14 DAY TRIAL // Despite initial dissensions among the participants at the Conference of the Parties 10 (COP10) of the UN Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), nations eventually managed to come to an important agreement regarding preserving biodiversity on Earth.
The decision was made Friday morning, when representatives of nearly 200 countries took a commitment to protect 10 percent of the world's oceans and 17 percent of all land mass by no later than 2020.
The conference, which was held in Nagoya, Japan, acknowledged that biodiversity cannot be protected in the 1 percent of oceans' surface that is currently protected, and in the 13 percent of all land mass.
Expectations were however a lot higher for the COP10. Environmentalists were hoping to obtain commitments on reducing pollution, ending subsidies for destructive practices and promoting habitat conservation, New Scientist reports.
But even this agreement was close to not happening at all, due to divergences between nations on how to equitably share biological resources between developed countries and the developing world.
This focal point in the discussions is called the Access and Benefits sharing, and the document regulates how developed nations support and benefit from biodiversity, which is mostly located in the developed world and the Third World.
Poorer nations would in return receive aids via technology transfers, and cooperation in domains randing from cosmetics to pharmaceuticals.
The recently agreed-upon document is called the Nagoya Protocol, and it will provide a framework on how to avoid bio-piracy in the developing world starting in 2020, when it goes into effect.
“We've seen history in the making here in Nagoya with a landmark agreement now in place that defines the future for life on Earth,” said in a statement the director general of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Julia Marton-Lefèvre.
The bad thing about this agreement is that it is not legally-binding, meaning that adhering to the proposed measures remains voluntary on the part of signing nations. The US is not a part of the agreement, and did not attend the conference.
“We were disappointed that most rich countries came to Nagoya with empty pockets – unable or unwilling to provide the resources that will make it possible for the developing world to implement their ambitious targets,” says the director general of WWF International, Jim Leape.
Japan alone took the leap, promising to fund the conservations effort with $2 billion.