COP10.org

Message for the Congressional Briefing by Conservation International, Washington, DC

Edward Norton
UN Biodiversity Goodwill Ambassador
29 September 2010

In a few weeks, when the 193 parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity converge in Japan to negotiate a new Strategic Plan for 2011-2020, American conservation organizations, scientists, and academics, leaders in the field of saving life on earth, will look on as observers. They will not have an official voice, nor a vote on the final agenda reached at the conference. How sadly ironic, that the country whose initiative gave rise to the CBD and has contributed so much to domestic and global conservation efforts, is not a ratified member of the CBD.

Seventeen years have passed since President Bill Clinton sent the Convention on Biological Diversity to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee to begin the process of ratification. It is time to complete it. Fragile marine and terrestrial ecosystems are disappearing at an alarming rate. Only collective, global action can inhibit or possibly reverse these forbidding trends.

 

Life on Planet Earth Depends on Biodiversity

Leda Huta
Executive Director, Endangered Species Coalition
Huffington Post
June 24, 2010

In this "International Year of Biodiversity," we need to recommit our attention and action on saving life on planet Earth. With all of us naturally drawn to the continually unfolding disaster of the BP Oil Spill, an important assessment of how the world is doing on protecting wildlife slipped under the radar screen for most of us.

The United Nations recently released report, the Global Biodiversity Outlook 3 that updates us on the state of wildlife across the planet. In 2002, world leaders came together and set goals for themselves in reducing the rate of loss of our tremendous biological resources. This Global Biodiversity Outlook is an assessment of how far we've come in meeting those goals. In scientific speak, none of the countries "met their targets."

By Emily Holding
San Diego Newsroom
April 6, 2010

Biodiversity update -- Research shows that DNA is being lost at alarming rates. Populations of freshwater fish have declined by nearly 50 percent and populations of terrestrial and marine species have fallen by around 30 percent since 1987, according to a May 2008 article coauthored by Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive director of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity; Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s environment administrator and Achim Steiner, the executive director of the U.N. Environment Program.

Biological diversity is a vital issue because, according to a publication from the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, about 70 percent of the world’s poor live in rural areas and depend on biodiversity for their well-being, more than 3 billion depend on marine and coastal resources and 1.6 billion rely on forests and forest products for their livelihoods.

July 21, 2009

Re: Convention on Biological Diversity ratification

Dear Madame Secretary and Senators Kerry and Lugar:

One of the great challenges of today is to stem the extremely high rate of species extinctions and habitat loss currently devastating Earth’s wondrous natural diversity. The 17 year-old Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is the only comprehensive agreement dedicated to the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity. Only four nations in the world are not yet parties to the CBD: Andorra, Iraq, Somalia and the United States.

Although the United States has sent large delegations to each of the conferences of the parties to the CBD, our influence on the treaty’s implementation is severely constrained by the fact that we are not a party. This not only impedes our ability to advance the conservation of global biodiversity, it also constrains our ability to participate in decisions with potentially major impacts on important sectors of our economy, such as pharmaceutical development. Thus, it is strongly in our national interest to become a party to the CBD. Accordingly, our organizations – with millions of American members committed to biodiversity conservation – now ask you to support U.S. ratification of this critical international agreement.