Convention on Biological Diversity a Ten Year Failure
The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is another of the world’s multilateral environmental institutions that has resolutely failed to achieve its stated purpose. Now less than two months away from the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity to be held in Nagoya, Japan, we already know that the participants will be reporting back on a grim litany of near complete failure. As Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the CBD told a high level forum in Chengu China this week:
the target set by world governments in 2002, ‘to achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national level,’ has not been met. … No government claims to have completely met the 2010 biodiversity target at the national level, and around one-fifth state explicitly that it has not been met. Indeed, the current biodiversity statistics are as worrying as ever. Species that have been assessed for extinction risk are on average moving closer to extinction …. [T]he five principal pressures directly driving biodiversity loss (habitat change, overexploitation, pollution, invasive alien species and climate change) are either constant or increasing in intensity.
This dismal assessment is of course not the fault Mr Djoghlaf nor the CBD itself, but the parties to the Convention, namely the nations of the world. Indeed the CBD is an institution of obvious weakness, hostage always to national capitals and wider power politics. The CBD possesses no power to compel compliance or punish non-compliance. The USA has never even ratified the CBD.
There is a tendency for states to hide behind membership of multilateral institutions – which are then undermined and rendered impotent by lack of effective commitment to agreed goals by national governments. Such has been the fate of the CBD.
There is also a tendency for NGOs to become overly fixated on the same multilateral institutions, tending to forget that voluntary multilateral commitments are no substitute for the tasks of shifting power, confronting the hard facts of political economy and forcing change in development pathways in national contexts.
Overwhelmingly, national politics and economics dominate international environmental negotiations, not visa versa.
It is with these political and economic realities in mind, that the Guardian newspaper in London recently launched its own campaign in the lead up to the talkfest in Nagoya:
The international agreements struck so far have failed miserably in halting the world's biodiversity crisis. … All the international meetings have done so far is to diffuse responsibility for the crisis, allowing member states to hide behind each other's failures. They create a false impression of action, insulating governments from public pressure. We don't accept this outcome, or the apathy and indifference with which governments are prepared to let another environmental calamity develop…. we are compiling a list of 100 specific tasks that will demonstrate whether they are serious about defending the wonders of the natural world. Each will be targeted at a particular government, and they will be asked to sign up to it before the meeting in Nagoya. We are asking governments to supplement the current treaty-making process with something real and specific, in such a way that success becomes possible and failure accountable. The campaign is called Biodiversity100. Time is short, so our intention is to choose the 100 tasks within one month. We will be addressing the G20 countries, as their wealth and power deprives them of excuses for ducking their obligations. We are looking for actions that make a major contribution to protecting a particular species or ecosystem; that are strongly and widely supported by scientific evidence published in academic journals; but that are politically costly or opposed by special interest groups.
Good luck to the Guardian with this campaign. Readers of this blog interested in submitting ideas can do so here.
