Biodiversity Convention

The Convention on Biological Diversity (“Biodiversity Convention” for short) is a treaty signed in 1992 by 150 government leaders who met at the so-called Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They pledged to promote sustainable development and to act to protect the natural resources of their respective countries. Business is referred to in the Convention (Articles 10 and 16), both because of the proactive role that the private sector may play, and because of its corporate responsibility toward the environment and global biological diversity.

The Convention is not a long text (42 articles on 20 pages in the English version), yet it represents one of the founding documents of the current agenda for sustainable development, on a par with the “Rio Declaration on Environment and Development” and the “Agenda 21” program. Now a piece of international public law featured in the United Nations (UN) Treaty Collection, it was the first agreement on such a global scale to focus on biological diversity, proclaiming in its preamble that “the conservation of biological diversity is a common concern of humankind” and that “it is vital to anticipate, prevent and attack the causes of significant reduction of loss of biological diversity at source.” Since its launch in 1992, over 40 other countries have joined the Convention; only a very few countries worldwide are not signatory parties yet: Some micro-states such as Andorra and the Vatican, also Iraq as well as the United States (which signed the treaty in 1993 but the U.S. Senate has yet to ratify it).

The Convention provides a global policy framework; national governments remain sovereign to decide and implement the most suitable strategies to achieve, in their own contexts, the three goals of the Convention: “conservation of biological diversity; sustainable use of natural resources; fair and equitable sharing of the benefits” (Article 1). National governments set their own targets, priorities, and action plans. Depending on the country, some industry sectors are more directly concerned, typically forestry, agriculture, fisheries, energy, transportation, and urban planning—but the broad agenda also reaches into other policy areas such as education, health, science, and technology. For the business community, this may translate into a range of opportunities (such as financial measures and incentives for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity) but also constraints (such as regulated access to genetic resources or statutory impact assessment).

The Convention is supported by a secretariat operating under the UN Environment Programme and based in Montreal, Canada. The secretariat increasingly regards business as a key stakeholder, on a par with local authorities and nongovernmental organizations. Since 2006 the secretariat has published a regular newsletter on business and biodiversity. The diverse topics in the April 2008 newsletter illustrate the range of challenges that lie at the interface of business and biodiversity: “assessing the economic cost of biodiversity loss,” “mainstreaming sustainable agriculture,” “catalyzing global corporate ocean responsibility,” but also “a mining company perspective.” Professional organizations such as the World Business Council on Sustainable Development and the International Chamber of Commerce are also contributing to this agenda.

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