Keeping Track of the Nairobi Biodiversity Talks: a Guide to IISD Coverage

The 1992 Earth Summit spawned three “Rio Conventions” (on biodiversity, climate change, and desertification).   With the 20th anniversary just two years away, negotiators in all three Conventions agree they should be more synchronized – last week at biodiversity talks in Nairobi, and next week at climate-change talks in Bonn.   Here’s a brief look at coverage to date.

24 May 2010 | NAIROBI | Dig through the negotiating texts of any of the Rio Conventions, and you’ll find something along these lines:

“The objectives of the three Rio conventions namely the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the United Nation Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are mutually supportive and cannot be achieved in isolation from each others.”

That’s from a February note to the Convention by Executive Secretary Ahmed Djoghlaf reiterating his long-standing call for an expert group to address the best ways of unifying the missions of the three Conventions.

The issue of whether or not to form that expert group was on the agenda these last two weeks in Nairobi as negotiators from countries that have signed the CBD hammered out technical details under the auspices of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA), but no consensus was reached on the issue.

Following the Negotiations on IISD

As always, the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) offered the best daily coverage of the negotiations and also published an exhaustive summary of the two weeks’ proceedings.   They’re doing the same this week for the CBD’s Ad Hoc Open-ended Working Group on Review of Implementation of the Convention (WGRI).

Anyone looking to really get up to speed should read the full document.