Post-COP10 Biodiversity Strategy
Takafumi Ikuta
Research Fellow
January 7, 2011 (Friday)
The Tenth Ordinary Meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP10) to the Convention on Biological Diversity, held in Nagoya in October, 2010, adopted both the Aichi Target and the Nagoya Protocol and was a resounding success. One might say that the age of earnest efforts towards preserving biodiversity has come at last.
The Aichi Target is a strategic plan which aims to “take effective and urgent action to halt the loss of biodiversity in order to ensure that by 2020 ecosystems are resilient and continue to provide essential services.” Goals such as “establishing 17 per cent of terrestrial and inland water areas and 10 per cent of marine and coastal areas as nature reserves,” “restoring at least 15 per cent of degraded ecosystems,” “preventing invasion by alien species” were agreed to, with a total of 20 goals in all. Regulations regarding biodiversity preservation will most certainly be strengthened in Japan and abroad.
The Nagoya Protocol is a set of rules that governs the distribution of profits garnered from the use of biological resources. Corporations that make use of the biological resources of other countries are required to gain the permission of those countries beforehand as well as enter into contracts which clearly define the distribution of any profits arising from product development. With effectuation of the protocol slated for 2012, domestic laws in Japan will begin to be overhauled as well. This will no doubt apply pressure towards increased procurement costs for biological resources.
For companies, biodiversity preservation is not simply a form of contribution to society. In the future, tightening regulations and increases in countermeasure costs, and especially how they will be reflected in conditions on procurement, will mean that biodiversity preservation will become something with which companies must deal in terms of management of risk to one’s core business. When one considers not only usage of biological resources, but the ecosystem degradation resultant of energy and resource development and land use, the need to scrutinize the effects of most business activities, including supply chains, on biodiversity and reduce risk to a minimum becomes apparent.
In contrast to such problems, an increase in business opportunities is also expected. The UN estimates that the biodiversity business market will reach approximately $280 billion in 2020. Specific goals for financial aid from developed countries to developing countries are scheduled to be finalized by 2012. Competition in international business development is likely to become heated in anticipation of an increase in circulation of funding for biodiversity preservation. Outside of Japan, countries are performing trials of quantitative evaluation of ecosystem degradation and utilization of market mechanisms.
The Japanese government has announced that it will contribute $2 billion over 3 years in support of developing countries, but it is not enough to simply provide funding; it must also think seriously of ways to turn this into business opportunities for Japanese companies. The government has also set the domestic goal of instituting a strategy for establishing nature preserves in every prefecture in Japan by 2012. Municipal governments have also begun to make endeavors towards building attractive, biodiversity-friendly communities and cities.
Hosting COP10 was an opportunity for Japan to deepen its understanding of biodiversity-related problems. It remains to be seen whether or not companies and local communities can grasp their own value and create it anew from the perspective of biodiversity.
