'Biodiversity is the foundation of human well-being and its degradation calls for immediate action to reach the 2010 biodiversity target’, speakers from the European Parliament, the European Commission and other European institutions confirmed at today’s conference of the Parliamentary Intergroup on Sustainable Development.
Struan Stevenson, Chair of the Intergroup, set the stage for the session with a strong plea to take action in all policy areas related to biodiversity, and reminded participants of the powerful force of partnerships like Countdown 2010. Responding to a detailed presentation of the European Commission’s Communication on ‘Halting the loss of biodiversity by 2010 – and beyond’ by Guy Duke, Adamos Adamou, the European Parliament’s Rapporteur on this issue, highlighted a number of challenges in implementing the action plan, including a reduction in the use of pesticides, a moratorium on deep sea bottom trawling, and the quest of implementing the Convention on Biological Diversity. Sebastian Winkler, Head of Countdown 2010, challenged participants to move from words to action. Using figures from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, he stressed the importance of ecosystem services and the role of communication in creating political support.
The European Economic and Social Committee’s opinion in support for the Biodiversity Communication will be published early next year, announced its Rapporteur Lutz Ribbe. However, the communication would fail to address a number of systemic issues, including the fact that biodiversity loss is a result of millions of small individual decisions, all of them legal. The Committee of the Regions, represented by Wim van Gelder, unanimously adopted its opinion on the biodiversity communication yesterday. Pointing out successful examples of biodiversity conservation on the regional level, he expressed doubt whether the 2010 biodiversity target would be achievable taking into account the insufficient allocation of funds for the next budget period.
The following session focussed on the sectoral objectives for biodiversity in the context of the European Union, including: Agriculture and rural development (Shelby Matthews, COPA-COGECA), Fisheries (MEP Ioannis Gklavakis; Doug Beveridge, Europêche), Forestry (Natalie Hufnagl, CEPF), Climate Change (Mike Harley, Natural England), Monitoring and Indicators (Anne Teller, SEBI 2010). With a view on global biodiversity, MEP Alain Lipietz introduced the Message from Paris and Nadia de Brito Pires explained how the European Commission’s DG Trade deals with biodiversity. The closing session dealt with supporting measures, including research (Martin Sharman, DG Research), business partnerships (Arnaud Colson, European Aggregates Association) and communication (Peter Bos, Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality).
