Mr.Chairman,
Thank you very much, This is the first time I have spoken in the Council. So may I commend the People's Republic of China for having the courage to bring in outsiders to look at its policies and practices in a very practical way. They have also, may I say, shown considerable courage in the assessment of the state of environment of the country, and we congratulate them on the honesty and the frankness of those assessment. May I also commend the Government of Canada for its part in helping foster this whole exercise .The Council seems to us to be a highly innovative way of working and it merits emulation elsewhere.
I am personally very pleased to be a member of the Council, I am Director General of the World Conservation Union. It is a government and NGO combination, with 133 government members and approlximately 650 NGO organizations around the world, plus 9,000 independent experts who work as volunteer in six technical commissions, Helping to establish and explore the links between environment and development is the fundamental objective of the Union, So it is appropriate that we are here. There is already substantive input from the members of the Union into the Council's work, And I would undertake to ensure that this work continues, and that our inputs are expanded.
Mr.Chairman, we have before us the Fourth Report the Biodiversity Working Group, I would like to congratulate Professor Wang Song and Dr.MacKinnon for this work, Several experts associated with IUCN, including Professor Wang Song, who is a member of the IUCN Council, have taken part in formulating this report. I will confine myself to making three basic points concerning structure, process, and working together in an integrated way.
1. The structural issue was raised in Paragraph7 of the conclusion of the report .It recalls that many participants feel that there is a need for a stronger biodiversity authority in China. I would only comment that experience elsewhere suggests that strengthening existing institutions is often preferable to creating new ones, particularly if a new one would be establishes by drawing biodiversity expertise out of other existing institutions. There is a real risk of sectoralizing biodiversity through the creation of new institutions. If I were to illustrate the point from the experience of my own country, which is New Zealand, I recall that eight or nine years ago, a proposal was made that all the so-called "green sectors"in the public sector might be pulled together into a large consolidated Department of Conservation. This was done. But the problem was that this was achieved by withdrawing the environmental foresters from the Ministry of Forestry, with drawing the environmental agriculturists from the Ministry of a Agriculture, with drawing the environmental fisheries experts from the Ministry of Fisheries, and leaving those ministries without an internal group concerned with biodiversity. Once consolidated together, the tendency became for the government departments to say, "Conservation? That is the job of the Department of Conservation, We don't have to do anything about it ", So I would simply recite the lesson learned in New Zeal and for you, and suggest that building on the authority of existing institutions has merit in this regard, Perhaps there is lesson in this story for China, although of course in this country you are talking about much greater dimensions.
2. Mr.Chairman, the report raises a number of process issues relating to how best to feed information from the Biodiversity Working Group into the decision making processes of the government. We would warmly endorse the recent initiative of the Biodiversity Working Group in setting up a series of studies on the economic benefits of biodiversity, starting with water cachement studies in Hubei Province. This is a clear example of the Working Group generating information of significance in the policy area ,and not least in the area of land use and planning. And we would encourage the group to do more of this in the way envisaged in this report. Perhaps they might go beyond looking at grassland and sub-alpine forest to looking at wetland areas, particularly coastal wetland or flood plains, where there is pressure to modify land use. We feel this would be of benefit and would al so increase the representative number of eco-systems being studied. Similarly, we strongly endorse the"sectoral workshop concept". As Professor Wang Song has said, the workshop held on biodiversity conservation in July was a considerable success. Such workshops in the future might desirably focus on information and issues t hat would help environmental units of the various ministries concerned to work m ore closely with the production units. It is these production units who take the key decisions on resource use, and biodiversity conservation is very much dependent, in our experience, on production side understanding of the values, both economic value and scientific value, of minimizing species loss.
There is also a second process issue, which is raised on Page 11of the report. It raises the proposal that the next step on the biodiversity action planning front would be to develop more specific biodiversity action plans at the local level. Biodiversity conservation is critical for building resilience to change, and enabling local communities to adapt to changing conditions. And the closer the action plans relate to local communities, the better. That is very much the global experience of the last five years.
3. Mr.Chairman, the final general issue is about working in an integrated way, or cross-sectorally. It is also an issue about conservationists'winning resource battles inside government. The memorandun between the Biodiversity Working Group an d NEPA rightly stresses the importance of scientific networks in support of biodiversity work. I need to point out that while such networks have a sound scientific justification, they also need to focus on areas of work that will develop good arguments in support of biodiversity conservationists. Conservationists around the world need to start winning more of the battles for resources and for funds. As a general statement, IUCN believes that biodiversity consevration needs to be addressed more broadly than through an exclusive focus on biology. This is the point that my colleague Claude Martin has just made. While biological information is critical, real solutions to the problems of biodiversity conservation, sustainable use of biological resources, and equitable sharing of benefits would come only through integrating biological information with economic and social factors. We therefore advocate a more integrated approach that has been pursued to date in the Biodiversity Working Group. We believe that this Working Group would be significantly strengthened through incorporating economic and social aspects of biodiversity country study for China was an excellent attempt to integrate the economic issues, and we would encourage more initiatives along these line.
Mr.Chairman, IUCN has been a strong supporter of the Biodiversity Working Group from its very beginning, and we remain committed to its very effective functioning .We are little concerned about the suggestion of splitting the Biodiversity Working Group into two separate sections, Separating the so-called natural eco-systems from agricultural and forestry systems seems artificial, in view of the Convention of Biological Diversity for example, which recognizes the integrated nature of natural and modified eco-systems. To illustrate this point ,the watersheds of China's great rivers cover both natural and cultivated areas To treat them as different would in our view, be, in a sense, a step backwards.
May I conclude by saying that we are prepared to support the Biodiversity Working Group in pursuing its future plans. This could include helping the Group secure funds for such activities as studies on evaluating the impact of traditional Chinese medicine on flora and fauna, studies in sustainable development around a selected nature reserve to promote the biodiversity region concept in China, and studies to develop baseline biodiversity data for future monitoring of fresh water and marine eco-systems. We look forward to having a closer and more practical working relationship with the Biodiversity Working Group.
Thank you very much, Mr.Chairman.