India should take leadership as it has highest number of endangered species

Kabir Arora / 16 October 2012 

Reflections of Mr Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias (Executive Secretary of Convention of Biodiversity) on India being a host nation for CBD as shared with Indian youth delegation (Swetha Stothra Bhashyam, N.S. Prasad, Vinay Bandari).

India had passed a Biodiversity Act ten years ago in 2002, which is one of the few countries who has a biodiversity law including Brazil, Australia, Norway and few more The law talks about Access and benefit sharing and has also established the National Biodiversity Authority at Chennai. While we appreciate the work they had done in the past and we would expect them to ratify the Nagoya protocol this year. As the host country India gets the presidency for the next two years. And as it has been done in the past by the various host countries, India also has to take extended leadership and constructive role guiding the world in the field of biodiversity.

India should also identify traditions that help protect nature the way Japan identified Satoyama. This should be easy for India as it has lot of such traditions coming down through generations. They should take leadership in Asia as it has the highest number of endangered searches in the world. They needs to focus on fishing stock and lead the negotiations on Oceans biodiversity as this is the topic in the limelight this year COP.

Food security is a great concern for India. Thus, India should use food biodiversity to combat food scarcity.  This would be another area India needs to look into. India should also play a role in enhancing South-South cooperation (increase contact between southern hemisphere nations) and help share the abundance of knowledge that already existed in these countries.

Mr. Dias believes that the civil society along with youth can play a very influential role in the policies that come out of this COP. The Japanese civil society played a major role in pressurising the Japanese government to declare this decade as the UN Decade on Biodiversity 2010-2020 by the UN general assembly.

He hopes that the Indian civil society can also take up such initiatives and help pressurize the state and national governments in taking up greater responsibility in biodiversity conservation.