Scientists expect Brazil to ratify Nagoya Protocol this year

Following recent passage of Brazil's new biodiversity law, the scientific community expects Brazil to confirm commitment to international agreement.

By Elton Alisson

Agência FAPESP – Brazil’s new biodiversity law, recently passed to regulate access to the country’s genetic heritage, especially as embodied in native animals and plants and the associated knowledge base of traditional communities, is a major step forward in this area, researchers say.

The scientific community expects Brazil to take another important step in the coming months by ratifying the Nagoya Protocol, an international agreement on access to genetic resources and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from their use. The protocol was established in 2010 as a supplement to the 1992 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

This expectation was highlighted by Brazilian scientist Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias, CBD Executive Secretary, during a symposium to discuss Brazil’s role in promoting international biodiversity conservation, held on June 11 at the University of São Paulo (USP).

“Various groups in Brazil have been refusing to discuss ratification of the Nagoya Protocol until a law was passed to assure access to and fair sharing of genetic resources, among other preconditions. Now that Congress has passed the new biodiversity law, we expect it to ratify the protocol before the year is out,” Dias told Agência FAPESP.

In his view, ratification is fundamental to consolidate the implementation of the Nagoya Protocol, which entered into force in October 2014 after being ratified by 50 countries. Ratification by Brazil, which has the greatest biodiversity of any country in the world, would encourage other parties to the CBD that have not yet ratified the protocol to confirm their commitment to the international agreement.

“Ratification of the protocol by Brazil will be highly symbolic and will spur other countries to accelerate their discussion processes with a view to taking the same action,” Dias said.

“Brazil has more than 15 years of experience in discussing access to and fair sharing of genetic resources. So we can contribute a lot to international decisions in this area. For this to happen, however, we need to ratify the Nagoya Protocol.”

According to Dias, several European countries are set to ratify the protocol this year. However, implementation of the international commitment faces difficulties. Only 62 of the 196 parties to the CBD have ratified the protocol so far.

“We’re promoting continuous efforts to make biodiversity a mainstream issue through awareness raising and dissemination of information to different economic sectors of the countries that have signed the CBD. Our top priority is to elucidate the Nagoya Protocol so that the agreement will be truly effective,” Dias said. “Only then will it produce the expected outcomes, which include sharing the benefits of the economic use of biodiversity with indigenous and local communities in all countries.”

Brazilian contribution

According to Dias, in recent years, Brazil has won growing international recognition for its actions in the environmental field.

It has increased the areas protected by law and reduced deforestation and hence greenhouse gas emissions more than any other country in the past decade. Moreover, he added, Brazil is one of the world’s leading producers of biodiversity science.

“Brazil’s contribution to world biodiversity science is approximately three times greater than in other areas,” he said.

However, Brazil has yet to take full advantage of the opportunities available to influence and lead the international agenda on biodiversity and the environment. Dias believes progress must be made on a number of issues.

“Brazil participates in international discussions on the environment, but this participation is muted,” he said. “It could be a more forceful actor, sharing experiences in areas such as satellite monitoring of ecosystems or rehabilitation of degraded forests to influence the international environment agenda.”

For example, Brazil is not yet a full member of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), an intergovernmental organization officially established in 2001 to allow anyone anywhere free access to data about all types of life on Earth via the Internet.

Moreover, of Brazil’s 26 states, only São Paulo has a committee and policy for biodiversity conservation, restoration and sustainable use, established with support from FAPESP’s BIOTA Program, Dias noted.

“Every Brazilian state should have a biodiversity plan similar to São Paulo’s,” he said. “More than half of Mexico’s states and China’s provinces have strategies for the sustainable use of biodiversity. Brazil is lagging a little on this.”

According to Dias, Brazil should also be reporting more regularly on its biodiversity to the CBD Secretariat.

After almost a year’s delay, Brazil submitted its fifth national biodiversity report at the start of 2015 and became the 131st party to the CBD to do so. The scientific community also has great expectations for the proposal to be presented by Brazil at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21), which will be held in Paris, France, in early December of this year, Dias said.

Hopes are high that Brazil will play a fundamental role in establishing a new global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from 2020, replacing the Kyoto Protocol and reconciling development with the conservation of natural resources.

“If greenhouse gas emissions aren’t reduced in the next few decades, global biodiversity could be severely affected,” Dias said. “Several studies show that a third of the world’s biodiversity could disappear if the average global temperature rises 2°C.”

“We hope Brazil will present a progressive proposal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at COP21 and that this will help inspire other countries.”

Unique opportunity

For Dias, not only COP21 but also the UN General Assembly scheduled for September and expected to adopt 17 sustainable development goals, mostly relating to environmental conservation and biodiversity, represent a major opportunity to spotlight the role of biodiversity in national public policies to promote development, combat poverty and assure food security.

This is because although countries recognize that biodiversity is part of the solution required to achieve sustainable development goals, most of the economic incentives offered by national governments to groups that exploit environmental resources have perverse effects on the environment, Dias said.

Fishing continues to be pursued in an unsustainable manner in most cases, for example, yet most countries still subsidize the fishing industry, just as they do agriculture and fossil fuel production.

Moreover, he stressed, society does not count environmental costs or pay for the environmental services provided by biodiversity, such as supplying food, water and clean air, as well as resources used to produce medical drugs, cosmetics and so on.

“Society benefits from these ecosystem services without paying,” he said. “In many parts of the world, the result is destruction of the environment, interrupting these ecosystem services.”

If global biodiversity losses proceed at the present pace, scientists predict that more than 40% of the animal and plant species alive in the world today will have disappeared within three decades. Coral reefs will be the first to die off, Dias said.

Awareness of the problem’s gravity can best be raised by setting quantitative targets for biodiversity conservation, suggested José Goldemberg, Professor Emeritus of both USP’s Energy & Environment Institute (IEA) and its Physics Institute (IF), during the event.

“It’s easier to raise awareness of climate change,” said Goldemberg, who is also a member of FAPESP’s Board of Trustees. “The science is clear and has been well disseminated by the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]. However, it has to be done for biodiversity as well. Otherwise, we’ll never get governments to take action.”

To assist the CBD’s efforts in this direction, the Intergovernmental science policy Platform on Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is conducting a global assessment of pollinators, pollination and food production, and another assessment on biodiversity scenarios worldwide.

Established in 2012 to systematize scientific knowledge on biodiversity and strengthen its effective use in global policymaking, the IPBES has also begun an assessment of biodiversity and ecosystem services in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Oceania and Europe.

These regional assessments will serve as the basis for the first global diagnosis, which is scheduled for completion in 2019.

The global assessment will be the equivalent of the IPCC’s reports on climate change, influencing and enhancing international and national policies for the conservation, restoration and sustainable use of biodiversity and ecosystem services, said Carlos Joly, a professor at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) and coordinator of FAPESP’s BIOTA Program, during the event.

“The idea is to produce a global report on biodiversity and ecosystem services every five years,” said Joly, who is a member of the IPBES.

“Our hope is that the UN’s seven biodiversity-related conventions and the countries that have signed up to them will use the data produced by the assessments and that the documents will be useful decision-making tools.”

Other participants in the event included José Eduardo Krieger, USP’s Pro-Rector for Research; Antonio Mauro Saraiva, coordinator of USP’s Biodiversity & Computing Research Center (NAP-BioComp); José Pedro de Oliveira Costa, a professor at the School of Architecture & Urbanism (FAU-USP); José Roberto Castilho Piqueira, director of the Engineering School (POLI-USP); and São Paulo State Environment Secretary Patricia Faga Iglecias Lemos.