Newsletter – Biodiversity

On Saturday the 15th of September 2012, thousands of citizens around the
world attended citizen consultations to express their views of global biodiversity policies and actions. The results will be presented at COP11 in India, October 2012.

COP11 has just finished and in this newsletter we give you news from World Wide Views on Biodiversity’s participation in the COP. We have videos from some of the events, interviews with CBD’s Executive Secretary, a citizen from France and photos from the COP.

COP11 finished successfully for World Wide Views on Biodiversity

The international negotiations at COP11 in Hyderabad, India came to a positive end this Friday. The formulations of the final resolution text is still in preparation but the existing draft of the Eleventh Meeting of Parties of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (COP11) calls on all countries to support projects such as the World Wide Views on Biodiversity. In decision texts L28, section D about the United Nations Decade on Biodiversity, paragraph no. 24, said that the Conference of the Parties:

“Encourages Parties, relevant organizations and stakeholders to support and contribute to communication initiatives, such as the World Wide Views on Biodiversity, which combine the implementation of Strategic Goals A and E regarding mainstreaming of biodiversity, participatory planning, knowledge management and capacity building”.

The WWViews citizen consultation model is getting acceptance in the UN system and it may be the beginning of the development of a more citizen involving approach to international decision-making processes. This opens for the possibility to arrange more World Wide Views meetings in the future, hopefully again in connection with COP12 in South Korea in 2014.

The WWViews delegation at COP11 participated at a Side Event on October 17 and a Special Event on October 18. At these events there was a panel debate with project managers, experts and citizens, showing of the documentary video about WWViews and questions from the audience. All this together spread a profound knowledge about the World Wide Views on Biodiversity project along with distribution of the Results Report.

Side Event and final resolution text

The World Wide Views on Biodiversity delegation filmed some of the events and made interviews with participants as well. One of the videos partly shows extracts from the Side Event and partly shows that the World Wide Views on Biodiversity is as a part of the final resolution text as mentioned above. Finally Bjørn Bedsted, Global Coordinator of WWViews hands over the Results Report to Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias, Executive Secretary of CBD.

See the video of the Side Event and the final resolution text here

Interview with CBD’s Executive Secretary

Bjørn Bedsted, Global WWViews Coordinator, interviewed Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias, CBD’s Executive Secretary, on the importance of the World Wide Views on Biodiversity project as a citizen participation project. Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias further elaborated on future use of integrating participatory projects like the World Wide Views in global policy making.

See the interview with Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias here

Rick Worthington at the Side Event

At the Side Event several speakers sat at the panel, Rick Worthington, Professor of Politics, USA, and partner of the WWViews in Phoenix/Arizona, USA, was among one of them. He shared his views on citizen involvement projects such as World Wide Views on Biodiversity, sustained engagement – more science museums was involved in WWViews on Biodiversity than WWViews on Global Warming in 2009 and he commented on some of the results from the citizen meetings.

See Rick Worthington at the Side Event here

Atul Pandya at the Side Event

Atul Pandya, Center for Environmental Education, Ahmedabad, India, was another panel member at the Side Event and a WWViews partner from India. He explained about the Indian citizens’ seriousness and ownership of the process of the meetings and the results.

Listen to Atul Pandya’s experiences here

Interview with a French citizen

At the Side Event citizen Cécile Orodé-Ugwumadu-Aubineau from France participated as a panel member, where she told about her experiences as a citizen during the World Wide Views meeting. She was also interviewed by the WWViews team and shared her concern for nature and its future and the gap between policy-makers and citizens.

Listen to Cécile Orodé-Ugwumadu-Aubineau’s thoughts here

Documentary video about WWViews

The documentary video about World Wide Views premiered at the Side Event and was shown again at the Special Event. The documentary video shows the process of the citizen meetings worldwide with recordings from many of the participating countries. This is a short version of the documentary video a longer version will be available soon.

See the documentary video here

Photos from COP11

Go to our flickr set to see photos of WWViews at COP11 in India here. Among them are photos from the Side Event and the Special Event along with photos of Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias receiving and reading the Results Report.

Partner feature

For photos from the WWViews meetings visit our Flickr photo pool!