Nagoya Protocol
On 29 October 2010, some 18,000 participants representing the 193 Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and their partners closed the Nagoya Biodiversity Summit by adopting historic decisions that will permit the community of nations to meet the unprecedented challenges of the continued loss of biodiversity compounded by climate change.
The Governments agreed on a package of measures that will ensure that the ecosystems of the planet will continue to sustain human well-being into the future.
Goals of Nagoya Protocol
The meeting achieved its three inter-linked goals:
- Adoption of a new ten year Strategic Plan to guide international and national efforts to save biodiversity through enhanced action to meet the objectives of the Convention on Biological Diversity
- A resource mobilization strategy that provides the way forward to a substantial increase to current levels of official development assistance in support of biodiversity
- A new international protocol on access to and sharing of the benefits from the use of the genetic resources of the planet.
Notable Statement
“If Kyoto entered history as the city where the climate accord was born, Nagoya will be remembered as the city where the biodiversity accord was born.”
Notable Point
- United States is NOT among the nearly 200 signatories of the Access and Benefit Sharing rules of the Nagoya Protocol. Getting the Americans into the net will be a key aim of the next U.N. summit on biodiversity to be held in New Delhi in 2012.
Nagoya’s Outcome: Aichi Target
The strategic plan which is outcome of the Nagoya Protocol is “Aichi Target”. It includes 20 headline targets, organized under five strategic goals that address the underlying causes of biodiversity loss, reduce the pressures on biodiversity, safeguard biodiversity at all levels, enhance the benefits provided by biodiversity, and provide for capacity-building.
The important agreements were as follows:
- At least halve and where feasible bring close to zero the rate of loss of natural habitats including forests
- Established a target of 17 per cent of terrestrial and inland water areas and 10 per cent of marine and coastal areas
- Through conservation and restoration, Governments will restore at least 15 percent of degraded areas
- Will make special efforts to reduce the pressures faced by coral reefs.
- Parties also agreed to a substantial increase in the level of financial resources in support of implementation of the Convention.
The Nagoya Access and Benefit Sharing Protocol
- This is called the new ABS Rules.
On the last day of the convention, the International Regime on Access and Benefit Sharing of Genetic Resources (ABS) came out.
- The treaty is a Protocol to the main convention, and lays down basic ground rules on how nations cooperate in obtaining genetic resources from animals to plants and fungi.
- Please note that countries could not reach to a legally binding protocol, yet it outlines how the benefits, arising for example when a plant’s genetics are turned into a commercial product such as a pharmaceutical, are shared with the countries and communities who have conserved and managed that resource often for millennia.
Important Points
- The new Nagoya Protocol on ABS lays out rules on how derivatives-substances and compounds derived from genetic resources- will be dealt with under an ABS regime.
- It addresses the issue of traditional knowledge and pathogens-for example how developed countries may in emergency situations obtain a flu virus in order to develop a vaccine to counter a possible epidemic.
- It says governments should begin considering ways of recompensing developing countries for genetic material that may have been collected years, decades even centuries ago- if in future they become used to produce say a new pharmaceutical or crop variety.
Complete Details are available here:
http://www.cbd.int/doc/press/2010/pr-2010-10-29-cop-10-en.pdf
Copy of ABS is located here
http://ictsd.org/downloads/2010/11/abs-protocol.pdf
