CBD Alliance SBI 7 Closing statement
This SBI began with a warning that Africa bears the brunt of biodiversity loss. Home to 25 per cent of the world’s biodiversity, it has lost about 24 per cent of its species. Vast forested areas in Europe are in flames, damaging ecosystems irrecoverably. Far worse forest fires raged in the Amazon last year, with many areas fragmented by industrial logging or conversion to pastures and intensive agriculture. In Asia, forests are lost to mining - often meant for “green” transitions and oil palm plantations. These losses are unfolding as Southeast Asia braces for a potentially record-breaking “super El Niño” in the coming year, with unusually high Pacific Ocean temperatures expected to intensify heat, drought and extreme weather.
In every corner of the world, Indigenous Peoples and local communities bear the brunt of this extraction and collapse. However, very few discussions during this meeting directly addressed the underlying causes and drivers, destructive industries, and the macro economic realities that facilitate these outcomes and perpetuate inequities.
While mainstreaming should concretely identify ways to put biodiversity and rights first in all decision making, no action to effectively ensure that biodiversity is not destroyed has been proposed. Sharing more best practices will not reverse the power imbalance between biodiversity and economic interests.
The Global Review should not only clearly reflect whether the GBF is being implemented and if the necessary support for it is provided, but to be truly useful it needs to also assess whether the GBF itself is addressing the biodiversity crisis adequately. We should not be accelerating its implementation if it is heading in the wrong direction. Therefore, a review of the biodiversity-effectiveness of each policy
measure under the GBF needs to be undertaken.
Substantial work remains to be undertaken for the global review. The review should have clear and concrete processes, including dialogues amongst countries, and with rightsholders, on the implementation of the GBF, and the necessary actions required to ensure meaningful outcomes.
The resource mobilisation agenda exposed fundamental disagreements over responsibility for providing biodiversity finance. Efforts to broaden the contributor base must not dilute developed country obligations under Article 20, circumvent Convention procedures, or use externally-developed criteria to redefine which countries should provide or receive finance.
Discussions on the institutional structure to operate the permanent financial mechanism also remain unresolved: any mechanism and its trustee must be under the authority of the COP and provide new, additional, predictable, adequate, non-debt creating and accessible finance, including direct access for developing countries, Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
At the same time, mobilising more finance is only part of the challenge. SBI’s work has also highlighted how harmful incentives and financial flows, debt and fiscal constraints negatively impact biodiversity, and the need for tax justice, financial alignment of private financial flows with the GBF. COP17 must address both sides of this equation: fulfilling public finance obligations and changing the financial and economic systems that continue to drive biodiversity loss.
On digital sequence information on genetic resources (DSI), the need for accountability and transparency to Parties is paramount. This applies to users of DSI, databases and all other actors involved in the administration, operationalization and governance of the multilateral mechanism and the Cali Fund. Potential conflicts of interest of experts, consultants and other service providers should be avoided or managed to maintain the integrity of outputs and processes.
As biological and genetic materials, and data/information generated therefrom are sovereign assets of Parties and their Indigenous Peoples and local communities, stringent action is needed against biopiracy, including digital biopiracy. Two years on from decision 16/2, there has been limited or no actions by databases or database-hosting Parties to address the transparency gaps in databases, or to curb the inequitable extraction of DSI from the South to the North.
History should tell us about the dangers of hype and the danger of focusing on symptoms rather than underlying causes. Synthetic biology is a resource-intensive undertaking, and yet some Parties block an essential ingredient that could help ensure that resources are spent wisely, namely horizon-scanning, assessment and monitoring. Investing in thoroughly examining reliability and effectiveness and hoped-for benefits of technologies and applications, as well as assessing risk and wider impacts, and more appropriate alternatives, is essential. The capacity to do so is at the heart of sovereign decision-making and policy development on synthetic biology. Without a clear and committed precautionary approach, synthetic biology will be yet another factor undermining biodiversity.