How do we match access and benefit sharing (ABS)with community conservation opportunities? Following CBD’s COP10 in Nagoya last year, CVNI’s Bas Verschuuren was invited to a think-tank on ABS and Protected Areas as well as a workshop on Community Conserved Areas in Europe. This commentary looks at recent provisions made to safeguard traditional knowledge through best practice and legal frameworks.
This season has seen several explorations into the ways we seek to conserve our natural life-support systems. Under the banner of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) new discussions are shaping the future conservation landscapes beyond protected areas. We are creating inroads into the legal aspects of access and benefit sharing related to genetic materials and into areas of high conservation value that have not yet been mapped as such. In doing, so we are venturing into the realms of multifunctional land-use where companies and local populations balance their activities on the land in order to make a living.
Following the first two pillars of the CBD, conservation and sustainable use we have recently seen the Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit sharing coming into force. Although this protocol might not have turned out as strong as the southern nations would have wanted it to be, it is seen by others as considerable achievement. The Nagoya Protocol also has implications for signatories at the national level as they will be tasked with creating the necessary legal and physical infrastructure to enable the sharing of – and access related to - genetic resources.
In many cases, it may be that regulations for bio-prospecting and agreements between industry and traditional knowledge-holders come too late to really make a difference for the improvement of local livelihoods as well as for biodiversity conservation. Nevertheless, it would be naïve to assume we have already exhausted natures’ potential to feed our on-going technological and scientific advances. We also have to see these developments in the context of opening up opportunities for financing conservation of the very ecosystems and species that sustain our global society.
Last July, UNEP’s biodiversity division and the South African NGO Natural Justice called together a creative think tank to discuss these issues in relation to protected areas at IUCN’s Headquarters, in which EarthCollective’s CVNI was also present. One of the specific developments that stood out is the tremendous opportunity that exists for protected area services to lobby their governments to develop necessary provisions with a view to resourcing protected areas through access and benefit sharing (ABS). It also became clear that those protected areas would look different from what many protected area divisions are currently used to and would demand a greater amount of interaction and integration with government departments dealing with other sectors of industry and types of land use.
A traditional healer from the Forikrom community in Ghana collects and processes natural materials into medicine. Under the CBD his knowledge is protected using a Community Protocol and he should be able to set the conditions under which he would or would not want to trade this knowledge and the genetic materials themselves. They may also make provisions for conserving the natural materials and the habitats in which they occur as well as set preconditions for their sustainable use.
To many, these developments are seemingly in line with the evolution of our understanding of conservation, adding new ways of conservation beyond protected areas, through communities and market mechanisms. For example, under the CBD the provisions made to safeguard traditional knowledge for example include best practice such as Community Protocols. Community Protocols help indigenous and local people to register their traditional knowledge in a framework of traditional, national and international law. They support communities to claim their rights to resources and knowledge derived from and related to biodiversity. These are exciting developments as they mark a turn in the recognition in rights from private and communal property to usufruct, customary and what some will call biocultural rights.
Improved legal recognition of people’s relationships with biodiversity and the potential value this has on cultural and traditional conservation activities can be significant, especially in the light of the CBD’s 2020 target. After the failing of the CBD to meet the 2010 target of halting biodiversity loss the CBD’s Programme on Protected Areas now marks a new ambition: to protect 17 percent of the earths’ terrestrial and marine area by 2020. This is an increase of 5 percent. What is significant about this 17 percent is that it will need to be conserved not only through systems of protected areas but also through other equitable and effective management means. As models of exclusionary top down nature protection have long proved ineffective or at best insufficient, we now see strong moves towards the conservation of Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas and areas of special spiritual and cultural significance such as Sacred Natural Sites.
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