The big corporate brotherhood encircling COP10's premises are united by a very simple creed: a vague, weak treaty is better for business and Nature must be monetized to have any worth at all. We in civil society must be equally clear in our thinking if we hope to foil their threat.
Thousands of activists are expected to come to COP10 representing issues as varied as the living world itself. Finding common ground and mutually intelligible language will be a real challenge and we might as well start those explorations here.
Some neo-abolitionists are seeking a Universal Declaration of Planetary Rights that would liberate natural life from the slavery of property law and accord it freedoms of its own. Imagining how that could and should work is the first step to achieving it and we look forward to your help.
For those visiting Japan for the first time, there are lots of lovely sane traditions here that have nurtured biodiversity for many centuries. Though hard to see in the gargantuan COP10 hall or the lifeless river next door, this wisdom does survive and is still struggling to prevail, and we offer samples here.
For many long-time activists, our struggle is our glory, but just to keep from burning out we've learned to love our partying, too. COP10 will offer some deadly struggles, but also many lively performances, concerts and side events that will be listed here.
COP10.org teamed up with Earth Foundation and Big Medicine to cover and/or interview some of the most compelling voices at COP10. The concerns these individuals articulate still define the greatest threats to the CBD treaty's future and biodiversity overall. Besides the samples below, many more perspectives will be posted soon at the Earth Foundation Vimeo channel.
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Sparking the most densely attended COP10 press conference, Harrison Ford spoke of the need for a broader and more passionate environmental movement and urged the US to end its holdout status and ratify the CBD. Co-featuring Ahmed Djoghlaf, CBD Secretariat Executive Secretary; Russell Mittermeier, Executive Director of Conservation International; and former UN University vice rector Kinhide Mushakoji presenting a CBD ratification appeal from Japanese civil society to the White House and US Senate. Moderated by ubiquitous COP10 coordinator, David Ainsworth. See Japanese appeal here.
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Mona Polacca is a Hopi-Tewa/Havasupai elder and member of the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers. Grandmother Mona has a Masters degree in Social Work and serves in several United Nations indigenous issues committees. She is also strongly committed to the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth and offered a bracing wake-up call to corporate/consumerist society in her Nagoya presentations.
Just past 1:30 this morning, a Nagoya meeting hall packed with representatives of 179 countries heaved a collective sigh of relief and burst into a standing ovation. After two weeks of tense negotiations, some deft diplomacy by Japan, and a final meeting that balanced for 8 hours on a razor's edge between failure and success, delegates to the UN biodiversity conference adopted an agreement on access and benefit sharing for genetic resources - and gave the world desperately-needed proof that governments can indeed work together to solve environmental problems. Within minutes, the delegates also adopted a strategic plan for conservation and a deal to secure financing for that plan by 2012.
"We've overcome the curse of Copenhagen," said The Nature Conservancy's Andrew Deutz immediately after the decision was reached.
THE NEW CBD TREATY IS IN TROUBLE Awaiting the "High Level" Cavalry
Nagoya - Oct 28, 2010: In brief, COP10 is turning out to be as divided, rancorous and stubbornly deadlocked as feared, especially regarding ABS, the Access and Benefit Sharing sections, which have generated most of the conflict thus far. Everything now awaits the 11th hour appearance of the fabled "political will" as the "high level" delegates arrive and sit down for the final grueling negotiating rounds.
See reference links below for more news on the ground.
Delegates, when you arrive in Nagoya, Japan this October for the UN’s 10th conference on biodiversity, you’ll be meeting at a decisive moment. For the agreements you reach, or fail to, at COP10* may well determine whether many forms of life survive or die out — including the large-brained, spiritually-inclined but as yet self-defeating, toolmaking ape, a relative newcomer to this biodiverse world.
Moreover, given the bitter failure of last December’s climate change conference in Copenhagen, what you achieve in Nagoya will affect not only biodiversity but also global warming. COP10 in Japan is the last major UN conference before the world gathers in Mexico in late November for yet another round of climate change talks. Delegates and NGOs heading to Cancun will be nervously watching the outcome of your negotiations, and your success or failure will directly impact their chances for reaching a climate change agreement that makes a genuine difference.
But in and of itself, COP10 is extremely important. One of the most idealistic yet crucial goals is to secure a treaty committing your nations to binding targets for preserving biodiversity over the coming decade. Make no mistake: Nagoya is not merely an excuse for another UN gabfest. As UN negotiators, you know that UN meetings are like sausage-making — slow, messy, involving all manner of ingredients, and observed with a feeling of queasiness. That said, unless the UN process, including its limitations, is understood by conference veterans and rookies alike, COP10 will be fated to fail before the microphones are even switched on. This need not happen.
To participants and lay readers alike: Whether you’re sitting in the main hall, back in the pressroom, manning an NGO booth, or following the conference from far away with ever-increasing concern, you have a role to play. Here, then, for readers at all levels of involvement, is a basic guide to what takes place at UN conferences — your program notes, as it were, for COP10. Based on years of personal experience and spiced with anecdotal chagrin, what follows may shed some light on how we can progress from mere good intentions to a binding United Nations treaty.
*10th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity.
Step One: The Script
Every UN conference begins with a draft text of the proposed treaty, the codex upon which official discussions proceed. The text that arrives in Nagoya will already have been edited countless times. And the working draft for COP10 will make for heavy reading: drafts of UN treaties can run to more than 200 pages, and their dense jargon, Delphic phrasing and alphabet soup of acronyms makes deciphering the exact meaning of many of their phrases, let alone sentences or paragraphs, a daunting task.
During negotiations, each line of text is debated, criticized, parsed for hidden meaning, and analyzed for implications regarding matters of international and domestic concern, whether political, social, economic, scientific, ethnic, gender-related, or religious. Provided all goes smoothly, delegates will agree to the final wording. But imagine a room teeming with politicians, lawyers, academics, editors and interpreters, each cluster representing one of up to 193 UN member countries, aided in turn by UN staff, all trying to reach agreement. Now picture each of these individuals having to check with their bosses back home to see if the proposed compromise wording, or even a newly inserted adjective, meets with approval. By comparison, The Council of Nicaea was a church picnic.
The golden poison frog (Phyllobates terribilis) is one of many endangered amphibian species.K. Kitchin, V. Hurst/Photoshot/VISUM/Still Pictures
The future of the world's biodiversity hangs in the balance as countries convene for crucial negotiations next week in Nagoya, Japan. The 193 signatory nations to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) pledged eight years ago to cut species loss "significantly" by this year. But studies show that the health of global biodiversity is reaching a crisis point, with extinctions of mammal and amphibian species continuing to rise (see Nature 462, 263; 2009).
Conservation leaders hope that the meeting of CBD nations on 18–29 October will give the green light to a new set of international agreements to help protect biodiversity. These include 20 new ambitions to be met by 2020, such as halving the loss and degradation of forests and other natural habitats, and ensuring that agriculture and aquaculture are sustainably managed (see Nature doi:10.1038/news.2010.31; 2010).
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's environment minister said on Tuesday he aimed to pass a climate bill soon and forge ahead with plans to launch an emissions trading scheme but gave few clues on how to win help from opposition parties in a divided parliament.
Environment Minister Ryu Matsumoto also said a U.N. meeting in Japan this month must agree on a global target to protect the diversity of plants and animals after failure to reach a goal set in 2002 of a "significant reduction" in losses by 2010.
Japan's climate bill, which backs the creation of an emissions trading scheme, was shelved earlier this year and faces an uncertain fate in a divided parliament, where opposition parties can block legislation in the upper house.
New York – Hopes have been dashed that the annual gathering of the world’s leaders at the United Nations General Assembly would be presented with a new impetus to implement the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Efforts to complete a new treaty by 21 September that is aimed at preventing biopiracy and that was to be adopted in October, have reached another impasse.
Negotiators from more than 100 countries that are Party to the CBD embarked on a marathon in Montreal from 18 to 21 September in a race to finalise the text of a protocol to ensure the fair and equitable sharing of benefits from the utilization of genetic resources.
After more than five years of difficult negotiations with strong resistance from the biotechnology, pharmaceutical and agribusiness sectors, some developed countries (especially Canada and the European Union) finally maintained their stance to not have a comprehensive treaty with an effective compliance system.
Excerpt:"There is not a single effective instrument for containing manmade global warming anywhere on earth. The response to climate change, which was described by Lord Stern as 'a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen', is the greatest political failure the world has ever seen."
A cautionary unto tragic tale with obvious implications for Nagoya, COP10 and biodiversity... - Ed.
Climate change enlightenment was fun while it lasted. But now it's dead
By George Monbiot, The Guardian 21st September 2010
The collapse of the talks at Copenhagen took away all momentum for change and the lobbyists are back in control. So what next?
The closer it comes, the worse it looks. The best outcome anyone now expects from December’s climate summit in Mexico is that some delegates might stay awake during the meetings. When talks fail once, as they did in Copenhagen, governments lose interest. They don’t want to be associated with failure, they don’t want to pour time and energy into a broken process. Nine years after the world trade negotiations moved to Mexico after failing in Qatar, they remain in diplomatic limbo. Nothing in the preparations for the climate talks suggests any other outcome.
KJ #75: BIODIVERSITY Japan’s Satoyama and Our Shared Future
"This luminous edition of Kyoto Journal is largely a prayer to and for COP10, the UN ’s 10th Conference of Parties to the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) that convenes in Nagoya this October. Since the 2020 biodiversity targets it adopts will touch every ecosystem on earth, it may be our last chance to save our planet’s wildness and our own evolutionary ass. The meditations on biodiversity’s preciousness and peril assembled here are thus meant to inspire all COP10 participants to do the right ethical/ecological/ancestral thing, and create a treaty that really works..."
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Nice parting gift...
Big News
In "Blessed Unrest" planetary visionary Paul Hawkins sees the hundreds of thousands of grassroots groups in action around the world today as the emergence of a global immune system. He believes if we all recognize that fact we can collaborate more intelligently and learn valuable tactics and strategies from our own immune cells as well.
"There is not a single effective instrument for containing manmade global warming anywhere on earth. The response to climate change, which was described by Lord Stern as 'a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen', is the greatest political failure the world has ever seen."
