion. In fact, this instrument has created a market in which lax jurisdictions have taken advantage by becoming genetic havens.

Around 2,000 gene banks operate worldwide, attracting some 15 million users. Almost two billion sequences have been registered, according to statistics from GenBank, one of the main databases in the sector and part of the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Argentina leads the list of permits for access to genetic resources in Latin America under the Protocol, with a total of 56, two of which are commercial, followed by Peru (54, four commercial) and Panama (39, one commercial). Mexico curbed access to such permits in 2019, following a scandal triggered by the registration of maize in 2016.

There are more than 100 gene banks operating in Mexico, 88 in Peru, 56 in Brazil, 47 in Argentina and 25 in Colombia.

The largest providers of genetic resources leading to publicly available DSI are the United States, China and Japan. Brazil ranks 10th among sources and users of samples, according to a study published in 2021 by Scholz and five other researchers.

The mechanisms for managing genetic information sequences have become a condition for negotiating the new post-2020 Global Framework for biodiversity, which poses a conflict between the most biodiverse countries (generally middle- and low-income) and the nations of the industrialized North.

Brazilian indigenous activist Cristiane Juliao, a leader of the Pankararu people, calls for a fair system of benefit-sharing for access to and use of genetic resources and their digital sequences at COP15, being held at the Palais des Congrès in the Canadian city of Montreal. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Indigenous people and their share

Cristiane Juliao, an indigenous woman of the Pankararu people, who is a member of the Brazilian Coordinator of Indigenous Peoples and Organizations of the Northeast, Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo, said the mechanisms adopted must favor the participation of native peoples and guarantee a fair distribution of benefits.

“We don’t look at one small element of a plant. We look at the whole context and the role of that plant. All traditional knowledge is associated with genetic heritage, because we use it in food, medicine or spiritual activities,” she told IPS at COP15.

Therefore, she said, “traceability is important, to know where the knowledge was acquired or accessed.”

In Montreal, Brazilian native organizations are seeking recognition that the digital sequencing contains information that indigenous peoples and local communities protect and that digital information must be subject to benefit-sharing. They are also demanding guarantees of free consultation and the effective participation of indigenous groups in the digital information records.

Thanks to the system based on the country’s Biodiversity Law, in effect since 2016, the Brazilian government has recorded revenues of five million dollars for permits issued.

The Working Group responsible for drafting the new Global Framework put forward a set of options for benefit-sharing measures.

They range from leaving in place the current status quo, to the integration of digital sequence information on genetic resources into national access and benefit-sharing measures, or the creation of a one percent tax on retail sales of genetic resources.

Lagging behind

There is a legal vacuum regarding this issue, because the CBD, the World Intellectual Property Organization and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, in force since 2004, do not cover all of its aspects.

Scholz suggested the COP reach a decision that demonstrates the political will to establish a fair and equitable system. “The scientific community is willing to share benefits through simple mechanisms that do not unfairly burden researchers in low- and middle-income countries,” she said.

For her part, Juliao demanded a more inclusive and fairer system. “There is no clear record of indigenous peoples who have agreed to benefit sharing. It is said that some knowledge comes from native peoples, but there is no mechanism for the sharing of benefits with us.”

IPS produced this article with support from Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.

Francis Ogwal (L) of Uganda and Basile van Havre (C) of Canada, co-chairs of the group responsible for drafting the post-2020 global biodiversity framework, explain the status of negotiations at the Palais des Congrès in Montreal on Dec. 14, 2022. Discussions are entering the final stretch to approve the new biodiversity protection targets. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MONTREAL, Dec 15 2022 (IPS)

Created in 2016, the Mexican Caribbean Biosphere Reserve (MCBR) hosts 1900 species of animals and plants and contains half of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System, the second largest in the world after Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

This ecosystem is under pressure from the construction of two of the seven routes of the Maya Train (TM), the Mexican government’s flagship megaproject, whose construction, which began in 2020, alters the environment of the Maya Forest, the largest tropical rainforest in Latin America after the Amazon.

This is recognized in two technical reports obtained in Mexico by IPS through public information requests, which state that, although the project is outside the marine area itself, it is located within its zone of influence.

Regarding the 257-km section 4, a document from October 2021 acknowledges the impact on two high priority hydrological regions.

And with respect to the impact on the 110-km section 5, another document dated from May 2022 states that “there is no previous study or information on the monitoring and sampling sites. The presence and state of the fauna that inhabit the trees are unknown.”

The MCBR administration recognizes impacts on two priority marine regions and on the coastline of the southeastern state of Quintana Roo, which is protected by the reserve.

For this reason, the MCBR refused to issue a technical opinion on section 5 due to lack of “sufficient information and elements” and, for T4, issued an opinion that demanded the presentation of additional data and prevention, management, and oversight measures.

Despite the impact that the railroad will have in the region, the government’s National Fund for Tourism Development (Fonatur) did not request reports from at least four other nature reserves.

Fonatur will be in charge of the TM, which will run for some 1,500 kilometers, with 21 stations and 14 stops, through five states in southern and southeastern Mexico.

The case of the railway exemplifies the contradictions between the attempt to protect nature and the development of infrastructure that sabotages that aim, a theme present at the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which began on Dec. 7 in the Canadian city of Montreal and is due to end on Dec. 19.

Moreover, the railway’s cost of some 15 billion dollars is classified as forming part of the harmful subsidies to biodiversity, which total 542 billion dollars a year globally. The investment needed for the conservation and sustainable use of nature is estimated at 967 billion dollars a year.

In the post-2020 global biodiversity framework, which is due to be adopted at the summit, one of the main 21 measures being negotiated is called in UN jargon 30×30: the protection of 30 percent of the planet’s marine and terrestrial areas through conservation measures by 2030, in an attempt to halt the loss of biodiversity on the planet.

The plan has attracted support from more than 100 countries but has awakened distrust among indigenous peoples, who have suffered from the imposition of natural protected areas without due information and consultation.

The summit, which has brought together some 15,000 people representing governments, non-governmental organizations, academia, international organizations and companies, will also discuss the post-2020 global framework, financing for conservation and guidelines on digital sequencing of genetic material, degraded ecosystems, protected areas, endangered species, the role of corporations and gender equality.

The 196 States Parties to the CBD, in force since 1993 and whose slogan at this year’s COP is “Ecological civilization. Building a shared future for all life on earth”, have not yet agreed in Montreal on the percentage of the oceans that should be protected and whether it should include waters under international jurisdiction.

The global framework is to succeed the 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets, adopted in 2010 in that Japanese city during the CBD COP10 and due to be met by 2020, which have failed. Target 11 stipulated the protection of 17 percent of terrestrial areas and inland waters and 10 percent of marine and coastal areas.

The Maya Train, the Mexican government’s main megaproject, threatens protected natural areas, such as the Mexican Caribbean Biosphere Reserve in the southeastern state of Quintana Roo, according to a Google Earth capture. In the COP15 negotiations in Montreal, a central issue is the declaration of more natural protected areas, but one of the threats is infrastructure works. Image: Google Earth

Insufficient rules

Manuel Pulgar Vidal of Peru, WWF global leader of Climate and Energy, who is attending COP15, said the problem lies in the regulation of protected areas.
“Nations such as Colombia, Ecuador and Chile have strengthened the system of natural areas. But in general the systems are weak and need to be reinforced, and money, staff and regulations are needed,” he told IPS.

Mexico has 185 protected areas, covering almost 91 million hectares -19 percent of the national territory-, six of which are marine areas, encompassing 69 million hectares. Despite their importance, the Mexican government dedicated less than one dollar per hectare to their protection in 2022.

In addition, management plans have not been updated to cover works such as the Maya Train.

Colombia, meanwhile, protects 15 percent of its territory in 1,483 protected areas covering 35.5 million hectares, including 12 million hectares in marine areas.

Chile, for its part, has 106 protected areas covering 15 million hectares of land – 20 percent of the total surface area – and 105 million hectares in the sea, in 22 of the conservation areas.

Among the 49 governments that make up the High Ambition Coalition (HAC) for Nature and People, aimed at promoting 30×30, are 10 Latin American countries: Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama and Peru.

Of the 586 commitments that organizations, companies and individuals have already made voluntarily at COP15, held at the Palais des Congrès in Montreal, only 93 deal with marine, coastal and freshwater ecosystems, while 294 address terrestrial ecosystem conservation and restoration; 185 involve alliances and partnerships; and climate change adaptation and emission reductions are the focus of 155.

A group of government delegates discuss the post-2020 global biodiversity framework with new biodiversity protection targets to be approved at COP15, which is being held at the Palais des Congrès in the Canadian city of Montreal. CREDIT: IISD

Aleksandar Rankovic of the international NGO Avaaz said the key challenge goes beyond a specific protection figure.

“The hows are not in the debate. It’s up to each country how it will implement it. It’s left to each country to decide what’s appropriate. There is little openness on how to achieve the goals,” the activist from the U.S.-based organization dedicated to citizen activism on issues of global interest, such as biodiversity, told IPS.

Only eight percent of the world’s oceans are protected and only seven percent are protected from fishing activities. Avaaz calls for the care of 50 percent of marine and terrestrial areas, with the direct participation of indigenous peoples.

The protection of marine areas is tied to other international instruments, such as the Global Ocean Treaty, which nations have been negotiating since 2018 within the framework of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and which aims to protect 30 percent of these ecosystems by 2030.

Pulgar Vidal, for his part, called for the approval of the 30×30 scheme. “Implementing these initiatives takes time. And you need an international financing mechanism,” he stressed.

In Rankovic’s view, a strong global framework is needed. “The issue is broader, because fisheries are not well regulated. Without this, marine areas will be part of a weak program,” he warned.

COP15 has also coincided with the 10th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety and the 4th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization, both components of the CBD and part of its architecture for preserving biodiversity.

IPS produced this article with support from Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.

A placard on display at activists' demonstration outside the 4th meeting of the CBD Working Group at the UNEP headquarter in Nairobi. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
Nairobi, Jun 27 2022 (IPS)

As the last working group meeting of the Post 2020 Global Biodiversity Agenda concluded here on Sunday, the delegates’ job at COP15 Montreal just got tougher as delegates couldn’t finalize the text of the agenda. Texts involving finance, cost and benefit-sharing, and digital sequencing – described by many as ‘most contentious parts of the draft agenda barely made any progress as negotiators failed to reach any consensus.

Nairobi – the Unattempted ‘Final Push’

The week-long 4^th meeting of the Working Group of the Biodiversity Convention took place from June 21-26, three months after the 3^rd meeting of the group was held in Geneva, Switzerland. The meeting, attended by a total of 1634 participants, including 950 country representatives, had the job cut out for them: Read the draft Post 2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) and its 21 targets, discuss, and clean up the text – target by target, sentence by sentence, at least up to 80%.

But, on Saturday – a day before the meeting was to wrap up, David Ainsworth – head of Communications at CBD, hinted that the progress was far slower than expected. Ainsworth mentioned that the total cleaning progress made was just about 8%.

To put it in a clearer context, said Ainsworth, only two targets now had a clean text – Target 19.2 (strengthening capacity-building and development, access to and transfer of technology) and target 12 (urban biodiversity). This means that in Montreal, they could be placed on the table right away for the parties to decide on, instead of debating the language. All the other targets, the work progress has been from around 50% to none, said Ainsworth.

An entire day later, on Sunday evening local time, co-chairs of the WG4 Francis Ogwal and Basile Van Havre confirmed that those were indeed the only two targets with ‘clean’ texts. In other words, no real work had been done in the past 24 hours.

On June 21, at the opening session of the meeting, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, described the Nairobi meeting as an opportunity for a ‘final push’ to finalize the GBF. On Sunday, she called on the parties to “vigorously engage with the text, to listen to each other and seek consensus, and to prepare the final text for adoption at COP 15”.

Answering a question from IPS News, Mrema also confirmed that there would be a 5^th meeting of the Working Group before the Montreal COP, indicating the work done in the Nairobi meeting wasn’t enough to produce a draft that was ready to be discussed for adoption.

The final push, it appeared, had not even been attempted.

Bottlenecks and Stalemate

According to several observers, instead of cleaning up 80% of the texts over the past six days, negotiators had left 80% of the text in brackets, which signals disagreement among parties. Not only did countries fail to progress, but in some cases, new disagreements threatened to move the process in the opposite direction. The most fundamental issues were not even addressed this week, including how much funding would be committed to conserving biodiversity and what percentage figures the world should strive to protect, conserve, and restore to address the extinction crisis.

True to the traditions of the UN, the CBD wouldn’t be critical of any party. However, on Sunday evening, Francis Ogwal indicated that rich nations had been dragging their feet on meeting the commitment of donating to global biodiversity conservation. Without naming anyone, Ogwal reminded the negotiators that the more time they took, the tougher they would get the decision.

At present, said Ogwal, 700 billion was needed to stop and recover global biodiversity. “If you keep giving less and less, the problems magnify. Ten years down the line, this will not be enough,” he said.

The civil society was more vocal in criticizing the delegates for losing yet another opportunity.

According to Brian O’Donnell, Director of the Campaign for Nature, the negotiations were faltering, with some key issues being at a stalemate. It is, therefore, up to heads of state and other political and United Nations leaders to act with urgency. “But time is now running out, and countries need to step up, show the leadership that this moment requires, and act urgently to find compromise and solutions,” O’Donnell said in a statement.

The Next Steps

The CBD Secretariat mentioned a string of activities that would follow the Nairobi meeting to speed up the process of building a consensus among the delegates. The activities include bilateral meetings with some countries, regional meetings with others, and a Working Group 5 meeting which will be a pre-COP event before COP15.

Finally, the CBD is taking a glass-half-filled approach toward the GBF, which is reflected in the words of Mrema: “These efforts (Nairobi meeting) are considerable and have produced a text that, with additional work, will be the basis for reaching the 2050 vision of the Convention: A life in harmony with nature,” she says.

The upcoming UN Biodiversity Conference will be held from 5 to December 17 in Montreal, Canada, under the presidency of the Government of China. With the bulk of the work left incomplete, the cold December weather of Montreal is undoubtedly all set to be heated with intense debates and negotiations.
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Mrinalini Rai, head of Women4Biodiversity and leader of the Women’s Caucus at the UN Biodiversity Convention and Cristina Eghenter of World Wildlife Fund for Nature, at a media roundtable at the ongoing UN CBD Working Group 4 meeting in Nairobi. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
Nairobi, Jun 24 2022 (IPS)

“I often hear, ‘What do women have to do with biodiversity?’ And I want to ask them back, ‘What do men have to do (with biodiversity)?’,” says Mrinalini Rai, a prominent gender equality rights advocate at the 4th Meeting of the Open-Ended Working Group of the UN Biodiversity Convention, which started this week in Nairobi.

Her comment appears to reflect the frustration women activists feel as their demand for a specific target on gender equality – known as Target 22 – shows few signs of progress.

Target 22 was first submitted last September at the 3rd meeting of the Open-ended Working Group (OEWG) of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework (GBF) in Geneva. The target, when summarized, proposes to “ensure women and girls’ equitable access and benefits from conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, as well as their informed and effective participation at all levels of policy and decision making related to biodiversity.”

The target was proposed officially by Costa Rica, with the support of GLURAC – a group comprising 11 countries from Latin America and West Africa which has been since accepted as a point of discussion by the CBD. The GRULAC members are Guatemala, Argentina, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Chile, Cote d’Ivoire, Ecuador, Togo, Benin, Cameroon, and Tanzania.

However, this week in Nairobi, when asked by IPS for their comments on Target 22, the co-chairs of the CBD appeared largely dismissive. “We already have a Gender Action Plan,” said Basile Van Havre – one of the two co-chairs, implying little importance or need for a standalone target.

Unsurprisingly, the draft remains a barely-discussed target on Friday – two days before the current meeting ends.

Gender in Biodiversity and Drafting of Target 22

Ratified by 200 nations, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is the first legally binding global treaty. It has three main goals: conserve biological diversity, promote sustainable use of its components, and attain fair and equitable sharing of the benefits derived from the utilization of genetic resources.

The convention’s 14th Conference of the Parties, held in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt, in 2018, adopted a decision to develop a new biodiversity framework that builds on the CBD’s 2011-2020 strategic plan known as “Aichi Biodiversity Targets”. The decision also includes “a gender-responsive and gender-balanced process for the development of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework”.

However, while a lot of progress has been made since 2018 on crafting and shaping the targets for the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), the Convention has yet to truly center gender issues. Of the 21 targets within the draft Framework, only one target mentions women, and no single target refers to gender. Some parties have stated that since the Gender Plan of Action (GPA) will complement the Framework, there is no need for a standalone target on gender. Feminists and gender equality advocates, however, believe it is critical to have strong integration of gender within the Framework itself to anchor and give life to the Gender Plan of Action.

“What we are saying is that this target is not supposed to be seen as something separate from everything in the GBF. When you adopt a standalone target on gender equality, it will guide all the work being done under the framework and to operationalize the framework including the communications, knowledge management, capacity building and financing of the new mechanism”, says Rai.

Cristina Eghenter, Global Governance Policy Coordinator at World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) links the currently lacking gender-segregated data and how the adoption of Target 22 could help plug the gaps.

“Women’s contribution to biodiversity is often questioned because this contribution is underreported and therefore, undervalued. A standalone target on gender equality would lead to the setting of clear indicators and a monitoring system which would then contribute to the production of gender-segregated data,” Eghenter points out.

Gaining support from other advocacy rights and equity groups

UNCBD Working Group 4 meeting in Nairobi in session. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Jennifer Corpuz leads the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity (IPFB) – a collection of representatives from indigenous governments, indigenous non-governmental organizations, and indigenous scholars and activists that organize around the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

On being asked her stance on a standalone, specific target on gender equality, Corpuz says that she wholeheartedly supports this. “When the GBF has included target 21, it is a natural progression that there should be a target 22”. Corpuz also explains that  Target 21 – the only target to mention women in the GFB, emphasizes indigenous communities and therefore, it will be more helpful to have a standalone target on gender equality that goes beyond women and is inclusive of all genders.

“We, therefore, strongly support Target 22 and hope it will be taken up for adoption at COP15,” she says.

Besides, IIFB and WWF, several other rights and equity advocacy groups are supporting the proposed new target. The Global Youth Biodiversity Network – an advocacy group that is demanding greater focus on youths in the GBF, also has voiced its support for a target on gender equality. Other groups lending their support are the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR), the Convention on Biological Diversity Alliance (CBDA), and the Women Caucus at the UNCBD.

Expectation VS Reality

As the Nairobi meeting nears its end – the conference will close on Sunday – there are more meetings of the contacts groups which oversee discussing and finalizing the text of the draft GBF with the negotiation in each meeting turning more intense. However, when it comes to Target 22 – the contact group 4, responsible for discussing and cleaning up the text of both targets related to gender, has had only one reading of the Target 22.

According to Benjamin Schachter, Human Rights Officer on Climate Change and Environment at ORCHR, the text of the target 22 is right now ‘full of brackets’ which indicates there is hardly any agreement among the contact group members discussing the target on its content.

As the GBF is expected to have at least 80% of ‘clean text’ before it is presented by CBD to the parties for discussion and adoption, the question that most people are wondering is if the draft GBF at COP15 includes a target for gender equality at all? Some are even asking if the draft in its current form (full of brackets) can be rejected by the parties altogether if they feel the task to clean it up is too arduous?

Total exclusion is ‘extremely unlikely,’ explains Schafter, explaining the technical process: since the target has been officially proposed by a group of parties and discussed at the contact group, the parties must work harder and get the draft to a shape where it can be considered for consensus building and eventual adoption.

A long way to Montreal

The onus, then, lies equally on parties as well as on groups such as Women4Biodiversity to lobby more parties and gain their support. Already, in the Nairobi meeting, a few more countries including Maldives, Norway, and the EU have expressed their support, taking the total number of supporting parties to 22.

Norway has, in fact,  also proposed an alternative text for the Target which reads “Ensure gender equality in the implementation of the global biodiversity framework and the achievement of the 3 objectives of the convention including by recognizing equal rights and access to land and natural resources of women and girls and their meaningful and informed participation in policy and decision-making”

“This language is both cleaner and stronger”, says Schachter.

Mrinalini Rai of Women4Biodiversity agrees: “Norway proposed and supported by American countries a new way to address the rights of gender equality and rights of women to lands and natural resources which is a fantastic improvement and if this new text comes in, it would be monumental step forward for CBD,” she says.

But can the advocates and supporters get 108 remaining countries to read, give input and prepare themselves for an informed discussion in the next five months? Undoubtedly, that remains an arduous task for the nations, requiring manpower, time, and resources.

The Target 22 advocates appear well aware of the challenge ahead: “It is going to be a long road to Montreal,” says Ana di Pangracio of the Convention of Biodiversity Alliance (CBDA).

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The recent eviction debacle involving the Maasai community in the Loliondo division in Tanzania’s northern Ngorongoro District has elevated indigenous people’s concerns about losing their ancestral lands under the ‘30by30’ plan in the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). Bradford Zak/Unsplash

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Jun 23 2022 (IPS)

In early June 2022, more than 30 people from the Maasai community in the Loliondo division in Tanzania’s northern Ngorongoro District were reportedly injured, and one person died following clashes with security forces over the demarcation of their ancestral lands for a new game reserve.

According to human rights organisations, the Maasai community was blocking eviction from its grazing sites at Lolionda over the demarcation of 1 500km of the Maasai ancestral land, which the government of Tanzania has leased as a hunting block to a United Arab Emirates company.

The eviction of the Maasai is a realisation of fears indigenous communities have about the loss of their ancestral lands under the ‘30by30’ plan proposed in the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The plan calls for conserving 30 percent of the earth’s land and sea areas. Close to 100 countries have endorsed the science-backed proposal to protect 30 percent of the planet by 2030, which is target 3 of the 21 targets in the GBF.

Indigenous communities worry that the current plan does not protect their rights and control over ancestral lands and will trigger mass evictions of communities by creating protected areas meant to save biodiversity.

The fourth meeting of the Open-Ended Working Group on the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework opened in Nairobi, Kenya, this week (June 21-26), hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The meeting is expected to negotiate the final new pact for adoption at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference, which includes the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 15) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to be held in Montreal, Canada in December 2022.

Human rights in the deal for nature

Indigenous groups are calling for a human-rights approach to conservation and strengthening of community land tenure. They emphasise that the international pact to stop and reverse biodiversity loss should include indigenous communities like the Maasai.

Jennifer Corpuz, Indigenous lawyer and global policy expert. Credit: J Corpuz

“We are highlighting the situation with the Maasai in Tanzania as an example of what should not be happening anymore, and the best way to avoid this is to ensure that there is a human rights language in the post-2020 framework,” Indigenous lawyer and global policy expert Jennifer Corpuz, a Kankana-ey Igorot from the Philippines and a member of the International Indigenous Forum for Biodiversity (IIFB) told IPS in a telephone interview.

“In particular, we identify target 3 of the framework, which is area-based conservation and the proposal to expand the coverage of the areas of land and sea that are protected. It is important to have the rights of indigenous people and local communities recognised,” Corpuz noted.

Corpuz said there is growing recognition among scientists about the importance of traditional knowledge and how it can guide decision-making on climate change and biodiversity, as well as the participation of indigenous people in biodiversity monitoring, which are the focus of targets 20 and 21 of the framework.

The CBD COP15 is expected to take stock of progress towards achieving the CBD’s Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020, as well as decide on a new global biodiversity framework negotiated every ten years. The CBD is an international treaty on natural and biological resources ratified by 196 countries to protect biodiversity, use biodiversity without destroying it, and equally share any benefits from genetic diversity.

Indigenous leaders say the evidence is clear about the role of indigenous communities in biodiversity protection following recent reports produced by the Nairobi-based UNEP and other conservation organisations like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

“Achieving the ambitious goals and targets in the post-2020 global biodiversity framework will not be possible without the lands and territories recognised, sustained, protected, and restored by [Indigenous peoples and local communities],” the report noted.

Under siege worldwide, from the rainforests of the Amazon and the Congo to the savannahs of East Africa, indigenous communities could continue to play a protective role, according to their leaders and scientists whose work supports the quest of indigenous peoples to control what happens on their territories.

Biodiversity in extinction

A landmark report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES),  has warned that around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades. The assessment report noted that at least a quarter of the global land area is traditionally owned, managed, and used by indigenous peoples.

“Nature managed by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities is under increasing pressure but is generally declining less rapidly than in other lands – although 72% of local indicators developed and used by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities show the deterioration of nature that underpins local livelihoods,” the report noted. It highlighted that the areas of the world projected to experience significant adverse effects from climate change, ecosystem functions and nature’s contributions to people are also areas in which large concentrations of Indigenous Peoples and many of the world’s poorest communities live.

Experts have warned that the success of the post-2020 GBF depends on adequate financing to achieve the targets and goals in the framework.

The finance component needs more attention, political priority and progress, Brian O’Donnell, Director, Campaign for Nature, told a media briefing alluding to the last framework that failed to reverse biodiversity loss because of a lack of financial commitment.

“This is no time for half measures. This is the time for bold ambition by governments around the world… We think a global commitment of at least one percent of GDP is needed annually to address the biodiversity crisis, that is the level of crisis finance that we need to materialise, and parties need to commit to that level by 2030,” O’Donnell said. “We feel wealthy countries need to increase the support for developing  countries in terms of investing at least 60 billion annually into biodiversity conservation in the developing world.”

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The city of La Paz, capital of the state of Baja California Sur, in northwestern Mexico, is one of epicenters for shark capture. Its products are destined for local markets, such as Nicolás Bravo's, where a vendor cleans fish caught that same day, in July 2021. Credit: Emilio Godoy / EJN-IPS

By Emilio Godoy
LA PAZ, Mexico, Aug 26 2021 (IPS)

At “The Lieutenant” (“El Teniente”) fishing site, near La Paz (Baja California Sur’s capital) the boats go by and come in all morning. To chase down sharks, fishers make their way to the Holy Spirit island, some 30 km away from La Paz. They unload the products that will be sold at the city’s fish markets.

Since at least 2016, Mexico has become a strong seller of shark fins to China and Hong Kong, under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) mechanisms. In the Asian market, shark fins are prized, used to make fin soup and other delicacies.

A fisher in Mexico gets around $2 per kilogram of shark, but the dried fins can cost up to $70 in Hong Kong, according to news and scientific reports. Data from the National Chamber of Fishing and Aquaculture Industries (Canainpesca) indicates that the fin trade alone represents 8-12% of producers’ income.

But the country’s export data and records from CITES, when compared, reveal discrepancies that seed doubt about whether the shark fins indeed originate in Mexico.

In 2016, Mexico exported 6,401.07 kilograms of scalloped hammerhead shark and 20,088.28 kg of smooth hammerhead shark dried fins to Hong Kong, but the island reported imports of 6,402.66 kg and 10,425.25 kg imports, respectively. In addition, Mexico exported 2 kg to the US that don’t appear in the CITES Trade Database.

The next year the country supplied Hong Kong with 8,286.61 kg of scalloped hammerhead shark dried fins; Hong Kong recounted the entry of only 3,502.05 kg; Mexico sent 10,153.9 kg of smooth hammerhead shark dried fins to Hong Kong, but the island only stated it received 5,975.25 kg. The US bought one kilo of dried fins, without traces in CITES.

The story repeated itself in 2018, when Hong Kong recorded the entry of 833.25 kg of scalloped hammerhead shark dried fins from Mexico, with no inscription under CITES. There was also 45 kg exported to the US not registered in CITES. The US imported 123 kg of great hammerhead shark dried fins that are absent in the CITES database. Mexico exported 1,821 kg of smooth hammerhead shark dried fins to Hong Kong, without traces in CITES.

In 2019, Hong Kong received 3,430.6 of scalloped hammerhead shark dried fins that aren’t included in CITES. At the same time, the island received 1,354.1 kg of great hammerhead shark dried fins and 3,911.77 kg of smooth hammerhead, without registry in CITES.

The Secretary of Environment didn’t authorize shark fin exports to China in 2020, but the country’s trade statistics show the delivery of 6,407 kg to the Asian nation that year. The exports need a special approval to comply with CITES requirements.

By late-April 2021, Mexico had sold 55,674 kg of dried shark fins to Hong Kong, 7,701 kg to China and 536 kg to Germany.

Those numbers show a growing increase of shark fin exports to China and Hong Kong, errors in Hong Kong’s and Mexico’s records, and the probability of illicit fins passing through legitimate trade channels to Asian markets.

Illicit fishing refers to activities such as fishing without a permit, out of closed season, capture of protected species, the use of forbidden fishing gear or giving false information on volumes and captured animals.

For Alejandro Olivera, Center for Biological Diversity (CBD)’s representative in Mexico, the lack of statistical reliability suggests under-reporting. “It’s hard to prove corruption, but it implies that things aren’t being done well, and we are talking about an international body. There should be a better mechanism at CITES, because they rely too much on what the countries report. Every single year there is a debate about it, but a better agreement for certainty and traceability (of the data) hasn’t been reached yet,” he said to EJN.

A 2018 lawsuit filed by environmentalists against the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity’s (Conabio) International Cooperation and Implementation Direction, seen by EJN, accused that agency of issuing non-detriment finding certificates (NDF), used to evaluate export requests of species protected by CITES, without complying with the international requirements.

The complaint, still pending, states that the authorizations lacked estimates of shark stocks, mortality patterns, population trends and extractions by species, among other aspects. It accuses Conabio of approving the delivery of 1,307.23 kg of hammerhead, smooth hammerhead and great hammerhead shark dried fins through 35 NDF in 2015.

Juan Carlos Cantú, director of Defenders of Wildlife’s Mexico program, told EJN there are shark fins that flow illegally throughout CITES Trade Database. The NGO works to protect and restore imperiled species throughout North America.

Cantú, a biologist by training, explained that the volume of fins doesn’t match that of the caught sharks. “It means the fishing authorities that manage notice of arrivals don’t do their job. The international rules aren’t fulfilled,” said.

The Fishing and Aquaculture National Commission (Conapesca), the fishing authority, allows it. Conapesca did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.

In Mexico, the North Pacific coasts are important shark catch areas. In the image, a fisherman reviews his morning catch in Mazatlán, in the northwestern state of Sinaloa, in August 2021. Credit: Christian Lizarraga / EJN-IPS

Chinese voracity

Hammerhead sharks give birth yearly or biannually. This slow-growing species reaches maturity at around eight or nine years. In the wild, they can live between 20-30 years, but one serious threat for populations is that they’re captured when they’re young, before they have a chance to breed.

The 2020 technical report “Selection of species for inclusion in the review of significant trade following COP 18: Extended analysis”, by the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre, found a sharp increase in international trade of hammerhead shark fins, of which Mexico contributes 61% of the global supply.

For the great hammerhead shark, it discovered that Mexico provides 71%. As for the silky shark, the country supplies 2% of the foreign market, and the pelagic thresher, approximately12%. For smooth hammerhead shark dried fins, Mexico supplies 76%.

Hesiquio Benítez, Conabio’s International Cooperation and Implementation director general, cautiously defended the export permits.

“We’re among the countries that better document shark fishing. It’s about how we use the best information to agree with the fishing authorities on the volumes of exploitation. The threat of illegal trade is always there but it’s a matter of law enforcement. It’s hard to know its magnitude. The Asian market is pretty irregular, it’s a real vacuum,” he said.

Beginning in 2020, Conabio, which financially depends on the Secretary of the Environment (Semarnat), established volumes of sustainable exports to monitor shark fishing and fin exports. Towards that end, the agency created a coding system, in which green means sustainable use, yellow comes on when the exploitation levels reach 70% and red means a stop for export licenses. This presages a conflict with the fishing sector.

Benítez explained the hammerhead shark has some margin for capture (coded green), the smooth hammerhead and the great hammerhead sharks are near-yellow in the Pacific Ocean, while the silky shark and pelagic thresher are both approaching red.

Conabio is about to publish a book on Mexican sharks included in CITES. Moreover, it will take part in the organization of a global meeting on non-detriment finding certificates (NDF), used to evaluate export requests of species protected by CITES, presumably in 2022.

A global supplier

Some recent reports confirm Mexico’s international role in the shark market.

In its 2018 report “Unintentional partner: How the United States helps the illegal shark fin market”, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which advocates for protection of wildlife and the environment, discovered that the US has become a bridge for shark fin exports from at least 10 American countries, Mexico among them.

NRDC identified dozens of in-transit shipments from these countries, principally to Asia, and the majority to Hong Kong. Mexico was the origin of more than a third of the cargo that mainly passed through the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports in California and Honolulu in Hawaii. Due to the different kinds of protection that countries like Costa Rica, Mexico and Peru apply regarding sharks, the organization doubted the legality of those fins.

According to Rosario Álvarez, the scientific network on migratory marine species Migramar’s executive director, shark populations decrease “in an alarming way”, for being considered commercial species, as “if they were chickens”.

Even though there aren’t population assessments for scalloped hammerhead sharks in the northeastern Pacific, Conabio has found reports of a 80% decrease in the last 70 years in adjacent regions. Pelagios Kakunjá, a non-profit organization in Mexico focused on ocean conservation, estimates that it’s overexploited. For smooth hammerhead sharks, there are no population assessments, but Conabio says that they have suffered a lower reduction compared to other hammerhead taxon, whereas Pelagios has found they’re overexploited.

In the case of great hammerhead sharks, there aren’t population assessments, but Conabio has found reports of a 80% decrease in the last 70 years near the northeastern Pacific, and Pelagios estimates they’re overexploited.

Regarding the shortfin mako shark, Conabio believes its capture is sustainable in the northern Pacific and it’s overexploited in the northern Atlantic.

“The illegal fin trade passes through Mexico. There is evidence that there’s trade out of the law. There is a lack of an adequate legal framework and of social and environmental regards. We seem to be racing at very different speeds: the speed of extraction exceeds the speed of reaction,” Álvarez said.

The data discrepancy has already reached CITES, which in its thirty-first virtual meeting of the Animals Committee this past May and June, suggested inviting the body’s Steering Committee to review the results of the Convention Secretariat’s study on the apparent difference in the trade of shark products, especially that of the notices of arrival to ports.

However, the Food and Agriculture Organization’s 2021 technical report “CITES and the sea. Trade in commercially exploited CITES-listed marine species” praised Mexico’s “relative success” in reporting trade of hammerhead sharks, “possibly due to the coastal and artisanal nature of fisheries.”

Law enforcement is Mexico’s pending issue, but in its 2018-2020 report to CITES, the country excluded information on law enforcement regarding violations to the treaty and since 2017 the country hasn’t delivered reports on annual illegal trade.

The 2017 “Action plan for North America. Sustainable trade in sharks”, developed by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation –agency of the Mexico-United States-Canada Treaty–, focused on fostering the legal, sustainable and traceable of eight shark species includes policies such as expanding the collection and analysis of shark fisheries and trade data, update shark fisheries management in Mexico, and building enforcement capacity.

Yet, the available evidence shows that Mexico still suffers from delays in those areas.

Defender’s Cantú pointed out that Mexico was always a strong exporter, but “before there was no information and that’s why the species were included in CITES”.

The expert emphasized that any regulation, perfect as it may be, “works provided that the authority applies them. Otherwise, [without enforcement] nothing works. Budget and trained personnel are needed. We have a (fishing) authority who doesn’t want to do its job, another one that more or less wants to do it, but lacks budget and human resources. And a higher authority (the government) that doesn’t care about the environment.”

NRDC suggests that the Latin American countries that contribute substantially to the shark international trade should prioritize domestic law enforcement and international conventions that govern fishing and shark trade, especially the fulfillment of CITES requirements.

Álvarez thinks the solution is categorical: forbidding shark fishing, as Colombia decided in 2020.

“That might discourage the market. There’s an important part of the demand side, as the purchasing level grows in Asia, in addition to the lack of regulation. It’s an unsustainable activity. We saw it before with the turtle and whales in the ’80s”, she commented. (Turtles and whales species were massively hunted, until they got protection from CITES. But turtles are still under threat from illegal fishing and trafficking.)

The conclusions of two workshops on NDF development organized by Conabio in 2019 and 2020 highlighted the importance of the assessment of stocks to measure the level of damage in fishing and of the generation of more information about the use of fishing gears, mortality per captures and the scale of the illegal fishing.

Meanwhile, Benítez, from Conabio, insisted on the importance of staying away from the sustainable limits.

“I’d expect that the export wouldn’t grow that much, for the sake of the species. We have to manage better to have sustainable management for the long term. It shouldn’t be a goal — it is about limits. We’re not interested in maximum exploitation, or in causing a social problem, but we do want to make it clear that we must have limits,” said Benítez.

This story was produced with support from the Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.

Fishermen unload seafood on August 3, 2021 in the port of Mazatlán, in the state of Sinaloa, in northwestern Mexico, one of the main fishing and and arrival sites for shark boats in the country. Credit: Christian Lizarraga / EJN-IPS

By Emilio Godoy
LA PAZ, Mexico, Aug 26 2021 (IPS)

The Mexican fisherman Tomás Valencia, aged 70, remembers that around 30 years ago he used to catch a lot of sharks.

“We got bull shark, blacknose sharks, blue sharks, spinner sharks. We caught up to seven in a journey, on average we fished 4 or 5,” he recalled. Valencia began to fish at age 7 and has become a legend in Tuxpan, a town 500 kilometers southeast of Mexico City, in the state of Veracruz, a traditional fishing and oil exploitation site. In his youth he used to tie sharks by the tail, while two other men held the nets that kept the animals.

But those times are memories, because fishers catch less and less. Now, they set sail at 7am in the morning and come back the next day. “Fishing has become very hard. There is little left, because we’re finishing them off. Sometimes there are journeys that that are empty-handed, said Valencia, a member of the “Puerto de Tampamachoco” cooperative, that incorporates 75 partners and advocates for the rights of small-scale fishers.

The coronavirus pandemic has hit the sector hard, because the fishermen couldn’t sail due to the risk of contagion and the market collapsed, and it hasn’t recovered yet.

This story plays out in other Mexican marine areas, aggravated by the authorities’ permissive attitude towards fishing of shark species under threat. More often than not, the fins end up in China and Hong Kong.

This assertion is based on the analysis of fishing license databases, notices of arrivals of shark boats and shark fin exports under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

Flouting of the rules and a lack of uniformity in reporting has exacerbated the capture of sharks, whose existence dates back millions of years and is key for the health of ecosystems.

As predators they control the balance of other species situated below them in the trophic chain; indirectly, they maintain the health of coral reefs and other ocean ecosystems, since herbivorous fish eat algae that can damage these reefs.

Shark fisheries’ records reveal many discrepancies. Dozens of notices of arrival only report eviscerated or fresh whole shark, without naming the boat or the species. Conapesca, the Fishing and Aquaculture National Commission, has registered 8,278 boats, of which 1,680 have capacity to bring in more than 1 ton of catch to port, and 6,598 less than 1 ton. Data from Conapesca seen by EJN states that between 2011 and last May there have been 109,475 notices of arrivals of shark fishing boats to ports, of which 81,332 were small boats of 1-ton capacity and 28,143 were larger boats, bearing a heavier load.

Of those, there have been 11,128 notices of arrival of boats with weight greater than 3 tons. The largest unloading of shark came from an unidentified boat on October 30th 2019, with 1,103 tons of shark on board, in Tonalá, 938 km south to Mexico City, in the state of Chiapas. Something similar — where boats were recorded bringing in volumes of shark that would have been physically impossible for them to transport — happened in other ports too, such as La Paz in the northern state of Baja California Sur, and San Blas, in northwest Nayarit.

A similar phenomenon happened to the export requests of shark fins under CITES, in existence since 1975. CITES, which covers more than 5,600 animal species and around 38,000 plants, protects them against overexploitation through international trade, according to their risk of extinction. It has three appendices that group species according to how threatened they are by international trade.

In 2017, 8 non-detriment finding certificates (NDFs), the tool used by the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (Conabio) – financially dependent on the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat)- to evaluate export requests of species protected by CITES, cite cases of loading reports that exceed the registered capacity of the boat. In 2018 there were another 3 NDFs; in 2019, 4; and in 2020, a total of 6.

Experts interviewed by EJN put the responsibility on the environmental and fishing authorities.

Alejandro Olivera, Center for Biological Diversity (CBD)’s representative in Mexico, deems physically “impossible” the unloading of high volumes of sharks by minor boats, because they can’t transport that weight, and attributes the problem to the lack of surveillance of law enforcement.

This data shows a capture pattern, explained to EJN by a fisherman in La Paz who chose to remain anonymous for security reasons. Major boats catch sharks in high seas and then share the volumes with minor ships that head for ports to unload the animals.

“The lack of control reflects on many fisheries and there are many forms to game the system of reporting. The fishing policy leads to a lack of transparency, to the absence of traceability of the boats and of seafood. Satellite data of minor boats aren’t shared (by the authorities). It’s a reflection of the disorder, which has too little data, and it impedes the fishery sustainable management”, added Olivera.

The consequence: overexploitation.

Juan Carlos Cantú, Defenders of Wildlife’s representative in Mexico, blamed Conapesca, the governmental agency that regulates the fishing sector, by issuing licences and controlling fishing activities.

“One of the things that has to be understood is that fishing authorities are responsible for the extraction (of species) and the surveillance (of fishing) as well. The fishing sector only cares about extraction”, claimed the expert.

Since 2011, Conapesca has given out 1,519 shark fishing permits, the only fishery that has specific licenses. In 2020, there were 170, valid until 2023, 2024 and 2025. By late May, the authorities renewed 21, in force until 2025. Most of the permits come from Baja California Sur, Veracruz, the northern state of Tamaulipas, Baja California, north of Mexico, and Sinaloa in the northwest. By law, the fishing authorities don’t award new licences, only renewals — an effort to keep the number of permits fixed and curb overfishing.

Most of the complaints the authorities receive are due to illegal fishing (only 20 cases). One complaint of illicit possession of sharks was recorded and there were 21 seizures between 2019 and 2020. Illicit or illegal fishing refers to activities such as fishing without a permit, fishing during a closed season, the capture of protected species, the use of forbidden fishing gear or the communication of false information on catch volume.

Those practices have given rise to another problem too: illegal shark finning, which consists of cutting off the fins and throwing the bodies into the sea, for exporting them to China and Hong Kong. The fishing sector — industry and cooperatives alike — denies it with the punctuality of a bureaucrat.

The NDF 192/2019, seen by EJN, cites 6 notices of arrival that reported unloading of fresh fins, which is prohibited by law. In addition, the NDF 121/20 mentions 10 notices of arrival of fins.

To authorize the exports, the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (Conabio), financially dependent on the Secretary of the Environment (Semarnat), Conabio applies a conversion factor to tally the number of unloaded animals and the volume of fresh fins.

Hesiquio Benítez, Conabio’s International Cooperation and Implementation director general, explained that the authorizations are based on Conapesca’s data and scientific papers.

“It’s the only thing we can directly pay attention to. We use the information on a case by case basis. The annual estimations come from scientific studies and we see trends. We take the information with due care. Sometimes, the data does not match,” he said.

Conapesca, which imposes fishing closed seasons from May to August on both coasts, didn’t answer a request for comment.

Mazatlán, in the state of Sinaloa, in northwestern Mexico, is a traditional shark fishing and landing site. In the image, on August 3, 2021, a fisherman casts his catch nets in the waters of Mazatlán, a seaside resort on the Pacific coast. Credit: Christian Lizarraga / EJN-IPS

Defenseless

There are 111 shark species on Mexican waters, according to the 2018 Action Programme for Conservations of Sharks and Rays.

But quite a few varieties are protected by law, which forbids the capture of whale shark (Rhincodon typus), white shark (Carcharhodon carcharhias) and basking shark (Cetorhinus maximus).

IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species catalogues as “vulnerable” the oceanic whitetip, smooth hammerhead, silky sharks, and bigeye thresher, common thresher and pelagic thresher, while considers the scalloped hammerhead, great hammerhead and shortfin mako sharks “in danger”.

Between 2013 and 2019, CITES approved the inclusion in Appendix II of scalloped hammerhead shark (Sphyrna lewini), smooth hammerhead shark (Sphyrna zygaena), great hammerhead (Sphyrna mokarran), silky shark (Carcharhinus falciformis), bigeye thresher (Alopias superciliosus), common thresher (Alopias vulpinus), pelagic thresher (Alopias pelagicus) and shortfin mako shark (Isurus oxyrinchus). That classification, which covers 10 shark species, indicates that the trade of these specimens needs a special authorization by the exporter nation. However, Mexico still hasn’t updated its regulation of species under threat.

In 2020, the Secretary of the Environment, in charge of drawing up the regulatory protection, vetoed the addition of scalloped hammerhead, smooth hammerhead, great hammerhead and shortfin mako sharks, in spite of the pressure of environmental groups that delivered scientific evidence of the urgency of that protection. Weeks ago, the secretary opened up a new public consultation on that annexation.

Mauricio Hoyos, the director general of non-government organization Pelagios Kakunjá, emphasized the low number of varieties under safeguard. “Mostly, it’s due to lack of information. That’s why it is so important to generate information to give the government those tools to protect the sharks. The hammerhead (shark) is at serious risk of extinction, because it’s captured too much for finning. It’s very prized. For that, it needs immediate protection,” said the biologist, who authored a study that supported the inclusion of those sharks.

Mexico is the fourth biggest producer of sharks, whose catch totaled 44,657 tons and consumption reached 45,615 tons –0.36 kg per capita– in 2018, according to Conapesca figures. As production doesn’t satisfy the domestic consumption, imports cover the difference. Between 2014-2018, the capture average equaled 38,233 tons.

The rays and shark fisheries are the eighth by size in the country, contributing 2.5% of captures and 2% of unloaded total weight in the last 15 years. The industry uses everything, from the meat until the fins.

To draw up the NDFs, Conabio assesses the actual risk and concludes which species face medium and high threats on both Mexican coasts, especially for their interaction with the artisanal fishing fleet –the main captor of sharks in shallow waters.

An obstacle lies in the absence of information on shark populations, which hinders their management.

Óscar Sosa-Nishizaki, researcher at the Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education’s Department of Biological Oceanography, highlighted the lack of “robust data” in fisheries.

“We have a general view, we try to rebuild the historic captures and make the best estimation of every species. The whole system of how capture data is obtained must be improved. We’re rebuilding the specific arrangement. There has to be assessment of the populations and the collection of biological information on birth, growth, migration and so on. It’s a long way until we can say if the populations are well or not,” he said.

The scientist is part of an inter-institutional working group that focuses on the historic reconstruction of shark fishing aimed at determining the conditions of the fishery, which has to be ready later this year.

The 2017 National Fishery Letter, the basis for the management of fisheries , only refers to the scalloped hammerhead and silky sharks in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean and describes them as “exploited to the maxim sustainability”.

Besides, in 2018 the Action Programme for the Conservation of Sharks and Rays, which is currently being updated, acknowledges the lack of dissemination, surveillance, monitoring and law enforcement as barriers to the conservation of the elasmobranch.

Moreover, it acknowledges the impacts of unsustainable fishing, disturbances and habitat pollution; and growth of human activities in important ecosystems for the species.

Cantú, from Defenders of Wildlife, slamed Conapesca for blocking protection to the varieties under threat. “Simply put, they are not interested in conservation, but in fishermen’ votes. They’re not doing anything.  The economic aspect has too much weight.” he said.

The Criminal Code typifies some felonies related to threatened species, including those in CITES. The code establishes one to nine years in prison for trafficking, capturing, owning, transporting, importing or exporting species protected by law or under international treaties, as CITES. It adds three additional years if the purpose of the activity is trading.

“It’s very difficult to enforce laws against a whole activity with the intervention of authorities from different institutions that have a totally different view on how things should be done,” said Cantu.

Since 2020, Semarnat faces two complaints by CBD and Pelagios Kakunjá for its reluctance to add the scalloped hammerhead, smooth hammerhead and great hammerhead sharks to the protection regulation.

Olivera from CBD argued that the motive may be economic, because “the scientific arguments are proved and those species have a huge commercial importance. It’s a heavy factor.”

But Sosa-Nichizaki has doubts about the viability of that inclusion. “It’s worth checking the sea cucumber case. It goes from one classification to another one, and it doesn’t imply a better situation. It’s a very interesting challenge, but the results so far for the sea cucumber aren’t very clear. For conservation, inclusion is an important step, but it’s not achieved overnight,” he said.

In 2018, Semarnat changed the sea cucumber status from “special protection” to “threatened”, which implies restrictions for its fishing and trade.

But since that moment, the pressure on the specie hasn’t stopped. In 2018 and 2019, there were 11 cases of illegal fishing and one of illicit trade. Press reports have shown that its capture and commercialization intents have continued.

Benitez, from Conabio, has doubts about the future protection of the species too and complains that the fishing sector doesn’t listen to them. “There is resistance from the sector, but it’s a global problem. There are lots of interests, cooperatives, (fishing) communities,” he stated. 

While the scientific and political debate goes on, fishermen like Valencia only want better livelihoods. “We’re being educated, so that we stop predating, [fishing less and more sustainably]. But we want alternatives, we don’t want to work at sea anymore. I’ve spent my whole life at sea. We want something else, to defend ourselves when there is nothing out there in the water. But the government takes decisions without taking into account the ones affected,” he lamented.

This story was produced with support from the Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.

Hawaii is home to many of the world's rarest plants and animals, recognised globally as a 'biodiversity hotspot.' “We have seen a lot of positive actions being taken around the world, especially new green initiatives, in response to the pandemic,” Mrema of the Convention on Biological Diversity, said. Credit: Jon Letman/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, May 22 2020 (IPS)

This year’s International Day of Biological Diversity falls amid the coronavirus pandemic and the slow easing, in some nations, of a global lockdown. While the lockdown has forced most people to stay at home, there have been reports of more wildlife being spotted – even in once-busy city centres. 

This change is fitting for this year’s theme: “Our solutions are in nature.” Experts say that this is an opportunity for humans to see the footprint they are leaving behind on earth, and time to reflect on how to work towards a better future for the sustainability of the environment and for wildlife in the future. 

“We know that humanity stands at a crossroad with regard to the legacy we wish to leave to future generations,” Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, Acting Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, told IPS. “As noted by the recent IPBES [Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services ] Global Assessment report, the current global response has been insufficient, given that nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history, and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world. Transformative change is necessary in order to restore and protect nature.”

‘Pandemic of complacency’

“I’m hoping what this pandemic does for us is draws attention to the pandemic of complacency that we were in before and [how that] contributed to the higher carbon [footprint], to greater human footprint, [and] plastic pollution in the ocean,” Roderic Mast, Co-Chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature SSC Marine Turtle Specialist Group, told IPS. “Hopefully it’ll make people realise they were having an impact.”

Mast added that one issue that has come up during this lockdown is a rise in illegal poaching in places such as Indonesia and French Guiana. Although this information is yet to be verified, Mast said he has unofficial accounts from community members on the ground that a lack of enforcers on the job means there more illegal poaching is taking place. 

Meanwhile, Mrema of the Convention on Biological Diversity said conservation efforts have actually strengthened under the pandemic.

“The present COVID-19 crisis has provided us with a reset button – as well as confirming what we already know, that biodiversity is fundamental to human health – and has given new urgency to the need to protect it,” Mrema said. 

However, both experts echoed each others’ sentiments that now is not the time to become complacent seeing the changes the lockdowns have brought to wildlife. For example, just because more sea-turtles are seen out in the open does not mean the crisis has been resolved, Mast said. 

“This temporary reduction of stress is not sufficient and we need greater changes in the way we treat our environment,” Mrema said.

“The only thing wrong with the ocean is all the stuff that we humans put in it and all the stuff we humans take out,” Mast added. “So if we can limit what we put in the ocean in terms of pollution, boat traffic, and sounds, and if we can limit what we take out in terms of fisheries — that’s when we’re going to start seeing healthier oceans.”

According to the IUCN’s Red List, 31,030 species of the 116,177 that have been assessed are threatened with extinction. Here are glimpses of conservation efforts and endangered species around the world:

Biological Diversity by Inter Press Service

Excerpt:

In the United Nations Conference on Biodiversity, government delegates, representatives of international organisations, and civil society activists came from every continent to Cancún in southeast Mexico, to make their proposals to protect biological resources. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
CANCUN, Mexico, Dec 14 2016 (IPS)

Synthetic biology, geoengineering and the recognition of ancestral knowledge are the issues that have generated the most heated debate in the United Nations Conference on Biodiversity, which ends in this Mexican resort city on Friday Dec. 17.

The outcome of the debates on these questions will be seen this week, in the final stretch of the Dec. 2-17 13th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), or COP 13, and other meetings and international forums focusing on the planet’s natural resources.

For developing countries these issues are vital, due to the biological and biocultural capital that they concentrate in their territories and that could be undermined if their exploitation is allowed within the framework of the CBD.

“On a scale of one to 10, I would say that we are at four. The negotiations are slow. We need to speed them up and they have to in favour of the people,” Venezuelan Santiago Obispo, leader of the non-governmental Amazon Cooperation Network, told IPS.

With respect to synthetic biology, governments and representatives of academia, civil society and indigenous communities are concerned about the possible devastating impacts on ecosystems and on the livelihood of local communities.

This discipline consists of computer-assisted biological engineering to design and build synthetic life forms, live parts, artifacts and systems which do not exist in nature.

Currently, research is being carried out on the creation of synthetic vanilla flavour, whose industrial production threatens the well-being of farmers in countries like Comoros, China, Madagascar, Mexico, Reunion and Uganda.

Similar research is also being conducted on vetiver, a fragrance used in cosmetic products and whose biosynthetic version will affect Brazil, China, Haiti, Indonesia, Japan, India and Reunion.

Laboratory studies are also focusing on genetic drivers, able to permanently alter species by driving one specific characteristic in the reproductive process.

Through this process, the altered genes are the ones inherited by the offspring. But opponents fear that species or ecosystems will be modified or eliminated, with unpredictable consequences.

In Cancún, where more than 6,500 official delegates and representatives of civil society are taking part in the conference, over 160 non-governmental, academic and indigenous organisations called for a moratorium on experiments involving synthetic biology, like gene drivers.

In the COP 13 debates, the African and Caribbean countries, seconded by El Salvador, Bolivia and Venezuela, pronounced themselves in favor of a moratorium, while Australia, Brazil and Canada led the group lobbying for the acceptance of synthetic biology within the CBD.

One issue which did gain unanimous support from the state parties is the rejection of digital genomic sequencing, molecular structures created with computer programmes.

In the text of the Cancun Declaration which is being negotiated, there is no reference to a “moratorium” on bioengineering and genetic drivers, but it does invite countries to postpone this kind of research.

In previous COPs, which are held every two years, the CBD recommended a precautionary approach with respect to the positive and negative effects of synthetic biology and called for further scientific research.

Delegates of the 196 states parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity step up the pace to achieve agreements on conservation and use of the planet’s biodiversity, in a summit that closes on Dec. 17 in Cancún, in Mexico. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

For Barbara Unmüssig, one of the heads of Germany’s Heinrich Böll Foundation, linked to Germany’s Green Party, the Cancún summit will be a success if the CBD adopts a precautionary approach towards bio engineering and geo engineering.

“The COP should come up with a strong declaration to tell companies behind synthetic biology and geoengineering that they take steps towards evaluating them and establishing a moratorium. If it confirms moratoria, it will show that it’s a convention with teeth and that it’s not in favour of certain technologies,” the activist told IPS.

“We have to stop the main drivers behind the destruction of biodiversity. If we are really interested in maintaining ecosystems, we have to think about adequate measures against overexploitation of fisheries and cultivating GMOs. The agroindustry tries to landgrab for monoculture, it’s happening all around the world.”

Geoengineering represents the large-scale intentional manipulation of planetary systems to combat climate change through techniques referring to the management of solar radiation, greenhouse gas reduction and weather modification.

During COP 9, held in Bonn, Germany in 2008, the CBD adopted a moratorium on ocean fertilisation, a geoengineering technique.

Meanwhile, delegates of native communities have been very active in the Cancún summit defending their rights in their territories and as protectors of biodiversity.

Bolivia suggested the creation of an ad hoc body responsible for indigenous peoples issues, now that native communities have gained recognition from the CBD of the concept of “indigenous peoples and local communities” as subjects of rights, in response to a demand that gained the support of organisations worldwide.

But within this recognition, there is one issue that faces opposition: the demand that native peoples settled in the territories must give consent to policies of conservation and best use of biodiversity. The term “free” in the proposed prior, free and informed consent is blocking negotiations due to opposition led by Asian and African countries.

“We want a balance of perspectives, a serious and responsible balance to increase the participation of indigenous peoples,” Diego Pacheco, the head of Bolivia’s delegation at COP 13 and his country’s vice minister of planning and development, told IPS.

The Cancún conference coincides with the halfway mark of the United Nations Decade on Biodiversity 2011-2020.

Studies published on the occasion of the summit show that ecosystems continue to be destroyed worldwide, despite conservationist efforts.

The world is living up to less than 60 per cent of the Aichi Targets, the 20 points of the Strategic Plan for Biological Diversity 2011-2020, adopted in 2010 by the states parties to the CBD, which refers to the protection of natural resources, participation of indigenous peoples and sustainable use, among others.

“These negotiations will affect biodiversity in the planet. We cannot allow the CBD to try to commercialise biodiversity, to put a price tag on it,” said Obispo, of Venezuela.

Unmüssig recommended addressing the causes of the loss of biological resources.

“We have to stop the main drivers behind the destruction of biodiversity. If we are really interested in sustaining ecosystems, we have to think of adequate measures against the overexploitation of fisheries and the cultivation of GMOs. Agroindustry tries to landgrab for monoculture, it’s happening all around the world.”

For Pacheco, the CBD must not impose “a hegemonic model. It has to listen to alternatives, but there is strong influence from developed countries.”

Topics such as the recognition of natural pollinisers and the designation of protected marine areas have progressed without any major setbacks.

In the first case, the importance of agroecology, of the maintenance of habitats, and of the need to avoid or reduce the use of toxic chemical substances in agriculture was discussed. In the second case, the significance of marine planification was debated.

In Cancún it was decided that Egypt would host COP 14 in 2018.

Representatives of native peoples all over the world take part in a meeting during the United Nations Conference on Biodiversity in the resort city of Cancún, Mexico. Indigenous delegates in the summit are defending their rights and their natural resources, which are threatened by climate change, the extractive industries and biopiracy. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
CANCUN, Mexico, Dec 12 2016 (IPS)

“We don’t have access to marine areas, because most are protected areas or are in private hands. We indigenous people have been losing access to our territories, as this decision became a privilege of the state,” complained Donald Rojas, a member of the Brunka indigenous community in Costa Rica.

The complaint from the head of the non-governmental National Indigenous Council of Costa Rica was in response to the ban keeping the Brunka and Huetar people from entering five of their ancestral land and sea territories, after they were declared natural protected areas.

“That restricts access to and management of resources,” said Rojas, who is a member of one of the eight native peoples in that Central American country of 4.8 million people, where 104,000 indigenous people live on a combined area of 3,500 square km.

Rojas is one of the Latin American indigenous leaders participating in different events and forums in the United Nations Biodiversity Conference, which has brought together nearly 6,500 delegates of governments, international organisations, academia and civil society in Cancun, Mexico from Dec. 2-17.

Native people used to fish and gather food in these areas located near the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, within Costa Rica’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

This conflict reflects the growing exploitation of EEZs by the states, which at the same time face an obligation to increase their protected marine areas and clean up the oceans – a contradiction that generates friction, and where the local communities are often victims.

This collision of interests has been seen during the global summit on biodiversity in the coastal city of Cancún, 1,200 km southeast of Mexico City, where the 13th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), or COP13, as well as other intergovernmental events and forums related to the preservation of the planet’s natural wealth, is taking place.

Coastal waters and continental shelves are increasingly exploited for fishing, agricultural, industrial or touristic purposes.

In the EEZ, which comprises a 200-nautical mile strip (240 km) from the coast, traditional activities are carried out such as fishing, extraction of oil and dredging of ports, that now extend to ultra-deep water drilling, underwater mining and extraction of minerals from polymetallic nodules.

Altogether, protected marine areas cover about 15 million square kilometres or 4.12 per cent of the world’s oceans, which is still far from the goal of 10 per cent, although the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) highlighted in Cancún the increase achieved in recent years.

But protection of coastal and marine areas under national jurisdiction has already reached 10 per cent, according to the “Protected Planet Report 2016” by UNEP and other international and civil society organisations.

Indigenous women in Ecuador demand protection of native corn during the global summit on biodiversity taking place Dec. 2-17 in Cancún, in southeast Mexico. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

However, only 0.25 per cent of areas beyond national jurisdiction are protected, which demonstrates a significant gap in conservation efforts and underlines the urgent need to seek ways to address the challenges of expanding protected areas.

Goal 11 of the 20 points of the Strategic Plan for Biological Diversity 2011-2020, wbich includes the Aichi Targets, adopted in 2010 by the state parties to the CBD, states that “by 2020, at least 17 per cent of terrestrial and inland water, and 10 per cent of coastal and marine areas, especially areas of particular importance for biodiversity and ecosystem services, are conserved through effectively and equitably managed, ecologically representative and well connected systems of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, and integrated into the wider landscapes and seascapes.”

Moreover, the 14th of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which the international community has set itself to achieve by 2030 proposes to “conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.”

The 10 targets included in SDG 14 refer to healthy seas, the sustainable use of resources and the reduction of pollution.

“It’s a big challenge. Two approaches can be adopted. One is based on marine planning and management, and the other on selection of economic sectors and closed seasons,” said Christian Neumann, Marine Ecosystem Services project manager for the Norway-based non-governmental GRID-Arendal, which collaborates with UNEP.

“The general problem is the overexploitation; it’s very difficult to put them (the two approaches) on balance. There is a growing understanding that in order to achieve sustainable development, a healthy ocean is needed,” he told IPS.

Construction projects highlight the contradiction between the exploitation of the EEZs and the preservation of healthy oceans and the rights of coastal inhabitants.

One example near Cancún is the expansion of the port of Veracruz, which is going ahead in spite of the threat it poses to the Veracruz Reef System, a natural protected area that spans coral reefs and subtidal aquatic beds, shallow marine waters, sandy beaches and mangroves.

The reef system was declared a national marine park in 1992.

The project, presented as the biggest port investment in the country in 100 years, includes the construction of two 7,740-metre-long breakwaters, an 800-metre-diameter harbor and nine kinds of dock terminals in a nine-square-km area.

In Honduras, the Misquito indigenous people are waiting to see the results of the oil exploration, which started in 2014 in the department of Gracias a Dios off the country’s Caribbean coast.

“It’s a fishing area, so there is an impact on this sector. We need to know what will happen with those jobs,” Yuam Pravia, a delegate from the non-governmental Moskitia Asla Takanka – Unity of the Moskitia (MASTA) in Honduras, told IPS during the conference.

In 2014, the British BG Group (which has since been taken over by Royal Dutch Shell) began exploration in a 35,000-square-km area granted in concession by the Honduran government.

In an attempt to safeguard their rights, the Misquito people set a series of conditions in order to allow the exploration to go ahead. But since the company failed to comply, the Misquito and Garifuna people are considering withdrawing their approval.

In Costa Rica a dialogue began between the government and indigenous peoples to solve the question of territorial access. “We are losing a fundamental basis of our indigenous identity. Since the government does not acknowledge this, an entire biological and cultural system is being violated,” said Rojas.

For Neumann, energy, mining and waste are becoming serious issues. “We need to consider them. But we have the (question of) economic needs as well. It’s difficult to think about alternatives for millions of fishermen,” he pointed out.

In Pravia’s opinion, governments should protect the rights of communities. “They just issue permits, without considering the impacts. There is a lack of information,” he complained.

Srewe Xerente, an indigenous man from Brazil, performs a ritual during a forum on ancestral rights at the World Conservation Congress in Honolulu, Hawaii, where native peoples are demanding greater participation in conservation policies. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
HONOLULU, Hawaii, USA , Sep 5 2016 (IPS)

“You don’t convert your own house in a tourist site,” said Oussou Lio Appolinaire, an activist from Benin, wearing a traditional outfit in vivid yellows and greens. He was referring to opening up to tourists places that are sacred to indigenous people.

Appolinaire, who belongs to the Gun people in the West African country of Benin, heads the indigenous-led sustainable rural development NGO GRABE-Benin. He told IPS that “People suffer displacement from sacred sites. If we lose knowledge, we lose ourselves. The sacred is like life. Conservation is the respect of natural law, of every single element in nature.”“Conservation has been State-centered, despite the poor results. Indigenous people' rights to their lands are not adequately recognised or protected.” -- Victoria Tauli-Corpuz

Thanks to the work of GRABE-Benin and other organisations, the government of Benin approved Interministerial Order No.0121 – the first law of its kind in Africa, which protects sacred forests, granting them legal recognition as protected areas that must be sustainably managed.

Benin has more than 2,900 sacred forests, only 90 of which have so far been formally protected.

Appolinaire’s demand for greater participation by indigenous groups in conservation is being voiced by indigenous representatives in the World Conservation Congress, running Sep.1-10 in Honolulu, the capital of the U.S. Pacific Ocean state of Hawaii.

This year’s edition of the congress, which is held every four years by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), has drawn 9,500 participants from 192 countries, including delegates from governments, NGOs, and the scientific and business communities.

Indigenous representatives in Honolulu are focusing on problems related to the Aichi Biodiversity Targets – the 20 points contained in the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020, adopted in 2010 by the states party to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

An assessment carried out in May by the Subsidiary Body on Implementation (SBI) of the CBD expressed concern over the scant progress made with respect to capacity-building and participation regarding the biodiversity targets among indigenous and local communities.

Aichi Biodiversity Target 14 states that “By 2020, ecosystems that provide essential services, including services related to water, and contribute to health, livelihoods and well-being, are restored and safeguarded, taking into account the needs of women, indigenous and local communities, and the poor and vulnerable.”

Target 18 refers to respect for “traditional knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, and their customary use of biological resources.”

Target 11 is for “at least 17 per cent of terrestrial and inland water, and 10 per cent of coastal and marine areas,” to be conserved by 2020. But indigenous people are worried that this will run counter to respect for their rights in their traditional ancestral lands.

Indigenous leaders from every continent listen to the report by U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Victoria Tauli-Corpuz during the Sep. 1-10 World Conservation Congress in Honolulu. Credit: Courtesy of Emilio Godoy

“We agree with conservation, but what needs to be discussed is conservation with rights, exercised by indigenous people,” said Julio Cusurichi, the president of the Peruvian NGO Native Federation of the Madre de Dios River and its Tributaries (FENAMAD) and representative of the Shipibo-Conibo community.

“The government has created natural areas in our territories and they are limiting our activities,” he told IPS. “It would seem that indigenous people are obstacles and have to be removed from our territories.”

In the southeastern department of Madre de Dios in Peru’s Amazon jungle region, 60 percent of the highly biodiverse territory is a natural protected area. It is also home to some 10,000 people belonging to seven of the country’s 54 indigenous groups.

One of the common problems is the tendency of governments to create protected areas in indigenous areas, without a proper consultation process.

The congress, whose theme this year is “Planet at the Crossroads”, will produce the Hawaii Commitments, 85 of which were approved by the Switzerland-based IUCN Members’ Assembly, made up of governments and NGOs, prior to the Honolulu gathering.

The debate in Honolulu is focused on 14 motions on controversial issues, like compensation for destruction of biodiversity, closing domestic markets for ivory trade, and improved standards for ecotourism. Of the 99 resolutions, only eight mention indigenous people.

“There is little participation in the implementation of conservation policies; just because an indigenous person heads up an office doesn’t mean indigenous people are participating,” complained Dolores Cabnal, a member of the Q’eqchí community who is director of policy advocacy in the Guatemalan NGO Ak’Tenamit Association.

Her NGO is active in the eastern Guatemalan department of Izabal, where there are three natural protected areas that are home to both indigenous and black communities. In these areas, local residents depend on agriculture and fishing, which leads to clashes with the authorities because the law on nature reserves makes these activities illegal.

Activists and experts agree that it will be difficult to reach the Aichi Biodiversity Targets without the involvement of native peoples.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz of the Kankanaey Igorot indigenous people of the Philippines, complained that states are ignoring the role of native people.

In visits to Brazil, Colombia, Finland, Guatemala, Honduras, Norway, Paraguay and Sweden, Tauli-Corpuz found violations of the rights to free, prior, and informed consultation, traditional lands, participation, natural resources, compensation for damage, and cultural rights.

“Conservation has been State-centered, despite the poor results. Indigenous people’ rights to their lands are not adequately recognised or protected,” the special rapporteur said during a meeting with indigenous people in Honolulu.

An estimated 50 percent of the world’s protected natural areas have been established on indigenous lands. The proportion is highest in Latin America and the Caribbean, and in countries like the Philippines, India and Nepal in Asia, and Botswana, Cameroon, Kenya, Namibia, South Africa and Tanzania in Africa.

“The problems of indigenous peoples are not only of one country, they’re global. We have to recognise indigenous law, we can’t change laws of nature,” said Appolinaire.

FENAMAD’s Cusurichi, winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize, calls for co-management by governments and local communities. “We need secure land tenure and it must include resource management and food security,” he said.

In Guatemala, indigenous organisations plan to present a draft law in Congress for the regulation of their rights, natural protected areas, and extractive activities.

Cabnal said the government should study which peoples are in natural protected areas, why they are there and what they need, rather than trying to drive them out.”

The concerns expressed in Honolulu will also be presented at the 13th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the CBD, to be hosted by Cancun, Mexico from Dec. 4-17.

Emberá leader Cándido Mezúa (holding the microphone) demands that indigenous people be taken into account in climate change mitigation actions and that they share the benefits from forest conservation, during the annual meeting of the international Governors' Climate and Forests Task Force (GCF) in Guadalajara, Mexico. Credit: Emilio Godoy

By Emilio Godoy
GUADALAJARA, Mexico , Aug 31 2016 (IPS)

“Why don’t the authorities put themselves in our shoes?” asked Cándido Mezúa, an indigenous man from Panama, with respect to native peoples’ participation in conservation policies and the sharing of benefits from the protection of forests.

Mezúa, who belongs to the Emberá people and is a member of the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests, told IPS that “the state should recognise the benefit of this valuable mechanism for long-term sustainability, as a mitigation measure unique to indigenous peoples.”

But little progress has been made with regard to clearly defining the compensation, said the native leader, in an indigenous caucus held during the annual meeting of the Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force (GCF), which is being held Aug. 29 to Sep. 1 in Guadalajara, a city in west-central Mexico.

Mezúa’s demand will also be put forth in the 22nd Conference of the Parties (COP 22) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to take place Nov. 7-18 in Marrakesh, Morocco."(Indigenous organisations) promote our own sustainable development strategies that are brought into line with local, national and international standards and that stand out for the fact that native peoples’ knowledge and practices are at their core.” -- Edwin Vázquez

The idea is for it also to be taken into account on the agenda of the13th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), to be hosted by Cancun, Mexico from Dec. 4-17.

“The viewpoints of local organisations should be taken into account in the implementation of any activity in their territory,” said Edwin Vázquez, head of the Coordinator of Indigenous Organisations of the Amazon River Basin (COICA).

The activist told IPS that indigenous organisations “promote our own sustainable development strategies that are brought into line with local, national and international standards and that stand out for the fact that native peoples’ knowledge and practices are at their core.”

While indigenous organisations hammer out their positions with respect to the COP22 in Marrakesh and the CBD in Cancún, the statement they released in this Mexican city provides a glimpse of the proposals they will set forth.

The “Guiding Principles of Partnership Between Members of the Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force (GCF) and Indigenous Peoples and Traditional Communities” demands that the implementation of the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) strategy must incorporate the “full and effective” participation of native peoples and local communities.

The declaration also states that “All initiatives, actions, projects and programmes led by the GCF that concern indigenous peoples and traditional communities must have the participation and direct involvement of local communities through a process of free, prior and informed consent.”

The measures must also “recognise and strengthen the territorial rights of indigenous peoples and local communities,” it adds.

Furthermore, they will promote financing and benefits-sharing mechanisms to be applied in the context of these initiatives and actions.

“Systems of binding social and environmental safeguards will be included,” to help indigenous and local communities face the risks posed by these policies.

The GCF can serve as a laboratory for the performance of the CDB and COP22, because the emphasis of governors focuses strongly on REDD+ plans.

Emberá huts in a clearing in a forest protected by this indigenous people in Panama, in their 4,400-sq-km territory. Native peoples want global climate change accords to recognise the key role they play in protecting forests, and demand to be included in benefits arising from their conservation efforts. Credit: Government of Panama

REDD+ is a plan of action that finances national programmes in countries of the developing South, to combat deforestation, reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and foment access by participating countries to technical and financial support to these ends.

It forms part of the United Nations Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (UN-REDD Programme) and currently involves 64 countries.

The GCF, created in 2009, groups states and provinces: seven in Brazil, two in the Ivory Coast, one from Spain, two from the United States, six from Indonesia, five from Mexico and one from Peru.

Financed by various U.S. foundations and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, the GCF seeks to advance programmes designed to promote low-emissions rural development and REDD+.

It also works to link these efforts to emerging greenhouse gas (GHG) compliance regimes and other pay-for-performance plans.

More than 25 percent of the world’s tropical forests are in the states and provinces involved in GCF, including more than 75 percent of Brazil’s rainforest and more than half of Indonesia’s.

Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, storing the carbon in their trunks, branches and roots, which makes it essential to curb deforestation and avoid the release of carbon. In addition, trees play a key role in the water cycle through evaporation and precipitation.

“The conditions must exist for effective participation in the programme preparation stage,” Gustavo Sánchez, the president of the Mexican Network of Rural Forest Organisations, who is taking part in this week’s GCF debates, told IPS.

In their 2014 annual meeting in the northwestern Brazilian state of Acre, the governors assumed a commitment for their regions to reduce deforestation by 80 percent by 2020 through results-based international financing.

For example, Brazil’s GCF states would avoid the release of 3.6 million tons of GHG emissions a year.

From 2000 to 2010, CO2 emissions from deforestation totalled 45 million tons in Mexico.

To cut emissions, Mexico has adopted a zero deforestation goal for 2030. The five Mexican states in the GCF could reduce their CO2 emissions by 21 tons a year by 2020, around half of the total goal.

Peru has offered a 20 percent cut in its emissions, avoiding the release of 159 million tons by 2030 from land-use change and deforestation. The South American country could reduce emissions from deforestation between 42 and 63 million tons annually by that year.

The GCF manages a fund, created in 2013, aimed at guaranteeing and disbursing 50 million dollars a year, starting in 2020, for capacity-building and the execution of innovative projects.

But the GCF did not invite indigenous organisations to form partnerships until 2014.

The countries of Latin America have not yet shown mechanisms of how to use the emissions cuts to ensure results-based payments. But REDD+, criticised by many indigenous and community organisations, is still in diapers in the region, where only Costa Rica will soon start participating in the plan.

Mexico, for its part, is completing its REDD+ National Strategy consultation.

“We have always had traditional climate policies,” said Mezúa. “The GCF can come up with a more complete proposal, with partnerships between different jurisdictions.”

Sánchez said the goals would be met if the administrators of natural resources are included. “The reach will be restricted if we limit ourselves to REDD+ policies, which are still being designed. A mechanism that brings all efforts together is needed.”

Vázquez said it is “decisive” for the process to include “the establishment of safeguards, mechanisms for participation in decision-making and the implementation of action plans, and equal participation in the benefits.”

An indigenous peasant farmer holds native coffee grains he grows in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. The sharing of benefits generated by genetic resources has become a controversial issue throughout Latin America. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Aug 22 2016 (IPS)

In July 2015, the Mexican government granted a U.S. corporation permission for the use of genetic material obtained in Mexican territory for commercial and non-commercial purposes, in one of the cases that has fuelled concern in Latin America about the profit-oriented approach to biodiversity.

The agreement, which is catalogued with the identifier number Absch-Ircc-Mx-207343-2, was approved by the National Seeds Inspection and Certification Service and benefits the U.S. company Bion2 Inc, about which very little is known.

Prior, informed consent from the organisation or individual who holds right of access to the material was purportedly secured. But the file conceals the identity of this rights-holder and of the genetic material that was obtained, because the information is confidential.

This is an example of confidentiality practices that give rise to concern about the proper enforcement of the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization, signed in that Japanese city in 2010 and in effect since 2014.

The protocol, a supplementary agreement to the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, in force since 1993, seeks to strengthen the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the utilisation of genetic resources.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the protocol has been ratified by Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Peru and Uruguay.

The protocol stipulates that each party state must adopt measures to ensure access to traditional knowledge associated with genetic resources in the possession of indigenous and local communities.

That will be done, it states, through the prior informed consent and the approval and participation of these groups, and the establishment of mutually agreed conditions.

“The expectations of indigenous people are not well-covered by the protocol,” Lily Rodríguez, a researcher with the Institute for Food and Resource Economics at Germany’s Bonn University, told IPS.

She stressed that the protocol is “the opportunity to recognise traditional knowledge as part of each nation’s heritage and to establish mechanisms to respect their decisions with regard to whether or not they want to share their knowledge.”

Latin America and the Caribbean is the region with the greatest biodiversity in the world, as it is home to several mega-diverse countries like Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico.

The questions covered by the Nagoya Protocol will form part of the debate at the 13th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, to be held December 4-17 in Cancun, Mexico.

Indigenous groups and civil society organisations complain that the protocol recognises intellectual property rights for so-called bioprospectors, research centres or companies hunting for biological information to capitalise on.

Quechua peasant farmers plant quinoa seeds in Peru’s highlands. Civil society organisations and indigenous peoples are strongly opposed to the commercial use of Latin America’s genetic wealth. Credit: Courtesy of Biodiversity International

Furthermore, the sharing of eventual monetary and non-monetary benefits for indigenous peoples and communities is based on “mutually agreed terms” reached in contracts with companies and researchers, which can put native people at a disadvantage.

In Guatemala, civil society organisations and indigenous groups have fought their country’s inclusion in the Nagoya Protocol, which it signed in 2014.

In June, a provisional Constitutional Court ruling suspended the protocol in Guatemala.

“We are opposed because it was approved without the necessary number of votes in Congress; indigenous people were not consulted; and it gives permission for experimentation with and the transfer and consumption of transgenics,” said Rolando Lemus, the head of the Guatemalan umbrella group National Network for the Defence of Food Sovereignty.

The activist, whose NGO emerged in 2004 and which groups some 60 local organisations, told IPS, from the Guatemalan department of Chimaltenango, that the use of biodiversity is part of the culture and daily life of indigenous people, whose worldview “does not allow profiting from ancestral know-how.”

Guatemala had accepted three requests for research using the medicinal plant b’aqche’ (Eupatorium semialatum), cedar and mahogany. The request for the first, used against stomach problems like worms, was in the process of being studied, and the other two were approved in October 2015 for research by the private University del Valle of Guatemala.

As a subsidiary to the Biodiversity Convention, the protocol also covers activities carried out since last decade, regulated by national laws, in different countries of Latin America, which are discussed in a regional study published in 2014.

Brazil, for example, has granted at least 1,000 permits for non-commercial research since 2003 and 90 for commercial research since 2000.

Between 2000 and 2005, Bolivia granted 10 genetic resources access contracts, out of 60 requests filed. Several of them involved quinoa and other Andes highlands crops.

Two of them were for commercial uses. But since new laws were passed in Bolivia in 2010, ecosystems and the processes that sustain them cannot be treated as commodities and cannot become private property. The legislation amounts to a curb on the country’s adherence to the protocol.

In Colombia there are permits to collect samples and to send material abroad. Since 2003, that South American country has granted 90 contracts, out of 199 requests, and has signed a contract for commercial research.

Although Costa Rica has not approved permits for access to traditional knowledge or genetic resources in indigenous territories, it has issued 301 permits for basic research and access to genetic resources and 49 for bioprospecting and access to genetic resources since 2004.

Bioprospecting involves the systematic search for, classification of, and research into new elements in genetic material with economic value. The role of the protocol is to ensure that this does not deprive the original guardians of their knowledge and eventual benefits.

Ecuador has received 19 requests since 2011 and in 2013 it negotiated a commercial contract.

For its part, Mexico has authorised 4,238 permits for scientific collection since 1996, and only a small percentage of requests have been denied.

Peru, meanwhile, requires a contract for every kind of access. Since 2009, it has authorised 10 contracts, out of more than 30 requests, and 180 permits for research into biological resources.

Ecuador is a good example in the region of the plunder of genetic material, as officials in that country complain.

The “First report on biopiracy in Ecuador”, released in June by the Secretariat of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation, stated that Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States have improperly exploited their biological wealth.

Of 128 identified patents, companies from the U.S. hold 35, from Germany 33, from the Netherlands 17, from Australia 15 and the rest are held by firms in a number of countries.

“It all depends on how the governments of each country protect indigenous people, in accordance with their own legal frameworks,” said Rodríguez.

“If the legislation says that they will only negotiate prior consent, including clauses on mutually agreed conditions – if they aren’t in a position to negotiate, it would be good if the government supported them so the negotiations would be more equitable and favourable for native peoples,” she argued.

Lemus is confident that the suspension in Guatemala will remain in place. “We are thinking of other actions to engage in. People must have mechanisms to protect themselves from intellectual property claims and genetic contamination,” he said.

Nepal’s Chitwan National Park has become one of Asia's success stories in wildlife conservation. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
CHITWAN, Nepal, Apr 11 2015 (IPS)

At dusk, when the early evening sun casts its rays over the lush landscape, the Chitwan National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site about 200 km south of Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, is a place of the utmost tranquility.

As a flock of the endangered lesser adjutant stork flies over the historic Narayani River, a left bank tributary of the Ganges in India, this correspondent’s 65-year-old forest guide Jiyana Mahato asks for complete silence: this is the time of day when wild animals gather near the water. Not far away, a swamp deer takes its bath at the river’s edge.

“A lot of our success was due to our close collaboration with local communities who depend on biodiversity conservation for their livelihoods.” -- Sher Singh Thagunna, development officer for the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation (DNPWC)
“The sight of humans drives them away,” explains Mahato, a member of the Tharu indigenous ethnic group who play a key role in supporting the government’s wildlife conservation efforts here.

“We need to return now,” he tells IPS. The evening is not a safe time for humans to be wandering around these parts, especially now that the country’s once-dwindling tiger and rhinoceros populations are on the rise.

Mahato is the ideal guide. He has been around to witness the progress that has been made since the national park was first established in 1963, providing safe haven to 56 species of mammals.

Today, Chitwan is at the forefront of Nepal’s efforts to conserve its unique biodiversity. Earlier this year, it became the first country in the world to implement a new conservation tool, created by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), known as the Conservation Assured | Tiger Standard (CA|TS).

Established to encourage effective management and monitoring of critically endangered species and their habitats, CA|TS has received endorsement from the likes of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Global Tiger Forum, who intend to deploy the tool worldwide as a means of achieving global conservation targets set out in the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

Experts say that the other 12 Tiger Range Countries (TRCs) should follow Nepal’s example. This South Asian nation of 27 million people had a declining tiger population – just 121 creatures – in 2009, but intense conservation efforts have yielded an increase to 198 wild tigers in 2013, according to the National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan 2014-2020.

Indeed, Nepal is leading the way on numerous conservation fronts, both in the region and worldwide. With 20 protected zones covering over 34,000 square km – or 23 percent of Nepal’s total landmass – it now ranks second in Asia for the percentage of protected surface area relative to land size. Globally it ranks among the world’s top 20 nations with the highest percentage of protected land.

In just eight years, between 2002 and 2010, Nepal added over 6,000 square km to its portfolio of protected territories, which include 10 national parks, three wildlife reserves, one hunting reserve, six conservation areas and over 5,600 hectares of ‘buffer zone’ areas that surround nine of its national parks.

These steps are crucial to maintaining Nepal’s 118 unique ecosystems, as well as endangered species like the one-horned rhinoceros whose numbers have risen from 354 in 2006 to 534 in 2011 according to the CBD.

Collaboration key to conservation

Sher Singh Thagunna, development officer for the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation (DNPWC), tells IPS, “A lot of our success was due to our close collaboration with local communities who depend on biodiversity conservation for their livelihoods.”

Nepal has classified over 34,000 square km – roughly 23 percent of its landmass – into a range of protected areas. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

Those like Mahato, for whom conservation is not an option but a way of life, have partnered with the government on a range of initiatives including efforts to prevent poaching. Some 3,500 youths from local communities have been enlisted in anti-poaching activities throughout the national parks, tasked with patrolling tens of thousands of square km.

Collaborative conservation has taken major strides in the last decade. In 2006, the government passed over management of the Kanchenjunga Conservation Area in eastern Nepal to a local management council, marking the first time a protected area has been placed in the hands of a local committee.

According to Nepal’s latest national biodiversity strategy, by 2012 all of the country’s declared buffer zones, which cover 27 districts and 83 village development committees (VDCs), were being collectively managed by about 700,000 local people organised into 143 ‘buffer zone user committees’ and 4,088 ‘buffer zone user groups’.

Other initiatives, like the implementation of community forestry programmes – which as of 2013 “involved 18,133 forest user groups representing 2.2 million households managing 1.7 million hectares of forestland”, according to the study – have helped turn the tide on deforestation and promote the sustainable use of forest resources by locals.

Since 2004 the department of forests has created 20 collaborative forests spread out over 56,000 hectares in 10 districts of the Terai, a rich belt of marshes and grasslands located on the outer foothills of the Himalayas.

In addition, a leasehold forestry programme rolled out in 39 districts has combined conservation with poverty alleviation, providing a livelihood to over 7,400 poor households by involving them in the sustainable management and harvesting of selected forest-related products, while simultaneously protecting over 42,000 hectares of forested land.

Forest loss and degradation is a major concern for the government, with a 2014 country report to the CBD noting that 55 species of mammals and 149 species of birds – as well as numerous plant varieties – are under threat.

Given that Nepal is home to 3.2 percent of the world’s flora, these trends are worrying, but if the government keeps up its track record of looping locals into conservation efforts, it will soon be able to reverse any negative trends.

Of course, none of these efforts on the ground would be possible without the right attitude at the “top”, experts say.

“There is a high [degree] of political commitment at the top government level,” Ghanashyam Gurung, senior conservation programme director for WWF-Nepal, tells IPS. This, in turn, has created a strong mechanism to curb the menace of poaching.

With security forces now actively involved in the fight against poaching, Nepal is bucking the global trend, defying a powerful, 213-billion-dollar annual industry by going two years without a single reported incident of poaching, DPNWC officials say.

Although other threats remain – including burning issues like an increasing population that suggests an urgent need for better urban planning, as well as the country’s vulnerability to natural disasters like glacial lake outburst floods and landslides that spell danger for its mountain ecosystems – Nepal is blazing a trail that other nations would do well to follow.

“Conservation is a long process and Nepal’s efforts have shown that good planning works […],” Janita Gurung, biodiversity conservation and management specialist for the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) tells IPS.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Tribal women handle flowers from the Mahua tree, indigenous to central India. India was one of the first countries to ratify the Nagoya Protocol. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
PYEONGCHANG, Republic of Korea, Oct 22 2014 (IPS)

For over 20 years, Mote Bahadur Pun of Nepal’s western Myagdi district has been growing ‘Paris polyphylla’ – a Himalayan herb used to cure pain, burns and fevers.

Once every six months, a group of traders from China arrive at Pun’s house and buys several kilos of the herb. In return, Pun gets “a lump sum of 5,000 to 6,000 Nepalese rupees [about 50 dollars],” he tells IPS.

But ask Pun who these traders are and what they plan to do with bulk quantities of Paris polyphylla, listed as a vulnerable species by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and he stares blankly.

“This is a medicinal herb, so I assume they use it to make medicines,” is his only explanation.

“The Nagoya Protocol is a huge opportunity that can help [states] bring down the cost of biological conservation." -- CBD Executive Secretary Braulio Ferreira de Souza
In fact, trade in Paris polyphylla has been banned since it falls under the Annapurna Conservation Area, the largest protected area in Nepal covering over 7,600 square kilometres in the Annapurna range of the Himalayas.

From ancient times local communities have utilised the herb to cure a range of ills, but traders like those who come knocking at Pun’s door are either unaware or unconcerned that Paris polyphylla represents centuries of indigenous knowledge, and is thus protected under a little-known international treaty called the Nagoya Protocol.

Adopted in 2010 at the 10^th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 10) in Japan, the agreement “provides a transparent legal framework for […] the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources.”

Designed to prevent exploitation of people like Pun by traders who buy traditional medicinal resources for a paltry sum before turning huge profits from the sale of cosmetics or medicines derived from these species, the treaty covers all genetic resources including plants, herbs, animals and microorganisms.

Impressive in its scope, the protocol has hitherto largely been confined to paper. This year, however, at the recently concluded COP 12, which ran from Oct. 6-17 in Pyeongchang, South Korea, scores of experts agreed to put the provisions of the treaty front and center in efforts to preserve biological diversity worldwide.

With support from 54 countries – four more than the mandatory 50 ratifications required to bring the treaty into effect – the Nagoya Protocol will now form a crucial component of the post-2015 development agenda, as the world charts a more sustainable path forward for humanity and the planet.

‘Biopiracy’

According to environmentalists and scientists, the Nagoya Protocol could help curb ‘biopiracy’, broadly defined as the misappropriation of traditional or indigenous knowledge through the system of international patents that primarily benefit large multinationals in developed countries.

For instance, a pharmaceutical company that develops and sells herbal-based medicines will now – under the terms of the protocol – be required to share a portion of its profits with the country from which the resources, or the traditional knowledge governing the resources, originate.

In turn, these earnings are expected to help low-income countries finance conservation efforts.

A clause on access also provides mechanisms for local communities or countries to limit or restrict the use or extraction of a particular resource.

These clauses guard against biopiracy of the kind that was witnessed in the 1870s when the British explorer Henry Wickham smuggled 70,000 rubber tree seeds from Brazil, which were subsequently dispatched as seedlings to plantations across South and Southeast Asia, thus breaking the Brazilian monopoly over the rubber trade.

Nearly a century later, in the 1970s, Brazil again fell victim to biopiracy when the U.S.-based pharmaceutical giant Squibb used venom from the fangs of the jararaca, a pit viper endemic to Brazil, in the creation of captopril, a medication used to treat hypertension.

The New York Times reported that the drug earned the company revenues of 1.6 billion dollars in 1991, but Brazil itself did not see a cent of these profits.

The potential success of the treaty hangs on the support it receives in the international arena. So far, two-thirds of the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) have failed to ratify the protocol, representing what some have referred to as a “missed opportunity”.

“The Nagoya Protocol is a huge opportunity that can help the parties bring down the cost of biological conservation,” CBD Executive Secretary Braulio Ferreira de Souza told IPS, adding, however, that nothing will be possible until nations make the agreement legally binding.

Brazil, home to the world’s largest rainforest that is considered a mine of genetic resources, is yet to throw its weight behind the Nagoya agreement, a move experts say would benefit over three million indigenous people living in the Brazilian Amazon.

Roberto Cavalcanti, secretary for biodiversity in the Brazilian environment ministry, informed IPS that President Dilma Rousseff has submitted the legislation under an urgency provision, so it’s now in the top three pieces of legislation pending approval by Congress.

“We anticipate that with the approval of Brazil’s new domestic Access and Benefits Sharing (ABS) legislation, there will be a good environment for the ratification of the Protocol,” he added.

The government has already begun the task of informing local communities about the merits of the Nagoya Protocol and its economic benefits for generations to come.

The work is being done in collaboration with the environmental conservation organisation Grupo de Trabalho Amazonico, which is helping to educate communities around the country.

Since January this year, the organisation has helped over 10,000 locals put together a set of rules called Protocolo Communitaro (Community Protocols), which promotes preservation and sustainable use of forests and water sources, including medicinal plants and fish.

Missing skills

Unlike Brazil, several other countries are struggling to pave the way for ratification of the Protocol, largely due to a lack of technical and economic capacity.

This past June, the CBD organised a workshop in Uganda where several African states could learn more about the treaty and its ABS mechanism.

Countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), home to a huge reserve of genetic resources and biological diversity including the world’s second largest rainforest, attended the workshop and admitted to being constrained by financial and technical limitations in implementing international agreements.

Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) Nayoko Ishii told IPS her office stands ready to increase financial support to developing countries that lack capacity.

The GEF’s 15-million-dollar Nagoya Protocol Implementation Fund (NPIF) has already begun to support global initiatives, including a 4.4-million-dollar project to help Panama operationalise the ABS mechanism.

However, Ishii added, demand for the support has to come from within.

“Every country has a different degree of capacity. People come to us with a plan to build a particular skill in a particular area and there are of course specific programs for that.

“But I would encourage them to look at the entire strategy as one big capacity building investment [and] use that money wisely, to better manage their protected area systems [and] their administrative structures,” she concluded. 

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

The bamboo plant has a very important role to play in environment protection and climate change mitigation. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
PYEONGCHANG, Republic of Korea, Oct 16 2014 (IPS)

Bamboo Avenue is a two-and-a-half mile stretch of road in Jamaica’s St. Elizabeth parish. It is lined with giant bamboo plants which tower above the road and cross in the middle to form a shady tunnel. The avenue was established in the 17th century by the owners of the Holland Estate to provide shade for travelers and to protect the road from erosion.

Bamboo has been part of Jamaica’s culture for thousands of years, but it has never really taken off as a tool or an option to resolve some of the challenges the country faces."The evidence shows that [bamboo] is being seriously undervalued as a possibility for countries to engage in biodiversity protection and protection of the natural environment." -- Dr. Hans Friederich

That’s until recently.

Last month, the Bureau of Standards Jamaica (BSJ) announced the country would embark on the large-scale production of bamboo for the construction of low-cost houses and value-added products such as furniture and charcoal for the export market.

It is still in the early stages, but Jamaica is being hailed for the project which the director of the International Network for Bamboo and Rattan (INBAR), Dr. Hans Friederich, said has enormous potential for protecting the natural environment and biodiversity and mitigating against climate change.

“The plant bamboo, and there are about 1,250 different species, has a very important role to play in environmental protection and climate change mitigation. Bamboos have very strong and very extensive root systems and are therefore amazing tools to combat soil erosion and to help with land degradation restoration,” Friederich told IPS.

“More bamboo will absorb more CO2 and therefore help you with your REDD+ targets, but once you cut that bamboo and you use it, you lock the carbon up, and bamboo as a grass grows so fast you can actually cut it after about four or five years, unlike trees that you have to leave for a long time.

“So by cutting bamboo you have a much faster return on investment, you avoid cutting trees and you provide the raw material for a whole range of uses,” he explained.

Director of the International Network for Bamboo and Rattan (INBAR), Dr. Hans Friederich. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

The BSJ is conducting training until the end of November for people to be employed in the industry and is setting up three bamboo factories across the island.

The agency is also ensuring that local people can grow, preserve and harvest the bamboo for its various uses.

“It can be planted just like planting cane for sugar. The potential for export is great, and you can get jobs created, and be assured of the creation of industries,” said the special projects director at the BSJ, Gladstone Rose.

On the sidelines of the 12th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 12) in Pyeongchang, South Korea, Friederich told IPS bamboos can contribute directly to Aichi Biodiversity Targets 14 and 15.

Target 14 speaks to the restoration, by 2020, of ecosystems that provide essential services, including services related to water, and contribute to health, livelihoods and well-being, taking into account the needs of women, indigenous and local communities, and the poor and vulnerable.

Target 15 speaks to ecosystem resilience and the contribution of biodiversity to carbon stocks being enhanced, through conservation and restoration, including restoration of at least 15 percent of degraded ecosystems, thereby contributing to climate change mitigation and adaptation and to combating desertification.

“We are here to encourage the parties to the convention who are bamboo growers to consider bamboo as one of the tools in achieving some of the Aichi targets and incorporate bamboo in their national biodiversity strategy where appropriate,” Friederich said.

President of the Jamaica Agricultural Society (JAS) Senator Norman Grant said bamboo “is an industry whose time has come,” while Acting Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries Derrick Kellier has admonished islanders to desist from cutting down bamboo to be used as yam sticks.

“We are collaborating to spread the word: stop destroying the existing bamboo reserves, so that we will have them for use,” he said.

Kellier said bamboo offers enormous potential for farmers and others.

“It is a very fast-growing plant, and as soon as the industry gets going, when persons see the economic value, they will start putting in their own acreages. It grows on marginal lands as we have seen across the country, so we are well poised to take full advantage of the industry,” Kellier said.

On the issue of conservation of biodiversity, Deputy Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Ibrahim Thiaw said there is a lack of understanding among developing countries that biodiversity is the foundation for the development.

As a result, he said, they are not investing enough in biodiversity from their domestic resources, because it is considered a luxury.

“If the Caribbean countries are to continue to benefit from tourism as an activity they will have to invest in protecting biodiversity because tourists are not coming just to see the nice people of the Caribbean, they are coming to see nature,” Thiaw told IPS.

“It is important that developing countries invest their own resources first and foremost to conserve biodiversity. They have the resources. It’s just a matter of priority. If you understand that biodiversity is the foundation for your development, you invest in your capital, you keep your capital. Countries in the Caribbean have a lot of resources that are critical for their economy.”

Jamaica’s Bureau of Standards said it is aiming to tap into the lucrative global market for bamboo products, which is estimated at 10 billion dollars, with the potential to reach 20 billion by next year.

Friederich said while some countries have not yet realised the potential for bamboo, others have taken it forward.

“I was in Vietnam just last week and found that there is a prime ministerial decree to promote the use of bamboo. In Rwanda, there is a law that actually recommends using bamboo on the slopes of rivers and on the banks of lakes for protection against erosion; in the Philippines there is a presidential decree that 25 percent of all school furniture should be made from bamboo,” he explained.

“So there are real policy instruments already in place to promote bamboos, what we are trying to do is to encourage other countries to follow suit and to look at the various options that are available.

“Bamboo has enormous potential for protecting the natural environment and biodiversity. The evidence shows that this is being seriously undervalued as a possibility for countries to engage in biodiversity protection and protection of the natural environment,” he added.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at destinydlb@gmail.com

Over the past two decades, 99 percent of India’s vultures have disappeared. Credit: gkrishna63/CC-BY-ND-2.0

By Stella Paul
PYEONGCHANG, Republic of Korea, Oct 16 2014 (IPS)

The Mountain Chicken isn’t a fowl, as its name suggests, but a frog. Kimisha Thomas, hailing from the Caribbean island nation of Dominica, remembers a time when she could find these amphibians or ‘crapaud’ as locals call them “just in the backyard”.

Known also as the Giant Ditch Frog, these creatures form a crucial part of Dominica’s national identity, with locals consuming them on special occasions like Independence Day. Today, hunting mountain chicken is banned, as the frogs are fighting for their survival. In fact, scientists estimate that their numbers have dwindled down to just 8,000 individuals.

Locals first started noticing that the frogs were behaving abnormally about a decade ago, showing signs of lethargy as well as abrasions on their skin. “Then they began to die,” explained Thomas, an officer with Dominica’s environment ministry.

“People also started to get scared, fearing that eating crapauds would make them ill,” she adds. In fact, this fear was not far from the truth; preliminary research has found that Chytridiomycosis, an infectious disease that affects amphibians, was the culprit for the wave of deaths.

Some 2,599 of 71,576 species recently studied are thought to be endangered -- International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)
Besides the mountain chicken, there has been a sharp decline in the population of the sisserou parrot, which is found only in Dominica, primarily in the country’s mountainous rainforests. Thomas says large-scale destruction of the bird’s habitat is responsible for its gradual disappearance from the island.

Dominica is not alone in grappling with such a rapid loss of species. According to the Red List of Threatened Species, one of the most comprehensive inventories on the conservation status of various creatures, some 2,599 of 71,576 species recently studied are thought to be endangered.

Compiled by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Red List aims to increase the number of species assessed to 160,000 by 2020. But even with only half the world’s biological species included in the index, the forecast is bleak.

While the extinction or threat of extinction of thousands of species poses huge challenges across the board, tribal and indigenous communities are generally first to feel the impacts, and will likely bear the economic and cultural brunt of such losses.

As Thomas points out, “The crapaud was our national dish. The sisserou parrot [also known as the Imperial Amazon] sits right in the middle of our national flag. Their loss means the loss of our very cultural identity.”

A similar refrain can be heard among the Parsi community of India, whose culture dictates that the dead be placed in high structures, called ‘towers of silence’, that they may be consumed by birds of prey: kites, vultures and crows. The unique funeral rites are an integral part of the Zoroastrian faith, which stipulates that bodies be returned to nature.

But over the past two decades, 99 percent of India’s vultures have disappeared, making it impossibly difficult for the Parsi community to keep up with a centuries-old tradition.

Rising economic burden

Besides severely affecting ancient cultural and spiritual practices, the disappearance of various species is also taking an economic toll on indigenous communities according to 65-year-old Anil Kumar Singh, who was born and raised in the village of Chirakuti in India’s northeastern hill districts.

Singh says that as a child, he never saw a doctor for minor ailments like the common cold or an upset stomach.

“We used Vishalyakarni [a herb] for pains and cuts. We drank the juice of basak leaves (adhatoda vasica) for a cough and used the extract from lotus flowers for dysentery,” he tells IPS.

“But today, these plants don’t grow here anymore. Even when we try, they die out soon and we don’t know the reason. We now have to buy medicines from a chemist’s shop for everything,” he asserts.

Sometimes, the cost is much higher. Northern Indian states like Haryana and Uttar Pradesh have experienced an explosion in the population of stray dogs, giving rise to health risks among locals.

By way of explanation, Neha Sinha, advocacy and policy officer of the Bombay Natural History Society in India (BNHS), a Mumbai-based conservation charity, tells IPS that the phenomenon of increasingly feral dogs can be traced to Indian farmers’ practice of leaving dead cattle out in the open to be consumed by birds of prey.

With no vultures to pick the beasts clean, dogs are now getting to the carcasses, growing more and more vicious and resorting to attacks on humans. BNHS is currently breeding vultures in captivity in order to prevent their complete extinction, but it is unlikely the birds will regain their numbers from 20 years ago.

Meanwhile, according to a study by Birdlife International, the population of feral dogs in India has grown by 5.5 million due to the disappearance of vultures.

The report says there have been “roughly 38.5 million additional dog bites and more than 47,300 extra deaths from rabies, [which] may have cost the Indian economy an additional 34 billion dollars.”

Legal and knowledge gaps

The near extinction of vultures in India is attributed to diclofenac, a painkiller that is often given to cows and buffalos to which vultures are allergic. Intense campaigning against use of the drug led to a government ban in 2004, but implementation of the law has been poor, and diclofenac is still widely used, according to Singh of BNHS.

“The farmers know [the drug] is banned but they continue to use it because the law is not being enforced,” she said.

In several other cases, communities are left confused as to the reasons behind species loss, making it increasingly hard to settle on a solution. For instance, even after a decade of seeing their unique creatures vanish, Dominica still does not know what brought the Chytridiomycosis fungus to their soil, or how to deal with it.

This knowledge gap is a double whammy for indigenous communities, whose lives and livelihoods depend heavily on the species they have lived side by side with for millennia.

Lucy Mulenekei, executive director of the Indigenous Information Network (IIN), tells IPS on the sidelines of the 12^th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 12), currently underway in Pyeongchang, South Korea, that the decline in the livestock population in Kenya has affected the Maasai people, a pastoral tribe that has always relied on their herds for sustenance.

Now forced to live off the land, the tribe is faltering.

“The Maasai people don’t know what kind of farming tools they need, or how to use them. They don’t know what seeds to use and how to access them. There is a huge gap in knowledge and technology,” explains Mulenekei, who is Maasai herself.

In response to the growing crisis, governments and U.N. agencies are pushing out initiatives to tackle the problem at its root.

Carlos Potiara Castro, a technical advisor with the Brazilian environment ministry, is leading one such project in the Bailique Archipelago, 160 km from the Macapa municipality in northern Brazil, where local fisher communities are taught to conserve biodiversity. Already, community members have learned the properties of 154 medicinal plants.

The annual cost of the project is about 50,000 dollars, but Potiara says a lot more funding will be needed in order to scale up the work and replicate such efforts around the country.

This might soon be possible under a new initiative launched by the government of Germany together with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), which offers 12.3 million euros over a period of five years to indigenous communities in over 130 countries to help them conserve protected areas.

Yoko Watanabe, a senior biodiversity specialist at the natural resources team of the GEF Secretariat, tells IPS the grants will also cover the cost of trainings, to pass on necessary skills to indigenous communities who are recognised as “indispensable to biodiversity conservation.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Coral reefs are the rainforests of the seas, providing food, resources and coastal protection to millions of people around the world. Yet they are on the frontline of destruction. At this Bonaire reef, the olive-green coral is alive, but the mottled-gray coral is dead. Credit: Living Oceans Foundation/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 15 2014 (IPS)

When political leaders from climate-threatened Small Island Developing States (SIDS) addressed the U.N. General Assembly last month, there was one recurring theme: the urgent need to protect the high seas and preserve the world’s marine biodiversity.

“I have come to the United Nations compelled by the dictates of my conscience,” pleaded President Emanuel Mori of the Federated States of Micronesia."In the long-term, there are no winners on this planet if we lose the fight against climate change and biodiversity loss." -- Nathalie Rey of Greenpeace International

“We are all stewards of God’s creation here on earth. The bounties of Mother Nature are priceless. We all bear the obligation to sustainably manage them.”

An equally poignant appeal came from President Christopher Loeak of the Marshall Islands: “The Pacific Ocean and its rich resources are our lifeline. We are the custodians of our own vast resources on behalf of future generations.”

“Our suffering could have been prevented by the United Nations – if only you had listened,” he told delegates, pointing an accusing finger at the world body for dereliction of duty.

A two-week long Conference of the State Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 12), currently underway in South Korea and continuing through Oct. 17, will finalise a road map to protect and preserve biodiversity, including oceans, forests, genetic resources, wildlife, agricultural land and ecosystems.

A report titled ‘Global Biodiversity Outlook 4‘ (GBO-4) released last week provides an assessment of the progress made towards achieving biodiversity targets set at a meeting in Nagoya, in Japan’s Aichi Prefecture, back in October 2010.

Nathalie Rey, deputy political director of Greenpeace International, told IPS the U.N. report monitoring “the miserable progress to date of implementation of the world’s government’s 10-year plan to save life on Earth shows that sustainable development is still a distant dream.”

Whilst small steps have been made, she said, it is going to require a giant leap forward to get the world on track to slow down and curb biodiversity loss altogether.

Rey pointed out that healthy and productive oceans are the backbone of the planet, and essential in the fight against poverty and ensuring food security. Coral reefs are the rainforests of the seas, providing food, resources and coastal protection to millions of people around the world. Yet the report highlights that they are on the frontline of destruction, she added.

“We continue to plunder them of fish, choke them with pollution and alter them forever with the impacts of human-induced climate change,” she said.

The acidification of oceans from the increased absorption of carbon dioxide in particular is having widespread effects on these coral ecosystems.

Reflecting another perspective, Alice Martin-Prevel, policy analyst at the Oakland Institute, a progressive think tank based in San Francisco, told IPS biodiversity preservation targets will never be achieved without secured access to land for farmers and safeguarding small holders’ ability to invest sustainably in their production activity.

She said the World Bank continues to produce business indicators, such as ‘Doing Business’ and the new ‘Benchmarking the Business Agriculture Project’, to encourage governments to create private land markets and open up to imported hybrid seeds and chemical fertilisers.

“This is why we launched the ‘Our Land Our Business’ campaign to protest the Bank’s business-friendly agenda and selling of countries’ ecosystems and land to foreign investors,” Martin-Prevel said.

She added that this jeopardises equal and environmentally-sustainable development.

Chee Yoke Ling, director of programmes at the Malaysia-based Third World Network, told IPS resource mobilisation remains elusive.

She said the second report of the High Level Panel presented to the ongoing COP12 reiterates that estimates at global, regional and national levels all point to a substantial gap between the investments needed to deliver biodiversity targets and the resources currently allocated.

This is true for all of the 2010 Aichi Targets, she added.

The report referred to a 2012 review that estimated current levels of global funding for biodiversity at between 51 and 53 billion dollars annually, compared to estimated needs of 300 to 400 billion dollars annually.

“Although the developed country parties have legally committed to provide new and additional financial resources to meet the full incremental cost of implementing the CBD, this commitment, as with other environmental treaties, has not been honoured,” Ling said.

She said a regular excuse used now is about the current economic condition of developed countries which has restrained development funding.

Rey of Greenpeace International told IPS that without concerted efforts to keep climate change under control, “we will see irreversible damage to coral reefs and other vulnerable habitats, with devastating consequences for marine life and those people that directly depend on them for work and protein.”

Building resilience through the establishment of an extensive network of marine reserves – ocean sanctuaries free of industrial activities – will be an essential tool to help the marine world adapt to climate change and protect against other stressors such as overfishing and destructive fishing practices.

This is a target that governments are still lagging way behind on, she said.

In 2012, world governments committed to double funding towards addressing biodiversity loss. Still, shrinking state budgets are negatively affecting funding for environmental conservation. This points to a continued lack of understanding of the huge economic returns from investing in biodiversity protection, said Rey.

Furthermore, the cost of not acting now far outweighs the costs of acting in the future. There are sufficient sources of money, but it is often a case of redirecting these sources towards sustainable activities, she noted.

Rey also said a clear starting point identified by the Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD) will be to reallocate harmful subsidies to conservation.

It has been estimated, said Rey, that a staggering one trillion dollars or more of public money is spent by governments every year on subsidies harmful to the environment, including the agriculture, forestry and fishing sectors.

Yet whilst the report notes there is an increasing recognition of harmful subsidies, very little action has been taken.

The current U.N. report hopefully acts as a half-time reality check that forces a major game change in the second half of this decade. Green groups say governments and companies should stop defending destructive activities, like oil drilling in the Arctic, ancient deforestation and agricultural activities that promote industrial, chemical- dependent monocultures.

“Because in the long-term there are no winners on this planet if we lose the fight against climate change and biodiversity loss,” Rey declared.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

The loss of mangroves affects the poorest among India’s coastal population. These traditional fishermen steer their boat and belongings to safer areas after the 2013 Cyclone Phailin brought heavy floods in it wake. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
ATHENS, Oct 15 2014 (IPS)

As the cyclonic storm Hudhud ripped through India’s eastern state of Andhra Pradesh, home to two million people, at a land speed of over 190 kilometres per hour on Sunday, it destroyed electricity and telephone infrastructure, damaged the airport, and laid waste to thousands of thatched houses, as well as rice fields, banana plantations and sugarcane crops throughout the state.

It is typhoon season here in Asia.

In Japan, still reeling from the impact of Typhoon Phanfone, Typhoon Vongfong brought another round of torrential rainfall and vicious winds this past weekend, continuing into Monday, and adding to the long list of damages that countries in this part of the world are now calculating.

In India alone, the government has pledged 163 million dollars in disaster relief, but officials say even this tidy sum may not be sufficient to get the state back on its feet. And for the families of the 24 deceased in Andhra Pradesh and and the eastern state of Odissa, no amount of money can compensate for their loss.

"If all the carbon stock held by mangroves were to be released into the atmosphere as CO2, the resulting emissions would be the equivalent of travelling 26 million km by car, 650 times around the world." -- United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
The ongoing calamity stirs memories of the deadly Typhoon Haiyan that claimed 6,000 lives in the Philippines almost exactly a year ago.

While these tropical storms cannot be stopped in their tracks, there is a natural defense system against their more savage impacts: mangroves. And experts fear their tremendous value is being woefully under-appreciated, to tragic effect, all around the world.

For those currently gathered in Pyeongchang, South Korea, for the 12^th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 12), this very issue has been a topic of discussion, as delegates assess progress on the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020, and its 20 Aichi Targets, agreed upon at a meeting in Nagoya, Japan, three years ago.

One of the goals accepted by the international community was to improve and restore resilience of ecosystems important for adaptation to and mitigation of climate change. On this front, according to the recently released Global Biodiversity Outlook 4 (GBO-4), efforts have been lacking, with “trends […] moving in the wrong direction”, and the state of marine ecosystems falling “far short of their potential to provide for human needs through a wide variety of services including food provision, recreation, coastal protection and carbon storage.”

Nowhere is this more visible than in the preservation of mangrove forests, with a single hectare storing up to 1,000 tonnes of carbon on average, the highest per unit of area of any land or marine ecosystem, according to the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).

Their ability to store vast stocks of CO₂ makes mangroves a crucial component of national and global efforts to combat climate change and protect against climate-induced disasters. Yet, experts say, they are not getting the attention and care they deserve.

A complex ecosystem

Mangroves, a generic term for trees and shrubs of varying heights that thrive in saline coastal sediment habitats, are found in 123 countries and cover 152,000 square kilometers the world over.

Over 100 million people live within 10 km of large mangrove forests, benefiting from a variety of goods and services such as fisheries and forest products, clean water and protection against erosion and extreme weather events.

Mangroves provide ecosystem services worth 33,000 to 57,000 dollars per hectare per year, says a UNEP study entitled ‘The Importance of Mangroves: A Call to Action’ launched recently at the 16^th Global Meeting of the Regional Seas Conventions and Actions Plans (RSCAP) held in Athens from Sep. 29-Oct. 1.

The report found that mangroves “are being destroyed at a rate three to five times greater than the average rates of forest loss”. Emissions resulting from such losses make up approximately a fifth of deforestation-related global carbon emissions, the report added, causing economic losses of between six and 42 billion dollars per year.

Besides human activity, climate change poses a serious threat to these complex ecosystems, with predicted losses of mangrove forests of between 10 and 20 percent by 2100, according to the UNEP.

The situation is particularly grave in South Asia, which by 2050 could lose 35 percent of the mangroves that existed in 2000. In the period running from 2000-2050, ecosystem service losses from the destruction of mangroves will average two billion dollars a year.

With their complex root system acting as a kind of natural wall against storm surges, seawater intrusion, floods and typhoons, mangroves act as a buffer for vulnerable communities, and also guard against excessive damage caused by natural disasters.

This time last year, for instance, Cyclone Phailin – one of the strongest tropical storms ever to make landfall in India – damaged 364,000 houses, affected eight million people and killed 53.

In October 1999, the devastating Odisha Cyclone touched landfall wind speeds of 260 kilometer per hour, and took the lives of no fewer than 8,500 people, while wrecking two million homes and leaving behind damages to the tune of two billion dollars according to official figures.

A mangrove impact study conducted in the aftermath of this storm, the strongest ever recorded in the Indian Ocean, found that the village to incur the lowest loss per household was protected by mangroves.

Scientists have found that mangroves can reduce wave height and energy by 13 to 66 percent, and surges by 50 cm for every kilometre, as they pass through the trees and exposed roots.

Mangroves crucial to regulating global warming

Speaking to IPS on the sidelines of the recently concluded RSCAP meeting, Jacqueline Alder, head of the freshwater and marine ecosystems branch at the UNEP’s Division of Environmental Policy Implementation, explained that a recent cost-benefit analysis in the South Pacific Island state of Fiji found a much higher financial success rate for planting mangroves than building a six-foot-high seawall.

Having worked in countries with high mangrove cover – from India and the Philippines, to Indonesia and Papua New Guinea – Alder believes that “many policy makers are not aware of mangroves’ multiple benefits. They better understand the commercial value of timber from traditional forests, and hence accord it more importance.”

With high costs and low success rates associated with regeneration, mangrove protection is falling short of the Aichi Targets, experts say.

“Regenerating a hectare of mangroves costs a high 7,500 dollars and is a dicey undertaking,” Jagannath Chatterjee of the Regional Centre for Development Cooperation (RCDC), currently working closely with coastal communities to regenerate mangroves in Odisha, one of India’s most cyclone-prone states, told IPS.

He blamed the destruction of the remaining mangrove forests on the “timber mafia”, alleging that cash crops are being planted in mangrove land.

With global warming rising at an alarming rate, the importance of mangroves in climate regulation cannot be ignored much longer.

If all the carbon stock held by mangroves were to be released into the atmosphere as CO₂, the resulting emissions would be the equivalent of travelling 26 million km by car, 650 times around the world, according to calculations by the UNEP.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Saint Lucia’s best known species is the gorgeous but endangered Amazon parrot. Credit: Steve Wilson/cc by 2.0

By Desmond Brown
PYEONGCHANG, Republic of Korea, Oct 14 2014 (IPS)

The remarkable biodiversity of the countries of the Caribbean, already under stress from human impacts like land use, pollution, invasive species, and over-harvesting of commercially valuable species, now faces an additional threat from climate change.

On the sidelines of the 12th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 12) being held here from Oct. 6-17, Saint Lucia’s Biodiversity Coordinator Terrence Gilliard told IPS that his government understands that biodiversity and ecosystem services underpin sustainable development."Our biodiversity is important for our health, our status, our attractiveness as a country and it is important that we conserve it and use it in a sustainable manner that it is there for generations to come." -- Helena Brown

But he said climate change is having an impact on biodiversity of the island nation.

“There have been reports of coral bleaching occasioned by higher sea temperatures and there has been a lengthening in the productive season of some agricultural crops,” said Gilliard, who also serves as sustainable development and environment officer.

“The extreme weather events such as Hurricane Tomas [in 2010] and the [2013] Christmas Eve trough resulted in major landslides within forested areas and there is…loss of animal life during these events. Long periods of droughts limit water availability and affect agricultural production.”

Though less than 616 square kms in area, Saint Lucia is exceptionally rich in animals and plants. More than 200 species occur nowhere else, including seven percent of the resident birds and an incredible 53 percent of the reptiles.

The nation’s best known species is the gorgeous but endangered Saint Lucia amazon parrot. Other species of conservation concern include the pencil cedar, staghorn coral and Saint Lucia racer. The racer, confined to the 12-hectare Maria Major Island, is arguably the world’s most threatened snake following recent increases in numbers of its distant relative in Antigua and Barbuda.

The Antiguan racer, a small, harmless, lizard-eating snake, was once widespread throughout Antigua, but became almost extinct early this century, hunted relentlessly by predators such as mongooses and rats. As of 2013, the population size was 1,020.

Helena Brown, technical coordinator in the Environment Division of the Ministry of Health and the Environment, said there are at least two conservation programmes in Antigua where the racer and another critically endangered species, the hawksbill turtle, are being conserved.

“There is a lot of work being done there but that’s just two species out of many. Our biodiversity is important for our health, our status, our attractiveness as a country and it is important that we conserve it and use it in a sustainable manner that it is there for generations to come,” Brown told IPS.

According to Jamaica’s National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA), ecosystems on that island most vulnerable to climate change impacts include coral reefs, highland forests, and coastal wetlands (mangroves).

With more than 8,000 species recorded, Jamaica is ranked fifth globally for endemic species. The Caribbean island has 98.2 percent of the 514 indigenous species of land snails and 100 percent of the 22 indigenous species of amphibians.

Jamaica’s rich marine species diversity include species of fish, sea anemones, black and stony corals, mollusks, turtles, whales, dolphin, and manatee. In addition, nearly 30.1 percent of the country is covered with forests and there are 10 hydrological basins containing over 100 streams and rivers, in addition to several subterranean waterways, ponds, springs, and blue holes.

For Saint Kitts and Nevis, where biodiversity is described as “very important to sustainable development,” the effects of climate change are not highly visible at this point.

“More time will be needed to observe some of the subtle changes that are observed. For instance, in some cases there seems to be longer periods of drought which are impacting on the natural cycles of some plants and also on agricultural crops,” the director of Physical Planning and Environment in the Ministry of Sustainable Development, Randolph Edmead, told IPS.

“The rainy season appears to be getting shorter and when there is rain the episodes are more intense thus leading to flash floods.”

Saint Kitts and Nevis is pursuing tourism development as its main economic activity, and many of the country’s tourism-related activities and attractions are based on biodiversity. These include marine biodiversity where coral reefs represent an important component.

Edmead said coral reefs also support fisheries which is an important source of food.

“The income generated from these activities not only supports development but also is important for sustaining livelihoods,” he explained.

Forest biodiversity also forms an important part of the tourism product of Saint Kitts and Nevis. Ecotourism activities which are based on organised hikes along established trails are engaged in regularly by tourists.

“Biodiversity also helps to protect soils from erosion which is not only important for agriculture but also in the protection of vital infrastructure,” he added.

Executive Director of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias told IPS climate change is a main threat to biodiversity and he urged progress at the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) COP scheduled for Dec. 1-12 in Peru.

Executive Director of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

“The threats to biodiversity continue. But where do these threats come from? They come from public policies, corporate policies and other factors that come from the socio-economic sector. These are population increase, consumption increase, more pollution, climate change. These are some of the big drivers of loss of biodiversity,” said de Souza Dias.

“So unless we see progress in the negotiations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, then the loss of biodiversity will probably continue.”

But de Souza Dias is also putting forward biodiversity as part of the solution to the climate change problem. He suggested that better management of forests, wetlands, mangroves and other systems can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“We can also enhance adaptation because adaptation is not just about building walls to avoid the sea level rise impacting coastal zones. It is about having more resilient ecosystems that can resist more the different scenarios of climate change,” he told IPS.

“We need to conserve better the ecosystems in our landscape…having more diverse landscape with some forest, some wetlands, some protected catchment areas. Currently we are moving to more simplified landscapes, just big monocultures of crops, large cities, so we are going in the wrong direction.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at destinydlb@gmail.com

South Africa’s white rhinoceros recovered from near-extinction thanks to intense conservation efforts. Credit: Kanya D’Almeida/IPS

By Stella Paul
PYEONGCHANG, Republic of Korea, Oct 13 2014 (IPS)

For over five years, 33-year-old Maheshwar Basumatary, a member of the indigenous Bodo community, made a living by killing wild animals in the protected forests of the Manas National Park, a tiger reserve, elephant sanctuary and UNESCO World Heritage Site that lies on the India-Bhutan border.

Then one morning in 2005, Basumatary walked into a police check-post and surrendered his gun. Since then, the young man has been spending his time taking care of abandoned and orphaned rhino and leopard cubs.

Employed by a local conservation organisation called the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), part of the Wildlife Trust of India, Basumatary is today a symbol of wildlife conservation.

Engaging locals like Basumatary into wildlife protection and conservation is an effective way to curb wildlife crimes such as poaching, smuggling and the illegal sale of animal parts, according to Maheshwar Dhakal, an ecologist with Nepal’s ministry of environment and soil conservation.

“[Law enforcement personnel] must have proper arms. They must also have tools to collect evidence, and records. They need transportation and mobile communication to act quickly and aptly. Without this, despite arrests, there will be no convictions because of a lack of evidence." -- Maheshwar Dhakal, an ecologist with Nepal’s ministry of environment and soil conservation
On the sidelines of the ongoing 12^th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 12) in Pyeongchang, South Korea, Dhakal told IPS that poverty and the prospect of higher earnings often drive locals to commit or abet wildlife crime.

Thus efforts should be made to combine conservation with income generation, so locals can be gainfully employed in efforts to protect and preserve biodiversity.

“Conservation efforts must also create livelihood opportunities within the local community,” he added.

“Everyone wants to earn more and live well. If you just tell people, ‘Go save the animals’, it’s not going to work. But if you find a way to incentivize protecting [of] wildlife, they will certainly join the force,” said Dhakal, adding that his own country is moving rapidly towards a ‘zero poaching’ status.

Poaching – a global problem

Poaching and the illegal wildlife trade are a universal menace that has been causing severe threats including possible extinction of species, economic losses, as well as loss of livelihood across the world.

According to the recently released Global Biodiversity Outlook 4 (GBO-4), the latest progress report of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the current annual illegal wildlife trade stands at some 200 billion dollars annually.

The illicit enterprise is also thriving in Asia, touching some 19 billion dollars per year according to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)’s Wildlife Enforcement Network.

Law enforcements agencies regularly confiscate smuggled products and consignments of skins and other body parts of animals including crocodiles, snakes, tigers, elephants and rhinos. The killing of tigers and rhinos is a specific concern in the region, with both creatures facing the impending risk of extinction.

One of the biggest killing fields for poachers is the Kaziranga National Park (KNP) in India’s northeastern Assam state, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and home to two-thirds of the world’s remaining Great One-horned Rhinoceroses. In addition, the park boasts the highest density of tigers globally, and was officially designated as a tiger reserve in 2006.

The 185-square-mile park had 2,553 rhinos in 2013. However, 126 rhinos have been killed here in the past 13 years, with 21 slaughtered in 2013 alone, according to the state’s Environment and Forest Minister Rakibul Hussain.

Illegal trade spawns conflict, disease

There is also a direct link between the illegal wildlife trade and political conflicts across the world, says a joint report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and INTERPOL, which puts the exact volume of the illegal trade at 213 billion dollars annually.

Much of this money “is helping finance criminal, militia and terrorist groups and threatening the security and sustainable development of many nations,” the report states.

According to the report, several militia groups in central and western Africa are involved in the illegal trade of animals and timber. These groups profit hugely from the trade, including through the sale of ivory, making between four and 12.2 million dollars each year.

Another report published this past February by Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs in UK, also pointed to the example of the extremist Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which has been reported to harvest tusks from elephants in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and barter with Sudanese soldiers or poachers for guns and ammunition.

But the trouble does not end there.

Maadjou Bah is part of a COP-12 delegation from the West African country of Guinea, where an Ebola outbreak in December 2013 has since spread to the neighbouring countries of Liberia and Sierra Leone, killing at least 4,300 people to date.

Bah told IPS that illegal hunting and trade in wildlife species increases the possibility of the Ebola virus spreading to other countries. Though the government of Guinea has designated 30 percent of its forests as ‘protected’, the borders are porous, with trafficking and trade posing a continuous threat.

Besides primates, fruit bats are known to be natural carriers of the Ebola virus, and since trade in bats forms part of the illegal global chain of wildlife trade, it is possible that Ebola could travel outside the borders where it is current wreaking havoc, according to Anne-Helene Prieur Richard, executive director of the Paris-based biodiversity research institute ‘Diversitas’.

“We don’t know this for sure since there is a knowledge gap. But certainly the risk is there,” she told IPS.

Using the law

Continued poaching is largely the result of slow law enforcement, according to Braullio Ferreira de Souza Dias, executive secretary of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity.

“Enforcement has to be a priority for government[s],” he told IPS.

This can be accomplished by, among other methods, providing law enforcement personnel with the skills and equipment they need to crack down on illegal activity. Forest guards, for instance, should be properly equipped – technically and financially – to prevent crime.”

“There is a need for capacity building in the law enforcement units,” Dhakal explained. “But that doesn’t just mean attending workshops and trainings. It means weapons, tools and technologies.

“They must have proper arms. They must also have tools to collect evidence, and records. They need transportation and mobile communication to act quickly and aptly. Without this, despite arrests, there will be no convictions because of a lack of evidence,” he said.

This is especially crucial in trans-boundary forests, where a lack of proper fencing allows poachers to move freely between countries.

Sometimes, the solutions are simpler.

“For example,” Dias stated, “Nepal has forged partnerships between the government and local communities. But what motivated the [people] to go out [of their way] to find time to prevent poaching? It’s that 50 percent of all earnings in Nepal’s national parks are directed towards local communities. [Officials] convinced them that if the poaching doesn’t stop then it would mean fewer visitors and lesser earnings,” he asserted.

A look at the country’s recent increase in the number of tigers and rhinos are proof of its successful conservation efforts: in the 1970s, Nepal had only a hundred tigers left in the wild. Today there are 200 and the country is aiming to double the number by 2020.

Similarly, the number of rhinos, which was a paltry 100 in the 1960s, is now 535. “We have recruited local youths as intelligence units who collect information on the movement of poachers. It works,” reveals Dhakal.

Experts say that ending demand globally is crucial to halting poaching and illegal trade. For this, collective action at the international level must be given top priority.

Dhakal, who is also the main spokesperson for the South Asian Wildlife Enforcement Network (SAWEN), told IPS that the network has roped in several governments in the region, along with organisations like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and INTERPOL.

Gaurav Gogoi, a member of the Indian parliament, says that governments can also cooperate at a bilateral level. “In the markets of Vietnam a single gram of rhino horn powder fetches up to [approximately 3,000 dollars],” he explained, adding that he is involved in lobbying events to push Vietnam to ban all products made of rhino horns in order to curb poaching elsewhere, including the Indian state of Assam.

“If you have poaching, it’s because there is someone out there who wants to buy those products. We have to address that,” Dias said.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

There are an estimated 13,000 pieces of plastic litter afloat every single square kilometer of ocean. Credit: Bo Eide Snemann/CC-BY-2.0

By Manipadma Jena
ATHENS, Oct 10 2014 (IPS)

Imagine a black-footed albatross feeding its chick plastic pellets, a baby seal in the North Pole helplessly struggling with an open-ended plastic bag wrapped tight around its neck, or a fishing vessel stranded mid-sea, a length of discarded nylon net entangled in its propeller. Multiply these scenarios a thousand-fold, and you get a glimpse of the state of the world’s oceans.

With an average of 13,000 pieces of plastic litter estimated to be afloat every single square kilometer of ocean globally, and 6.4 million tonnes of marine litter reaching the oceans every year according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), researchers and scientists predict a bleak future for the great bodies of water that are vital to our planet’s existence.

A conservative estimate of overall financial damage of plastic to marine ecosystems stands at 13 billion dollars each year, according to a press release from UNEP released on Oct. 1.

“To entirely rid the ocean of litter is an aspiration not expected to be achieved in a lifetime, even if we stop waste inputs into the sea, which we still have not. The cost is too much. Much of the waste has been broken down and is beyond our reach. To clean the sea surface of [floating] litter itself will take a long time." -- Vincent Sweeney, coordinator of the Global Programme of Action for the Protection of the Marine Environment from Land-based Activities (GPA).
With the 12^th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP12) currently underway in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the issue of marine health and ocean ecosystems is in the spotlight.

Of the 20 Aichi Bioiversity Targets agreed upon at a conference in Nagoya, Japan in 2010, the preservation of marine biodiversity emerged as a crucial goal, with Target 11 laying out the importance of designating ‘protected areas’ for the purpose of protecting marine ecosystems, particularly from the harmful effects of human activity.

Speaking to IPS on sidelines of the 16^th Global Meeting of the Regional Seas Conventions and Actions Plans (RSCAP) held in Athens from Sep. 29-Oct. 1, Tatjana Hema, programme officer of the marine pollution assessment and control component of the Mediterranean Action Plan, told IPS that marine debris results from humane behaviour, particularly land-based activities.

The meeting drew scientists and policymakers from around the globe to chart a new roadmap to stop the rapid degradation of the world’s seas and oceans and set policies for their sustainable use and integration into the post‐2015 development agenda.

There was a near unanimous consensus that marine littler posed a “tremendous challenge” to sustainable development in every region of the world.

The issue has been given top priority since the Rio+20 Earth Summit in Brazil in 2012, and Goal 14 of the 17 proposed Sustainable Development Goals – which will replace the MDGs as the U.N.’s main blueprint for action at the end of this year – set the target of significantly reducing marine pollution by 2025.

“We did not have any difficulty pushing for the explicit inclusion of this goal in the proposed SDGs,” Jacqueline Alder, head of the freshwater and marine ecosystems branch at the Division of Environmental Policy Implementation for the UNEP told IPS. “After all, oceans are everyone’s problem, and we all generate waste.”

Wastes released from dump-sites near the coast or river banks, the littering of beaches, tourism and recreational use of the coasts, fishing industry activities, ship-breaking yards, legal and illegal dumping, and floods that flush waste into the sea all pose major challenges, experts say.

Similarly, plastics, microplastics, metals, glass, concrete and other construction materials, paper and cardboard, polystyrene, rubber, rope, fishing nets, traps, textiles, timber and hazardous materials such as munitions, asbestos and medical waste, as well as oil spills and shipwrecks are all defined as marine debris.

“Organic waste is the main component of marine litter, amounting to 40-80 percent of municipal waste in developing countries compared to 20-25 percent in developed countries,” Hema said.

Microplastics, however, emerged as one of the most damaging pollutants currently choking the seas. This killer substance is formed when plastics fragment and disintegrate into particles with an upper size limit of five millimeters in diameter (the size range most readily ingested by ocean-dwelling organisms), down to particles that measure just one mm in diameter.

“Micro- and nano-plastics have been found [to have been] transferred to the micro-wall of algae. How this will affect the food chain of sea creatures and how human health is going to be affected by ingesting these through fish, we still do not know,” UNEP’s Vincent Sweeney, who coordinates the Global Programme of Action for the Protection of the Marine Environment from Land-based Activities (GPA), told IPS.

Fishermen haul in their catch on a beach in Sri Lanka’s eastern Trincomalee District. Experts say a large portion of marine litter is a by-product of the global fishing industry. Credit: Kanya D’Almeida/IPS

“The extent of the microplastic problem till now is somewhat speculative; we still do not have a sense of how much of the oceans are affected,” he added.

Ocean SDG targets have to stand up to four criteria: whether they are ‘actionable’, ‘feasible’, ‘measureable’ and ‘achievable’.

Unlike, for example, the target of reducing ocean acidification (whose only driver is carbon dioxide), which easily meets all four criteria, the issue of marine debris is not as simple, partly because “what shows up on the beach is not necessarily an [indication] of what is inside the ocean,” Sweeney asserted.

“Marine litter can move long distances, becoming international. Ownership is difficult to establish,” he added. Litter also accumulates in mid-ocean ‘gyres’, natural water-circulation phenomenon that tends to trap floating material.

“The risk in not knowing the exact magnitude of marine litter is that we may tend to think it is too big to handle,” Sweeney said, adding, however that “momentum is building up with awareness and it is now getting priority at different levels.”

“To entirely rid the ocean of litter is an aspiration not expected to be achieved in a lifetime, even if we stop waste inputs into the sea, which we still have not. The cost is too much. Much of the waste has been broken down and is beyond our reach. To clean the sea surface of [floating] litter itself will take a long time,” Sweeney asserted.

“Though there are different drivers for marine pollution in each country, the common factor is that we are consuming more and also generating more waste and much of this is plastic,” he concluded.

Aside from insufficient data and the high cost of cleaning up marine litter, the Means of Implementation (MoI) or funding of the SDG ocean targets is yet another challenge for most regions.

Northwest Pacific countries like China, Japan, Russia and Korea, however, have established replicable practices, according to Alexander Tkalin, coordinator of the UNEP Northwest Pacific Action Plan.

“Korea and Japan are major donors and both have introduced legislation specifically on marine litter,” Tkalin told IPS on the sidelines of the meeting.

“Japan has changed legislation to incentivise marine debris cleaning, tweaking its law under which, normally, one pays for littering, but the government now pays municipalities for beach-cleaning after typhoons, when roots and debris from the sea-floor are strewn on beaches,” Tkalin explained.

The Dutch and the U.S. also have strong on-going programmes on marine debris, as does Haiti, according to Sweeney.

The extent of the crisis was brought home when Evangelos Papathanassiou, research director at the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research in Attiki, 15 kilometres from Athens, told visiting regional journalists about his experience of finding a sewing machine at a depth of 4,000 feet in the Mediterranean Sea.

“Even though man-made marine pollution from aquaculture, tourism and transportation are most pressing in the Mediterranean and Black Sea, they are not getting the deserved attention,” he added.

If the new development era is to be a successful one, experts conclude, we terrestrial beings must urgently turn our attention to the seas, which are crying out for urgent assistance.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

The Caribbean's fishing industry provides direct employment for more than 120,000 people and indirect employment opportunities for thousands of others – particularly women – in processing, marketing, boat-building, net-making and other support services. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
PYEONGCHANG, Republic of Korea, Oct 9 2014 (IPS)

Scientists here are warning Caribbean countries, where the fisheries sector is an important source of livelihoods and sustenance, that they should pay close attention to a new international report released Wednesday on ocean acidification.

The report, published by the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), coincides with the 12th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 12) being held here from Oct. 6-17.We’re in a world where the ocean is acidifying very, very, very rapidly and so we need to move very, very quickly.” -- Dr. Carol Turley

“Ocean acidification can have quite specific impacts on certain fisheries, and so actually ocean acidification is especially important for Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and people that rely on specific types of fishery or some type of organism,” Dr. S. J. Hennige, the lead editor of the report, told IPS.

“There are variable responses with organisms with regard to ocean acidification, but for the ones which are negatively affected by it, if you are reliant on just that one type of fish then it could have very large impacts and you may have to actually switch to a different organism or something like that.”

In the CARICOM region, the local population is highly dependent on fish for economic and social development. This resource also contributes significantly to food security, poverty alleviation, employment, foreign exchange earnings, development and stability of rural and coastal communities, culture, recreation and tourism.

The subsector provides direct employment for more than 120,000 fishers and indirect employment opportunities for thousands of others – particularly women – in processing, marketing, boat-building, net-making and other support services.

In the report, an international team of 30 experts, led by UK scientists, has concluded that ocean acidification is already underway, and it is now nearly inevitable that it will worsen, causing widespread impacts, mostly deleterious, on marine organisms and ecosystems, and on the goods and services they provide.

David Obura, director of Coastal Oceans Research and Development in the Indian Ocean, said food security, in the Caribbean and other regions of the world where there is heavy reliance on the fisheries sector, is threatened.

“Ocean acidification changes the chemistry of the sea water which means that how fish grow is affected and usually negatively,” Obura told IPS. “So productivity will go down or the certainty of knowing what the output is going to be, how much food is produced, is less certain so it undermines the production system.”

Ten years ago, only a handful of researchers were investigating the biological impacts of ocean acidification. Whilst their results gave cause for concern, it was clear that a lot more measurements and experiments were needed.

Around a thousand published studies later, it has now been established that many marine species will suffer in a high CO2 world, with consequences for human society.

Hennige said there are already examples, in the U.S., where an oyster fishery is being impacted by ocean acidification. He said the underlying cause of the problem is carbon dioxide.

“The more carbon dioxide is released from all our fossil fuels into the atmosphere, the more will dissolve in the ocean,” he explained.

“There are practices which can be put in place to offset it on a temporary basis, but the underlying problem is there is still more carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere and this problem is only going to get worse if we continue.

“It’s not a problem that is being caused by the Caribbean, this is a global problem and it’s a global solution that’s needed,” Hennige added.

Dr. Susan Singh-Renton, deputy executive director of the Caribbean Regional Fisheries Mechanism (CRFM), told IPS that everything in the report applies to the Caribbean situation.

“Ocean acidification is a worrying phenomenon because it means that seawater, as a supporting medium for life, is changing in a very fundamental manner. Since the ocean ecosystem is so complex, it is not possible to predict the impacts with certainty, but it is certain that the impacts will be significant for tropical islands, especially those which have built their economies based on the health and beauty of their local coral reef ecosystems,” she said.

“As coral reefs begin to decline, this will affect many traditional Caribbean fisheries targeting reef fishes, such as snapper, grouper, parrot fish, etc. that depend on the coral reefs for their food, shelter and survival.

“Also, there would likely be declines in the health and survival of animals that grow carbonate shells such as queen conch, which support very important multi-million-dollar commercial fisheries in the Caribbean. With so fundamental a change in seawater chemistry, it is also possible that other forms of ocean life, as we know them today, could be affected ultimately and irreversibly,” Singh-Renton noted.

The report’s authors said the exact magnitude of the ecological and financial costs is still uncertain, due to complex interactions with other human-driven environmental changes.

They said risks to coral reefs are highlighted in the CBD, due in part to the crucial role they have in helping support the livelihoods of around 400 million people.

Hennige said that the by the end of this century, the economic loss caused by ocean acidification would be “a trillion dollars”.

His colleague, Dr. Carol Turley, a contributing author to the report, said the downward spiral could be reversed but urgent action and funding are needed.

“Who can measure acidification? It’s really developed countries that can measure it so we need to start exporting that knowledge to countries like the Caribbean, to countries like the small island developing states,” she told IPS.

“And that’s where financing comes in because as scientists we can collaborate and give you knowledge but we need financing so that we can help you set up monitoring.

“I am worried that we are too slow. We’re in a world where the ocean is acidifying very, very, very rapidly and so we need to move very, very quickly.”

In 2013, experts warned that the acidity of the world’s oceans may increase by 170 percent by the end of the century, bringing significant economic losses. The scientists said then that marine ecosystems and biodiversity are likely to change as a result of ocean acidification, with far-reaching consequences for humans.

They also warned that economic losses from declines in shellfish aquaculture and the degradation of tropical coral reefs may be substantial owing to the sensitivity of molluscs and corals to ocean acidification.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at destinydlb@gmail.com

In addition to its prized value as an ingredient in high-end perfumes, the vetiver plant has important conservation benefits, preventing soil erosion and helping maintain water quality. Credit: treesftf/cc by 2.0

By Desmond Brown
PYEONGCHANG, Republic of Korea, Oct 7 2014 (IPS)

Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, is the world’s leading producer of vetiver. In the southwest of the country, vetiver production is hard to ignore.

Driving into Les Cayes, the largest town in the south, one is greeted by fields of vetiver on either side of the road. The same is true if driving from Les Cayes to Port Salut. Steep hillsides of the green grass line many of the ridges between the two towns.Synthetic biology differs from conventional genetic engineering in its technique, scale, and its use of novel and synthetic genetic sequences – raising new risks to biodiversity.

Haitian vetiver is highly regarded among perfumers, and it is a key ingredient in some of the finest and most expensive perfumes in the world.

However, struggling Haitians who farm this product could be dealt another harsh blow with the introduction of a new industry – synthetic biology. Although still undefined, synthetic biology can be described as ‘extreme genetic engineering,’ and refers broadly to the use of computer-assisted, biological engineering to design and construct new synthetic biological parts, devices and systems, and to redesign existing biological organisms.

“In countries like Haiti there are high-value agricultural exports that form a significant part of the economy, and those high-value low-volume goods are slated to be created by companies like Evolva and could replace the truly natural products,” Dana Perls, food and technology campaigner with the civil society group Friends of the Earth U.S., told IPS.

“Evolva is creating synthetic biology flavours and fragrances which could be offered at a much cheaper price and would ultimately remove the need for different farmers of flavours and fragrances.”

Haiti’s vetiver crop is processed by 10 distillers, but it provides jobs for some 27,000 farming families in the southwest. For these farmers, the vetiver plant has important conservation benefits, preventing soil erosion, and helping maintain water quality.

The global value of the synthetic biology market reached 1.6 billion dollars in 2011and it will further grow to 10.8 billion by 2016, increasing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 45.8 percent.

Haiti’s share of worldwide vetiver exports grew from 40 percent in 2001 to over 60 percent in 2007. But in the wake of the worldwide financial crisis, Haiti has seen a sharp reduction in vetiver exports. The country, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, produces about 50 to 60 tonnes of vetiver annually, about 50 percent of the world’s supply.

An estimated 60,000 people in Haiti’s Les Cayes region depend on vetiver as their primary income source. The crop is grown on 10,000 hectares.

Before 2009, Haiti’s vetiver crop was valued at approximately 15-18 million dollars per year. In recent years, Haiti’s export earnings from vetiver have declined to around 10 million per year.

While biotechnology has been portrayed as a panacea for climate change and other societal ills, critics say these claims are largely unproven. Credit: Bigstock

Synthetic biology differs from conventional genetic engineering in its technique, scale, and its use of novel and synthetic genetic sequences – raising new risks to biodiversity.

Friends of the Earth International is urging caution and has made several recommendations to the 12th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 12) being held here from Oct. 6-17.

“We are recommending a moratorium on the environmental release and the commercial use of synthetic biology, specifically because of the lack of international regulations and virtual lack of environmental and safety assessments anywhere in the world. We are encouraging the CBD to stand behind the precautionary approach which countries have already agreed to by being signatories to the CBD,” Perls said.

“This is a new and emerging issue and needs to be treated as such. Many of the concerns have to do with the environmental, cultural, social impacts of this new technology, including what would happen if a product like ginseng here in Korea were to be produced using synthetic biology. The impact that it would have on small famers across this country could be immense.

“It would also have a large impact on countries like Brazil where the feed stock would be grown in order to produce these synthetic biology organisms, which will churn out whatever you’ve designed it to churn out,” she added.

While biotechnology has been portrayed as a panacea for climate change and other societal ills, Friends of the Earth said the claims that genetically engineered plants and microbes can sequester more carbon in the soil and produce more fuels when processed than conventional methods have yet to be proven.

The group noted that “in the wake of these unfulfilled promises” emerges synthetic biology, a more extreme form of genetic engineering, which has also been touted as the solution to the climate crisis.

But the group said synthetic biology is not a sustainable solution to the climate crisis and has the potential to create an entirely new set of problems.

The Philippines is the world’s biggest producer and exporter of coconut oil. Twenty-five million people in a population of 100 million are directly or indirectly dependent on the coconut industry for their livelihoods and domestic food security.

Neth Dano, programme manager with the ETC Group, told IPS, “There is a lot at stake for the Philippines” on this issue because synthetic biology could potentially replace coconut oil in the global market.

“In the Philippines, coconut production is not done in a plantation way, it’s small scale. And in the structure of rural economies, in most cases the coconut producers are among the poorest ones,” Dano explained.

Dano said the CBD as the United Nations body responsible for looking at potential impacts of development on biodiversity and also primarily for conservation of biodiversity can do a lot to address the concerns over synthetic biology.

“The CBD is the only body in the United Nations that had taken up synthetic biology so far and addressed the concerns on its potential impacts on biodiversity,” Dano said.

Dano noted also that most of the commercial beginnings of synthetic biology were related to climate change.

“The earlier research and development efforts were focusing on algae that actually would produce biofuels. And biofuels were seen as a solution to address this problem of massive greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. So it was actually presented as a solution to climate change as a mitigation strategy,” she said.

“The big oil companies invested so much in the development of biofuels from synthetically modified algae but the investments did not deliver, so now they’ve shifted their attention to low-volume high-value and this is where the lauric oils come in,” Dano added.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at destinydlb@gmail.com

The planet has lost an estimated 52 percent of its wildlife in the last four decades. Experts say that more funds are needed to scale-up conservation efforts. Credit: Kanya D’Almeida/IPS

By Stella Paul
PYEONGCHANG, Republic of Korea, Oct 7 2014 (IPS)

With governments, activists and scientists tearing their hair out over the world’s impending crisis in biodiversity, the outgoing president of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) delivered a simple message to participants at the 12^th Conference of the Parties to the CBD (COP12) currently underway in the Republic of Korea’s northern Pyeongchang county: honour the promises you made last year.

Speaking to IPS on the sidelines of the meeting, running from Oct. 6-12, Hem Pande, chairman of the Biodiversity Authority of India, which has held the presidency of the Conference of the Parties for a year, said finance continues to be a weak link in global efforts to safeguard the earth’s fragile ecosystems, with parties failing to deliver on their pledges.

“There is a huge requirement for financing resources. The budget for environmental conservation is ever shrinking. It’s time for the parties to walk the talk." -- Hem Pande, chairman of the Biodiversity Authority of India
Pande recalled that at the 11^th meeting of the parties (COP11), held in the South Indian city of Hyderabad in October 2012, states had promised to double funding for conservation by 2015.

However, after two years, this promise remains largely undelivered. Unless countries keep their word, it will be difficult to make significant progress in achieving the 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets, agreed upon at a meeting in Nagoya, Japan, in 2011, the official added.

“There is a huge requirement for financing resources. The budget for environmental conservation is ever shrinking. It’s time for the parties to walk the talk,” Pande told IPS.

Countless issues are calling out for an injection of monetary resources: from coastal clean-up projects and scientific research to public awareness campaigns and livelihood alternatives, conservation is a costly undertaking.

According to an estimate by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), an annual expenditure of 200 billion dollars would be required to meet all 20 of the CBD goals for 2020, including eliminating harmful subsidies, halving the rate of ecosystem destruction, sustainably managing fisheries, increasing protected areas, restoring 15 percent of the world’s degraded ecosystems, and conserving known endangered species.

Thus the agreement to boost funding was one of the most celebrated outcomes of COP11. Using a baseline figure of the average annual national spending on biodiversity between 2006 and 2010, developed countries had said they would double their giving by 2015.

Although no numbers were put on the table, observers expected that a doubling of the resources then would mean around 10-12 billion dollars a year.

Now, as the convention does its mid-term review, it appears that figure is far from becoming a reality.

Paul Leadly, lead author of ‘Global Biodiversity Outlook 4’ (GBO-4), a progress report on global efforts towards the Aichi Targets released here Monday, acknowledges that finance is “definitely insufficient.”

“The good news is there is a slight increase in the funding. The bad news is, it’s not anywhere near doubling the amount,” he told IPS.

According to him, given the current slowdown in the global economy, it is difficult to say how nations will fulfill their promises in another two years.

“It doesn’t help that a lot of countries are not [doing] very well financially. For example, in Brazil, there is economic stagnation,” Leadly added.

Others believe the global financial climate should not act as a deterrent to swift action on conservation and environmental protection.

Countries like India have allocated substantial amounts of state funding to the conservation effort, in the hopes of leading by example.

“Since 2012, we have been spending two billion rupees [about 32.5 million dollars] each year just on managing and maintaining our biodiversity hubs such as our national parks and sanctuaries […]. We have reported this to the CBD as well,” Pande claimed, adding that all 191 parties to the convention are bound to do the same.

Although the budget allocation to India’s ministry of environment and forests has seen a decline from 24 billion rupees (391 million dollars) in 2012-13 to 20.4 billion rupees (325 million dollars) this year, Pande says the combined total budgets of all ministries involved in the conservation effort – including departments that oversee land restoration, soil conservation, water, fishers and ecological development – represent a sum that is higher than previous years.

Still, India is just one country out of nearly 200. Given that international agreements on biodiversity are not legally binding, no country can be “forced to pay”, so holding parties accountable to their financial commitments is no easy task.

Pande also said that a large number of governments had not submitted their national reports to the CBD in time, resulting in inadequate data in the GBO-4 regarding finances and financial commitments.

Mobilising resources will be a major topic at the meeting currently underway in Korea. Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, told IPS that an expected outcome of COP12 was a clear resource mobilisation strategy to tackle the dearth of funds.

Another factor to keep in mind is that state parties can increase allocations for biodiversity conservation efforts without necessarily making huge investments.

One of these “non-economic” ways of generating the necessary resources, according to Leadly, is to end subsidies.

“Governments are spending so much money on providing subsidies: in agriculture, fuels, fisheries, fertiliser. Ending those subsidies doesn’t cost money. In fact, [governments] could use that money for other things, like channeling it into conservation of biodiversity,” he asserted.

Leadly pointed to India’s on-going efforts to phase out subsidies of synthetic fertilisers as an example others could follow, adding, “If you look at China, their fertiliser is massively subsidised, which is not matching the needs of their crop plants. But political will is needed.”

Some states do appear to be prioritising the issue: Thailand this year added 150,000 dollars to its annual budget in order to jumpstart forest conservation; Guatemala has earmarked some 291 million dollars for biodiversity efforts, Namibia spends about 100 million dollars a year on similar endeavours, while Bangladesh and Nepal have allocated 360 and 86 million dollars respectively.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

A cow stands in the middle of a dried-out agricultural plot in Sri Lanka's northern Jaffna District. Credit: Kanya D'Almeida/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 6 2014 (IPS)

In pure numbers, the past few decades have been marked by destruction: over the last 40 years, Earth has lost 52 percent of its wild animals; nearly 17 percent of the world’s forests have been felled in the last half-century; freshwater ecosystems have witnessed a 75-percent decline in animal populations since 1970; and nearly 95 percent of coral reefs are today threatened by pollution, coastal development and overfishing.

A slew of international conferences and agreements over the years have attempted to pull the brakes on what appears to be a runaway train, setting targets and passing legislation aimed at protecting and conserving the remaining slivers of land and sea as yet untainted by humanity’s massive carbon footprint.

In 2010, building on the foundation laid by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), scores of experts and activists gathered in Nagoya, Japan, drafted the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020, which included 20 points known as the Aichi Targets, encompassing everything from land preservation to sustainable fishing practices.

Though the goals were subsequently re-affirmed by the U.N. general assembly, and reiterated yet again at the 2012 Rio+20 Earth Summit in Brazil, scientists say losses continue to outpace gains, as forests are chopped down, garbage emptied into oceans and animal habitats razed to the ground to make way for human development and industry.

Against the backdrop of the ongoing 12th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the CBD (COP 12), a United Nations progress report on the state of global biodiversity released Monday in Pyeongchang, Korea, called urgent attention to unmet targets and challenges ahead.

Coming exactly a year before the halfway point of the 2011-2020 Strategic Plan and the United Nations Decade on Biodiversity, ‘Global Biodiversity Outlook 4’ (GBO-4) called for a “dismantling of the drivers of biodiversity loss, which are often embedded deep within our systems of policy-making, financial accounting, and patterns of production and consumption.”

For instance, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)’s latest Living Planet Report, humans are “using nature’s gifts as if we had more than just one Earth at our disposal.”

The organisation’s Living Planet Index (LPI), based on studies of over 10,000 representative populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish, found that exploitation of natural resources by humans accounted for the vast majority of wildlife losses in the last four decades (37 percent), followed by habitat degradation (31 percent), climate change (seven percent) and habitat loss (13 percent).

The same report found that human impacts such as increased pollution and construction projects were largely responsible for the steep decline of wildlife in freshwater systems, with 45,000 large dams (over 15 metres) preventing the free flow of some of the world’s major rivers, at a huge cost to biodiversity.

Marine animal populations have also plummeted by 40 percent, making a strong case for the rapid designation of adequate marine protected areas. However, according to the GBO-4 released today, “more than half of marine regions have less than five percent of their area protected.”

Of the five Strategic Goals (A-E) of the 10-year biodiversity plan, GBO-4 highlighted numerous challenges, including threats to natural resources provoked by greatly increased total global consumption levels (Target 4), rising nutrient pollution impacting aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity, compounded by increased pollution from chemicals, fertilisers and plastics (Target 8), a rising extinction risk for birds, mammals and amphibians (Target 12), and a lack of capacity to mobilise concerned citizens worldwide (Target 19).

According to David Ainsworth, information officer for the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, “The question of agriculture and food security is probably one of the biggest challenges we are facing.”

“Given that we know we’re looking at a substantial population increase by the end of the decade, which is likely going to be matched with a change in dietary patterns such as the consumption of more meat, we are probably going to experience tremendous pressures on biodiversity just in trying to deal with the agricultural situation alone,” he told IPS.

A lot of this could be solved, he added, by dealing with food production systems, by promoting a different model to the typical, rich, North American diet and by tackling food waste at all stages of the production cycle, from wastage in fields and transportation chains to food distribution centers and even in the home.

Asia-Pacific: under tremendous pressure

With a population of just over 4.2 billion people, the Asia-Pacific region faces a unique set of challenges to preserving its biodiversity.

According to Scott Perkin, head of the Natural Resources Group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)-Asia, the region “has taken some important steps towards the achievement of the Aichi Targets.

“A majority of countries in the region have revised and strengthened their National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (Target 17), and a significant number have ratified the Nagoya Protocol (Target 16),” Perkin told IPS in an email.

But the region as a whole remains under tremendous pressure, he said, adding, “Population growth and rapid economic development continue to fuel the loss and degradation of natural habitats, and much greater efforts will be required if Target 5 on halving the rate of loss of forests and other habitats by 2020 is to be achieved.”

Indonesia alone experienced a deforestation rate of one million hectares a year between 2000 and 2003. A recent study indicates that in 2012 the country likely hacked away 840,000 hectares of primary forest, outstripping even Brazil, which cut down 460,000 hectares that same year.

Perkin said the illegal wildlife trade in Asia is yet another critical issue, one that will make achievement of Target 12 – preventing the extinction of known species – especially challenging.

The region also provides a stark example of the links between biodiversity and economic gains, a point also highlighted in the report released today. According to GBO-4, reducing deforestation rates have been estimated to result in an annual benefit of 183 million dollars in the form of ecosystem services.

The same pattern is evident throughout the Asia-Pacific region, particularly in places where governments have replaced marine resource exploitation with conservation efforts.

In the western Pacific Ocean nation of Palau, for instance, the banning of commercial fisheries has boosted the tiny island’s ecotourism potential, with visitors rushing to explore the country’s bustling coastal waters.

A single shark, which had hitherto brought the country a few hundred dollars for its fin, considered a delicacy in East Asia, now fetches 1.9 million dollars over its entire lifetime.

In Indonesia too, the creation of the world’s largest sanctuary for manta rays has raised the sea-creature’s economic potential from some 500 dollars (when used for meat or medicine), to over one million dollars as a tourist attraction, according to Bradnee Chambers, executive secretary of the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP)’s Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals.

Still, it will take more than piecemeal measures to bring about the scale of protection and conservation required to keep biodiversity levels at a safe threshold.

As Ainsworth pointed out, “The core of this issue goes beyond the questions of where we put our roads and highways – it goes to fundamental ways of how we organise ourselves socially and economically in relation to nature and biodiversity.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Coral reef ecosystem at Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. Credit: Jim Maragos/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

By Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias
MONTREAL, Canada, Sep 30 2014 (IPS)

In Nagoya, Japan, in 2010, the international community made a commitment to future generations by adopting the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020 and 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets.

In doing this, governments recognised that biodiversity is not just a problem to be solved, but rather the source of solutions to 21st century challenges such as climate change, food and water security, health, disaster risk reduction, and poverty alleviation.  In taking this action, countries affirmatively recognised that biodiversity is essential for sustainable development and the foundation for human well-being.We now know that real change does not come from ‘silver bullet’ solutions, but from those strategies that simultaneously address the multiple underlying causes of biodiversity loss.

The Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 and its Aichi Biodiversity Targets are a framework for the world to achieve the vision of human beings living in harmony with nature.  If achieved, by the middle of the 21st century, we will enjoy economic and social well-being while conserving and sustainably using the biodiversity that sustains our healthy planet and delivers the benefits essential to us all.

This is within our reach. And if we succeed, we will ensure that by the end of this decade, the ecosystems of the world are resilient and continue to provide for our well-being and contribute to eradication of the poverty that holds back human aspirations.  The Aichi Biodiversity Targets are about taking action now for the benefit of our collective future.

We are now approaching the mid-way mark of the United Nations Decade on Biodiversity.  Governments of the world will meet in Pyeongchang, Republic of Korea in early October at the 12^th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP-12) where they will launch and review the Global Biodiversity Outlook 4 (GBO4), the latest global assessment of the state of biodiversity. As they review GBO4, they will see how we are all doing in achieving this vision.

The good news is that countries and civil society are making progress, and concrete commitments to implement the Aichi Biodiversity Targets are being taken.  Our current efforts are taking us in the right direction.

However, achieving many targets will require substantial additional efforts.

Additional pressures are being placed on the life-support systems of our planet by a greater population, by climate change, land degradation, over exploitation of species and spread of alien invasive species as a consequence of economic decisions that neglect to fully take into account the value of environmental assets and of biodiversity.  Extra efforts will be needed to overcome these human-made challenges.

What kind of actions need to be taken?  We now know that real change does not come from ‘silver bullet’ solutions, but from those strategies that simultaneously address the multiple underlying causes of biodiversity loss – subsidies that lead to overexploitation, habitat loss, climate change, inefficiencies in agriculture among others – while addressing the direct pressures on our natural systems.

There is an increasing need to develop strategic and sustained actions to address both the underlying and immediate causes of biodiversity loss in a coordinated way.  There is a need to mainstream biodiversity into policies and actions well beyond the sectors that focus on conservation.

At the Pyeongchang meeting governments will need to make additional commitments to ensure that their actions are effective and achieve the desired results.  They will need to agree to mobilise sufficient financial and human resources in support of such actions – increasing significantly current efforts.

The actions that are needed to overcome the loss of biodiversity and the ongoing erosion of our natural life support systems are varied: integrating the values of biodiversity into national accounts and policy, changes in economic incentives, enforcing rules and regulations, the full and active participation of indigenous and local communities and stakeholders and engagement by the business sector. Partnerships at all levels will need to be agreed and vigorously pursued.

At COP-12, events such as a Business Forum and a Summit of Cities and Subnational Governments, and meetings of Biodiversity Champions, will help to build the networks and partnerships needed to realise this.

These actions for long-term work take time to lead to measureable outcomes.  Direct action is needed now to conserve the most threatened species and ecosystems.  So, we will need to continue our work in establishing protected areas and expanding networks for terrestrial and marine areas.  We will need to work with partners to save the most endangered species.  We will need an urgent push for the protection of coral reefs.

Our immediate and our long-term efforts can and must be strengthened by understanding the critical links between biodiversity and sustainable development. Measures required to achieve the Aichi Biodiversity Targets will also support the post-2015 development agenda, and the proposed Sustainable Development Goals currently under discussion at the United Nations General Assembly.

In this way achieving the Targets will assist in achieving the goals of greater food security, healthier populations and improved access to clean water and sustainable energy for all. Implementing the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020 means already implementing our strategy for sustainable development.

The theme of the High Level Segment of the Pyeongchang meeting reflects this. For two days in October, over 100 ministers and high level representatives will discuss “Biodiversity for sustainable development.”

In choosing this theme, the government of Korea has made it clear we must continue our efforts to not only achieve the mission of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity, but the social, economic and environmental goals of sustainable development, and to achieve human well-being in harmony with nature.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

A family travelling by boat along the San Juan River, a biodiversity-rich area on the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. Credit: Germán Miranda/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Sep 10 2013 (IPS)

A team of scientists who analysed the richness of plant species around the world concluded that the ecosystems in need of immediate protection in order to meet the 2020 conservation goals set by the Convention on Biological Diversity are largely concentrated in Latin America.

Humanity’s life support system, which provides our air, water and food, is powered by 8.7 million different kinds of plants, animals and other living species. But those species are going extinct at an accelerating rate, representing a major threat to future human survival.

Recognising this threat, nearly every country in the world has agreed under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to protect 17 percent of the planet’s land areas and conserve 60 percent of the world’s plant species by the year 2020.

These twin goals, included in the 20 Aichi Targets, can only be achieved if far more land in the Caribbean, Central America and northern South America is properly protected, according to a new study published Sep. 6 in the journal Science.

The study, “Achieving the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Goals for Plant Conservation”, analysed the distribution of 110,000 different plant species to discover that about 67 percent the world’s plants live in 17 percent of the planet’s land area – mainly in tropical and subtropical regions.

“Our paper sets out the priority areas for protection, based on their species richness,” said report co-author Stuart Pimm from Duke University, in the eastern U.S. state of North Carolina.

Those priority areas include Panama, Costa Rica, Ecuador, northern Peru and the Caribbean islands, Pimm told Tierramérica*.

Costa Rica is home to nearly 800 endemic species, found nowhere else in the world. Canada, which is nearly 200 times larger in area than the small Central American nation, has only about 70 unique or endemic species scattered across its nine million square kilometres of land area.

The reasons for this disparity are Canada’s cold climate and the last Ice Age, which buried the entire country in ice several kilometres deep 10,000 years ago.

Less than one sixth of these priority regions are protected, the report found. While Costa Rica has protected at least 20 percent of its land area, far more than nearly any other country, there is not enough data to know if that is enough, Pimm said.

“When it comes to plants, we don’t have the data to determine how much should be protected in any one country or where these protected areas should be inside a country,” he noted.

There is far more information on birds and animals, which has been used to identify so-called “biodiversity hot spots”.

This new study confirms most of these spots, but takes the analysis further with better methodology. There is a correlation between the diversity of plants and that of other species, but there are also plenty of exceptions. A tropical forest might have many amphibians, while a tropical island with similar numbers of plants may have none, Pimm explained.

Most existing national parks and protected areas are often in remote areas or in barren and inhospitable areas. With this new data, species-rich areas can be targeted for protection.

“The hard reality is that most of the priority areas in need of protection are in generally poor countries, like Madagascar or Ecuador,” said study co-author Clinton Jenkins, a tropical ecologist and conservation expert from North Carolina State University, who also works with a Brazilian conservation NGO.

“Costa Rica has to protect more of its area than Canada if we want to stem the rising tide of extinctions,” said Jenkins in an interview with Tierramérica.

Mobilising international support to protect biodiversity in other countries has been very difficult. Under the CBD Strategic Plan for reaching the 2020 goals, developed countries agreed to double biodiversity aid by 2014, and to maintain those levels until the final year of the plan.

“This is key to achieving any target,” CBD spokesperson David Ainsworth told Tierramérica.

Ecuador proposed to protect 10,000 square kilometres of its Amazon region as a national park, instead of allowing oil drilling, through the Yasuní-ITT initiative. It asked the international community to contribute 350 million dollars a year to offset the foregone oil revenues, Jenkins noted.

But after five years, the fund to leave the oil in Yasuní Park untapped had collected only 13.3 million dollars, and now Ecuador is preparing to allow drilling to proceed.

“A new road has already been blasted through the region,” Jenkins said.

Roads inevitably lead to deforestation, with negative impacts on local indigenous communities, he added. The Tagaeri and Taromenane indigenous peoples live in voluntary isolation in the region.

Oil drilling using extended reach technology could minimise the damage, by eliminating the need for roads. It is not necessarily more costly, but not all companies have the expertise to do it, he said.

“If the oil is going to be drilled, then it’s up to the Ecuadorian government to make sure companies make the minimum impact,” said Jenkins.

There are parts of the world that are simply more important than others when it comes to biodiversity. Yasuní is one. “Either species are protected from extinction, or they are gone forever and no one will ever experience them again,” he stressed. “I personally think it is immoral to allow species to go extinct.”

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

By Manipadma Jena
HYDERABAD, India, Oct 23 2012 (IPS)

Developing countries are investing enormously in preserving biological diversity, and it is unimaginable that the wealthy nations will not fulfill their obligations to provide funding for these efforts, Brazilian environmental negotiator André Aranha Corrêa do Lago told Tierramérica*.

Global awareness on biodiversity is still “much lower than it should be,” despite the fact that the Convention on Biological Diversity has provided “a large amount of scientific information to governments in all countries,” said Corrêa do Lago, director of the Department of Environment and Special Affairs at Brazil’s Ministry of External Relations and senior negotiator of the Brazilian delegation at the 11th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 11) to this international treaty.

Corrêa do Lago spoke with Tierramérica in Hyderabad, a world centre of computing and biotechnology in southern India and the host of COP 11 on Oct. 8-19.

Biofuels are amazingly profitable in tropical countries, says André Aranha Corrêa do Lago. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Q: Judging by the results of COP 11, how do you evaluate the state of global awareness on biodiversity?

A: The awareness on biodiversity is much lower than it should be. This convention, however, is helping more than any other initiative to create awareness. It has provided a large amount of scientific information to governments in all countries.

Q: One of the most contentious issues is the lack of financial commitments. What is the solution?

A: There is a very clear solution from the point of view of developing countries: developed countries should honor future obligations and provide finances to developing countries to conserve their biodiversity.

The fact is that biodiversity is globally linked and we cannot isolate it by geographical boundaries.

It is only when biodiversity is incorporated into the development paradigm, seen as an important factor promoting economic, social and environmental sustainability and recognized as relevant to energy, agriculture and so many other human activities, that we can ensure adequate resources are allocated to its preservation.

Q: The parties to the convention have agreed that the impact of biofuels on biodiversity will be taken into account when they develop future energy strategies. The text was welcomed by Brazil, a big producer of ethanol. Why?

A: In Brazil’s experience, biofuels have had an extraordinary impact on development, because they are inexpensive and their technology is not challenging. And this has raised some concerns in many quarters.

However, we have to know more about biofuels, as some are less sustainable than others, and ensure that they are economically, socially and environmentally positive.

At the COP, the parties have agreed that biofuels are extremely important. We must however take into consideration their impact on biodiversity. Brazil supports any step that recognizes that biofuels can be very positive for the energy sector and for sustainable development.

The great news for developing countries is that in tropical countries, biofuels are amazingly profitable, and it is an opportunity we have to use.

Q: Before the Nagoya Protocol was signed, Brazil had put in place national rules for access and benefits-sharing and against biopiracy. But they did not work.

A: Yes, Brazil has national legislation regarding access and benefits-sharing. But, as with any other country’s legislation, this is not enough to guarantee benefit-sharing. In the absence of an international framework, national legislation is limited because it does not cover global enforcement.

When the Nagoya Protocol enters into effect, and for that we need at least 50 countries to ratify it, we shall have a common internationally recognized platform that will ensure that access and benefit-sharing laws and regulations defined at the national level will be respected, thus providing assurance, stimulating scientific research and preventing biopiracy.

Q: But two years after its adoption, the Nagoya Protocol has only been ratified by six countries, and Brazil is not among them.

A: As the first step, the president (Dilma Rousseff) has already sent it to the congress, where it is being examined at the present time. In Brazil, any ratification of an international agreement is a complex process because it has to go through the congress.

We in the executive have learnt that the congress does not like it when the executive has ideas on how the congress should act; it is analyzing the protocol very thoroughly. There is an apparent positive mood on the protocol in the congress, and it could be ratified earlier than the time taken by other such procedures.

Q: Before the next COP in 2014?

A: I believe certainly by the next COP.

Q: Many conservationists claim the current reform of the Brazilian forest code will hurt the successful efforts by your government to reduce deforestation.

A: The president had to veto the text of the forest code issued by the congress. And this is the second time she has done this. The government is not going to approve a forest code which contradicts the national commitment to the reduction of deforestation.

The current Brazilian forest code is an exceptional legislation that exists nowhere else in the world. To give an idea: in any area in Brazil which is not in the Amazon, owners of land can only use 80 percent of the land, while the rest has to be preserved as natural habitat. Inside the Amazon, it is the reverse – 80 percent has to remain untouched and only 20 percent used.

There is nowhere in the world a legislation so tough on private property in order for an ecosystem like the Amazon to be preserved. The present issue is how we are going to deal with those who have violated it. The new legislation is going to be extremely stringent in dealing with such cases.

The forest code is from 1965 and since then Brazil has become a much more important and complex economy. We need to have a forest code that reflects these realities.

Interestingly, there is a huge public debate on this, but decisions are in the hands of the congress, of persons elected by popular vote. All efforts are focused on convincing the congress to deliver a balanced forest code.

Q: How much funding does Brazil expect from the COP, and what biodiversity issues would it address as a priority?

A: What we have seen at the COP is very clear. Large developing countries like India and Brazil are already investing enormously in preserving biodiversity.

The prime minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh, pledged additional resources at the COP so that India can progress towards the Aichi Targets (adopted in 2010 to address the underlying causes of biodiversity loss). This is the utmost demonstration of how developing countries are doing their part.

However, there are other countries that need additional resources to ensure their biodiversity. I cannot imagine that developed countries will not take this into consideration and find solutions to make sure that these countries get adequate funds.

India and Brazil can also do more if there are additional resources. As a priority for spending on biodiversity, Brazil would follow exactly on the lines that Singh mentioned: that countries have to have all the instruments – technology and human capacity building – that enhance biodiversity. It cannot be business as usual.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Excerpt:

By Manipadma Jena
BHUBANESWAR, India, Oct 4 2012 (IPS)

The eleventh meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 11 CBD) approaches amidst a hailstorm of public protest against the ‘tragedy of the commons’ – the rapid loss of biodiversity in forests, oceans and indigenous community farmlands.

Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Credit: Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Montreal, Canada.

Ten thousand people are expected to attend the global event, which promotes the motto ‘Nature protects if she is protected’, scheduled to run from Oct. 8-19 in southern India’s information technology hub, Hyderabad.

During this time, 193 member countries will assess progress made in translating the Aichi Targets – adopted at the last COP CBD held in Nagoya, Japan, in 2010  – into revised National Biodiversity Strategies and Actions Plans, and discuss resource mobilisation strategies to implement them.

With so much at stake, Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias, executive secretary of the Montreal-headquartered Convention on Biological Diversity, has a lot on his plate.

With three decades of combined experience in scientific training and extensive negotiation experience on biodiversity issues, Dias spoke with IPS correspondent Manipadma Jena about which issues CBD will push for and what he hopes can be achieved at the COP 11.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What are some of the reasons for governments’ inability to meet their commitments on containing rapid biodiversity loss?

A: The third Global Biodiversity Outlook in 2010 assessed that we were making little progress implementing the biodiversity agenda, and the main drivers of biodiversity loss were still going strong.

Country policies are still promoting land conversions, degrading ecosystems to enhance food – including from oceans – and energy production, in unsustainable ways. Climate change and ocean acidification have exacerbated the situation.

Although we see an increase in commitment from governments and civil society on the need to protect nature and enhance biodiversity conservation, we still see a mismatch between these commitments and (real) action.

Q: The most exploited areas, and also those witnessing the maximum loss of biodiversity, are the community commons. How can this be rectified?

A: Overfishing is a classic example of the tragedy of the commons and loss of biodiversity in the oceans is increasingly becoming more evident. One of the targets we agreed to in Nagoya is for countries to reform their economic instruments that negatively impact biodiversity and ecosystems.

Unsustainable fishing receives subsidies in most countries for fishing vessel fuels and also for shipbuilding. We need to remove subsidies, utilise those funds (for promoting alternate livelihoods for fishers, for instance) and also create temporary no-go areas, for depleted fish species to restock.

We know what needs to be done to change the current situation. Unfortunately, policies and economic instruments globally are still promoting ‘business as usual’ models that do not enable sustainability.

Q: Is it possible to devise a legal system that can protect traditional indigenous practices from the crippling impacts of intellectual property rights in globalised markets?

A: That is what we hope. After many years of very hard negotiation, the CBD was instrumental in arriving at the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefits-sharing in 2010, which introduced the concept of economic benefits-sharing with those who are the custodians of biodiversity, who are mostly indigenous communities from developing countries.

Before this, India, Brazil and Australia had put in place national rules for access and benefits-sharing that were against bio-piracy. The fact is that most companies in developed countries did not feel obliged to meet these requirements because there was no global rule in place.

Q: Where does the CBD stand in getting the required number of countries to ratify the Nagoya Protocol?

A: We need at least 50 countries of the 193 Parties to the CBD to ratify the Nagoya Protocol in order to acquire legal status. We have 92 signatures but only five countries have completed all formalities required to ratify the protocol, while we have information that 12 more will probably ratify by the end of this year. This will, however, only make for a third of all ratifications needed. I hope by COP 12 in 2014 we will have the rest.

Our emphasis currently is to promote awareness, capacity building and consultations with different global sectors such as health, agriculture and biotech, so that governments have all the information they need to ratify the protocol and promote necessary domestic changes.

Q: In the meantime, what other mechanisms can governments immediately adopt to halt the alarming rate of biodiversity loss, and protect local communities?

A: Another potential mechanism is the protected area. In many countries these are established and (overseen) by national governments. The CBD recognises that we could also have community-governed protected areas that are fully recognised and financially supported by national governments.

This is a desirable participatory process advancing the issue of socio-economic equity and has the win-win outcome of enhancing biodiversity conservation and the livelihoods of local communities.

Namibia has already executed 70 such formal ‘conservancy’ agreements with local communities. Bolivia, Australia, Brazil and Mexico, too, have success stories. At COP 11, CBD will launch a study summarising these positive experiences over a full day of discussion, (in an effort to encourage) countries to adopt the mechanism.

Q: What role do you see for women globally in the preservation of biodiversity?

A: Women, especially in indigenous communities, provision food in families, rear children and are the custodians of a traditional relationship with nature and of collective knowledge about food production systems. It is very important to ensure we can count on this knowledge for better management of biodiversity conservation by recognising (women’s) role and encouraging participation in decision-making.

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