‘Introduce fee for use of natural resources, tighten implementation of laws, make urban cores accountable’: Biodiversity conservation experts
Day Two of the International Workshop on ‘Sustainable Production and Consumption and Novel Economic Instruments for Biodiversity Conservation’ had three special sessions focusing on eco certification, forest certification, organic farming movements and agro-biodiversity conservation, and mainstream development projects for the cause of sustainable production and consumption.
The first session, on market access instruments, addressed eco-certification, micro-finance, and funding towards sustainable use of natural resources and protected areas. The session was chaired by Dr. U Sankar, Honorary Professor, Madras School of Economics (MSE), Chennai, and speakers at the session included Massimiliano Riva, Policy Specialist, Innovative Finance, UNDP, New York; Dr. Shigefumi Okumura, Director, Future Corporation, Japan; Chimed-Ochir Bazarsad, BIOFIN Lead Expert, Mongolia; Dr. TR Manoharan, Forest Stewardship Council National Representative for India; and Dr. Praveen Deshmukh, Counsellor, CII-ITC Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Development. Chimed-Ochir Bazarsad spoke, in detail, about the biodiversity fund. Highlighting the lack of basic financial mechanisms and the poor implementation of laws, he also suggested the introduction of natural resource use fee which could be re-invested towards conservation.
The second session was on mainstreaming development programmes for sustainable production and consumption and discussed fiscal tools for mainstreaming and the Green Development Policy. The session was chaired by Massimiliano Riva, Policy Specialist, Innovative Finance, UNDP, New York. It included speakers like Dr. David Meyers, UNDP Global BIOFIN Team; Ravindra Singh, Senior Advisor, GIZ, New Delhi; Odjargal Davaajav, Officer, Division of Clean Technology, Investment and Production, Ministry of Environment and Tourism, Mongolia; Anabelle Plantilla, Project Manager of BIOFIN, Philippines; and Divya Mittal, IAS, Uttar Pradesh, India.
The final session discussed policy-level strategies to strengthen existing biodiversity-relevant economic instruments and the need to introduce new economic instruments for attaining sustainable production and consumption in BIOFIN countries It was co-chaired by Dr. Amita Prasad, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, India; and Markus Lehmann, Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Secretariat.
Prof. A. Damodaran, faculty from the Economics and Social Sciences area at IIM Bangalore and driving force of the to-day global workshop, explained how urban cores caused depletion of biodiversity and urged BIOFIN to address issues of urban cities polluting the neighbouring towns and villages with their consumption. “We need a de-auxiliarized urban ecosystem which is circular in nature. A system where what goes around urban bio-ecosystem comes around,” he said.
The two-day workshop announced the commencement of the second phase of BIOFIN project in 2018. The second phase envisions implementation of the different learnings gained from BIOFIN phase I.