For Friday the 12th of November we had a bit of a special issue in our weekly journal club. Many of us had been somewhat following what was going on in Nagoya CDB COP10 meeting that took place in Nagoya, Japan between 18th and 29th of October. Following the over all failure of global 2010 targets it is, after all, very interesting to see what the global high-ranking political community has in mind for the next decade.
Since none of us in our little club was high-ranking enough to have actually been in Nagoya, we had to settle for the Advance Unedited Texts from the meeting website. These documents listing several important outcomes of the meeting have no doubt passed through many delegates and represent a compromise everybody is happy with. It is no surprise then that we didn’t find the documents very easy to digest. Right after the meeting both international as national (Finnish) media praised the success of the meeting, but at least the press releases said very little about what was actually achieved. After reading some of the documents we knew a little more, but not a lot. As expected, the outcomes are more of declaration than an action plan, although important targets are listed as well. Since there are no binding obligations it is left up to national implementation to actually meet the targets and it that sense we still have to wait and see how the implementation takes off. Needles to say, after the 2010 failure at least our journal club wasn’t overly optimistic about meeting the targets.
Nevertheless, several important targets are listed. Few of these attracted more discussion, like target 1
By 2020, at the latest, people are aware of the values of biodiversity and the steps they can take to conserve and use it sustainably
which is perhaps the most important target of them all, but at the same time a bit funny: how can the other targets be met if this as a starting point won’t take place until the end of the target period? Target 5 states that
By 2020, the rate of loss of all natural habitats, including forests, is at least halved and where feasible brought close to zero, and degradation and fragmentation is significantly reduced
Clearly the wordings are more careful than 10 years ago, in other words instead of speaking about stopping we are talking about halving and reducing. Perhaps the most interesting target is the target 11 which gives us some concrete numbers
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 landscape and seascapes
This sounds all very good – or at least better than the current situation – but still much is left to how one actually calculates the statistics. For example, in Finland the proportion of protected forests and areas under restricted forestry use is 14.5% of the total land area, which is not that far off from the target. However, if we consider strictly protected forests on actual forest land the number drops to 5.2%. Also it remains to be seen how “equitably managed”, “ecologically representative” and “well connected” systems of protected areas are implemented in reality. The upside is that considering these targets, there is clear need for conservation planning in the coming years 🙂
There has been a clear sea-change in the way how the motivation of biodiversity conservation is presented. Ecosystem services and especially TEEB are very pervasive in the documents, which pretty much reflects what is going on in the world of conservation today. If you can’t appeal to people’s heart, appeal to their wallet.
Further into our discussion we also agreed that human population growth is almost nowhere to be found in any of the texts. Economic growth and it’s harmful effects are lightly discussed, but there is no mention about the detrimental effects that ever growing human population has on the environment and biodiversity. The reason might be that it still is too touchy a subject especially for some of the developing countries. On the other hand, at least from the perspective of resource consumption it is the excessive standard of living in the developed world that is causing a big strain on the environment.
In the end we felt that perhaps it is still a bit early to call the verdict on Nagoya as so much depends on how the “flexible framework” is utilized and implemented in different parts of the world. At least the meeting wasn’t as immediate failure as Copenhagen climate negotiations were, but already very critical views have been published concerning the outcome of COP10. We’ll definitely keep an eye on how things are progressing.
