24th meeting of the Subsidiary Body con Scientific, Technical and Technological Advise - SBSTTA 24 / 3rd meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Implementation SBI 3
The cart before the horse?
Get link
Facebook
X
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps
-
As the negotiations of SBSTTA 24 mover forward, civil society wonders if we are putting the cart before the horse
The integration of a Rights-Based Approach (RBA) is critical for a transformative, comprehensive and measurable post-2020 global biodiversity framework (GBF) and the realization of a world where all people can live in harmony with nature, in line with Member States’ obligations under international law. The aim is to improve positions rather than just conditions for sustainable change and fairness. Fundamental rights include substantive and procedural rights. Every right has a corresponding duty. David R. Boyd, the Special Rapporteur on the issue of human rights obligations relating to the enjoyment of a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment, states that respect of human rights and a rights-based approach are key to “ achieving rapid and ambitious progress in the protection, conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity . [1] ” Human rights and a healthy environment are mutually dependent. Everyone’s ability to enjoy human rights to life, health, food an...
Once upon a time, some 30 years ago, life was very easy for conservationists. Instead of having to cope with complicated concepts like biodiversity, which are defined and quantifiable with scientifically agreed indicators, they could simply conserve “nature”. Almost everything that looked more or less green qualified as “nature”: pine plantations, destroyed wetlands (called “polders” in countries like the Netherlands), potato fields with some flowers in them, shrimp ponds ,or city parks. Moreover, all this nature could easily be protected by simply putting a fence around it. The resulting protected areas, the only areas that could be controlled by, often politically insignificant, nature conservation agencies and organizations, formed the cornerstone of nature conservation policies. Then, in 1992, the Convention on Biodiversity came along, and everything became more complicated. Suddenly it mattered whether “nature” was biodiverse or not, and whether it was actually an ecosystem ...
As CBD negotiations ramp up, one thing that we can expect for sure is that there will be a lot of talk about ‘the gap’, that is, the discrepancy between current financing of biodiversity conservation, and the projected amount needed to arrest biodiversity loss. Discussions about this gap tend to treat biodiversity conservation as a simple mathematical equation: add money and there will be less biodiversity loss. Of course, the problem with this framing is the extent to which practices that contribute to biodiversity loss are embedded in our current political-economic system; a problem that will not be so easily solved by injecting funding into existing conservation models. In response to this oversight, our research collective, alongside the Third World Network, has produced a report [1] that proposes a different framing of the issue, which includes concrete recommendations for negotiators and civil society about how to address these underlying drivers. To move ‘beyond the...
Comments
Post a Comment