CREATE-CSS Internship Experience with the Secretariat for the Convention on Biological Diversity by Deniz Dutton, MSc Student at McGill University (supervised by Dr. Cynthia Kallenbach)
As an intern with the Secretariat for the Convention on Biological Diversity, my job was to support the implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, also known as the post-2020 biodiversity framework. I had two major tasks: conducting research on the best available resources for monitoring changes in the status of biodiversity to contribute to a Resource Manual for implementation, and analyzing the alignment of countries’ National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) and National Targets with the Global Biodiversity Framework. The outcome of the work was presented to the Parties to the Convention at COP16, taking place in Cali, Colombia in the last two weeks of October.
The work was important for determining whether the level of ambition for addressing the biodiversity loss crisis expressed by countries around the world is sufficiently on track to fulfill the vision of the Global Biodiversity Framework, which is to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030 and to achieve a society living in harmony with nature by 2050.
Besides allowing me to become acquainted with the global biodiversity agenda and familiar with different countries’ commitments to achieving the vision of the framework, the internship gave me unexpected insight into an emerging discipline: biodiversity monitoring.
While I had been familiar with the concept of greenhouse gas inventory, before the internship I had never thought about taking inventory of a country’s biodiversity. But just like how the Paris Agreement requires its Parties to submit Nationally Determined Contributions to global greenhouse gas emissions in order to track progress towards the vision of achieving net zero emissions by 2050, Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, now beholden to the Global Biodiversity Framework, should report on how successfully they have been able to implement the framework – and to do that, they need biodiversity data.
Biodiversity monitoring is in its infancy. The methodologies are in the process of being developed and there is a major need for harmonization of these methodologies and protocols across large regions in order to accurately track changes in biodiversity trends. In researching the resources available to nations to this end, I came across a number of different organizations at the forefront of developing biodiversity indicators and monitoring efforts. Some of these organizations include Biodiversa+, GEO Biodiversity Observation Network, and the World Conservation Monitoring Center through UNEP.
As a soil microbial diversity researcher, I was immediately interested in the status of efforts to monitor soil biodiversity at a global scale. The technology exists to rapidly sequence environmental DNA (eDNA) found in soil, sometimes even in the field. The most exciting aspect of eDNA is the potential to more efficiently, non-invasively and accurately detect the responses of biological communities to anthropogenic change and increase the effectiveness of efforts to restore and conserve the biosphere. However, it is not yet used at a broad enough scale to yield results useful for national reporting obligations, and before it can be scaled up, serious capacity issues in the realm of technical expertise, funding, interoperability of protocols, and bureaucratic barriers must be overcome.
For example, a pilot soil biodiversity monitoring project implemented by Biodiversa+ concluded that currently, the ability to transfer physical soil samples to central hubs from across the EU and Turkey is very limited, and that, ideally, as many national monitoring programs as possible should be set up, each with the same level of capacity to process soil samples and extract and analyze DNA before reporting data to centralized hubs. The project and the Biodiversa+ initiative in general represents the leading edge of biodiversity science, but there is a need for an acceleration and proliferation of these efforts in order to meet our international objectives for biodiversity conservation and recovery.
Additionally, in line with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, there needs to be a whole-of-society approach to biodiversity monitoring that serves the dual purpose of tracking changes in the world’s biodiversity trends and engaging local communities in their surrounding ecology and, consequently, stands a chance of reversing the worrying declines in biodiversity worldwide. Making eDNA monitoring accessible, cheaper and more standardized would help serve this purpose, because it represents an opportunity for environmental and scientific education that simultaneously helps countries with their national reporting obligations to international conventions.
In the monitoring framework of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, Parties collectively agreed to report on progress towards their commitments using the same set of indicators. Indicators are information tools which summarize data on environmental or socio-economic issues in order to provide a “snap-shot” of the overall status and trends. Indicators play an important role in monitoring biodiversity and feeding back onto policy decisions that can influence biodiversity trends and subsequently indicator values. They can therefore help improve the effectiveness of biodiversity monitoring programs.
Despite the proven effectiveness of DNA-based biodiversity monitoring methods, they only feature in the Global Biodiversity framework as an optional indicator to use alongside population counts. The marginalization of this method is unfortunate considering that DNA-based monitoring is needed to determine undesired gene flow from introduced species, populations, and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which represent an increasing threat to biodiversity that is already compromised due to habitat loss. Considering the substantial gains that are to be made from applying DNA-based monitoring at a broad scale and building up national capacities in this regard, this represents an important area of development in the field of biodiversity monitoring.
By reviewing emerging knowledge on the most promising biodiversity monitoring resources, I was able to gain an understanding of the knowledge gaps and therefore the future role I could play in this field given the skills I am learning in my graduate program. In this way the internship was invaluable to me. I am now seriously considering a future career in developing soil biodiversity monitoring capacities at the level of the UN or at the national level, including in my second country of Turkey, which I know is in need of and would benefit greatly from increased capacity for biodiversity monitoring.
At the end of the day, the biodiversity crisis impacts all of us, and we need a coordinated global effort to address it head on and as quickly as possible, while respecting national sovereignty and promoting monitoring efforts uniquely tailored to each country’s ecological, social and economic context. The ecological problems we face are global in nature; they are the result of the interconnectedness of all of our societies, and we have an important opportunity to leverage these global connections to equitably address biodiversity loss across the world. This means partnerships between the developed and developing countries that mobilize financial, technical and scientific resources and build capacity in the countries that are simultaneously the most biodiverse and the most ill-equipped to effectively study biodiversity, as well as the most vulnerable to the environmental changes that are impacting human and non-human communities alike.
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