Harnessing the financing potential of the UNCCD and CBD

The current economic downturn calls for concerted attempts in the development arena to put increasingly limited financial resources to ever better effect. Nowhere are there more ample opportunities for resource efficiency than in the Rio Conventions, where the objectives are mutually supportive in their aim to safeguard our vital ecosystem services.

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) recently took promising steps to harness the joint financing potential of the CBD and UNCCD. It is certainly clear that many of the innovative incentive mechanisms for both land and biodiversity investments are the same. These include payment for environmental services, biodiversity and carbon offsets, fiscal reform, and markets for green products, to name just a few.

Moreover, both Conventions share the drive to demonstrate that investing in natural resources is overwhelmingly an economic and not environmental imperative. Indeed, the forthcoming Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity – dubbed the “Stern Report for Nature” – warns that neglect of our natural services threatens to drive us into an economic catastrophe far greater than we currently face.

The CBD recently invited the GM to share its ongoing work on Economic Valuations of Land during its Third Meeting of the Ad Hoc Working Group to Review the Implementation of the Convention (WGRI-3), held in Nairobi, Kenya. The Valuations are key instruments in creating compelling arguments for investment, heightening governments’ appreciation of the costs, benefits and trade-offs of alternative policy options. Their comprehensive approach encompasses the value of all natural resources and ecosystem functions related to land, including biodiversity. In Zambia for example, this work is translating into the inclusion of a five-year programme for the systematic Economic Valuation of Land in the country’s 6th National Development Plan. 

The GM looks very much forward to stepping-up its collaboration with the CBD, so as to test its strategic and operational instruments of better governance in financial resource mobilisation in the context of the CBD, as the GM is currently doing in the context of the UN Forum on Forests in close cooperation with the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and other international partners. 

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