The city of Cancun, Mexico, hosted two events in December that are central to the international sustainable development agenda: the Business and Biodiversity Forum, on the 2nd and 3rd, and the 13th Conference of the Parties (COP 13) on Biodiversity, between the 4th and 17th. Check out the main decisions and debates held in Cancun from the perspective of CEBDS and World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD).
Business and Biodiversity Forum
The Business and Biodiversity Forum was attended by over 300 people, most of whom were from the private sector. Among them was the sustainability manager of Votorantim Reservations, Frineia Rezende, who wrote exclusive article about the event for the CEBDS Blog.
The forum has been held since 2011 and, in this edition, the central topics of discussion were the valuation of natural capital; financial solutions; and business, biodiversity and climate. The main messages of the forum were:
- Publicizing the urgency and status of biodiversity issues is not enough. Direct action on biodiversity is more likely to happen based on business cases anchored in science and finance;
- The academy expressed the desire to form partnerships with companies once the need for dissemination and facilitated access to business knowledge was identified;
- Collaboration between companies, NGOs and local communities is a key factor in advancing the challenges of biodiversity, economic prosperity and social well-being.
COP13
Held since 1994, the Biodiversity COP reached its 13th edition with the theme “Mainstreaming Biodiversity for Well-being”. COP13 was marked by great concern for compliance with the AICHI goals and with the certainty that the participation of companies is crucial to this process. Check out a summary of the main highlights of the discussions below:
- High Level Segment: during the 2nd and 3rd of December the following was approved and adopted: Cancun Declaration. The messages were constructed based on commitments to include biodiversity as a central and priority agenda, for example: “Improving frameworks regulatory frameworks for private sector activities, improving incentives and promoting tools for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity”;
- Training: the parties agreed on an action plan (2017 – 2020) that will enhance and support capacity building for the implementation of the Convention and its protocols focused on strengthening the implementation of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011 – 2020 and the AICHI targets;
- Restoration: the COP adopted a short-term action plan for ecosystem restoration and called on parties to promote, support and carry out ecosystem restoration actions;
- Biodiversity and Climate Change: the COP encouraged parties to consider biodiversity when addressing mitigation, adaptation and risk reduction measures associated with climate change, promoting the use of ecosystem-based solutions where possible;
- Climate-related geoengineering: the COP reiterated the importance of adopting a precautionary approach to climate-related geoengineering;
- Resource mobilization: the COP called on its Parties to scale up their efforts to achieve the AICHI targets, including doubling the amount of biodiversity-related financial resources, especially the flow to developing countries;
- Brazil: the country joined the Bonn Challenge (“Bonn Challenge”) and to 20×20 Initiative. With this, Brazil declares its intention to restore, reforest and promote the natural recovery of 12 million hectares of forests by 2030. There was a possibility of the country ratifying the Nagoya Protocol, but this ended up not happening.
