Together we can achieve more: More posters and more flyers.

Monday's side event at the SBSTTA meeting of the CBD by the pet industry gave an impressive insight how to deal with pets and ornamental plants becoming invasive: Simply tell consumers not to release them.
Or even better: put up posters in shops and print a line on the bag in which you buy your fish or pond plants and all will be solved.
Don't bother involving academics or even the governments - retailers are the best people to talk to consumers, and they are already used to put up posters and hand out flyers.

Submitted by Antje on 7 Nov 2011.

Behind us is infinite power.

Behind us is infinite power.
Before us is endless possibility.
Around us is boundless opportunity.
Why should we fear?

Unfortunately that is not the closing statement of the Meeting of the Aarhus Convention. It's an advertisement poster of Chisinau Airport, showing seven children in the departure lounge, ready to travel the world - Except that they probably aren't.

Submitted by Antje on 2 Jul 2011.

Documentation: Ecoropa's GMO Intervention

"The de facto exclusion of GMOs from the Aarhus Convention was not due to scientific certainty or lack of public interest but was due to a very unfortunate constellation of lack of political will at a certain historical moment."

Submitted by Antje on 30 Jun 2011.

Enter the Aarhus stage: The Biotech Industry

[img_assist|nid=707|title=|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=100|height=43]Today "Business and Industry" entered the stage. Again compared to the CBD negotiations I'm used to there is little industry present: so far there are only four them, which makes their background even more remarkable.

Submitted by Antje on 29 Jun 2011.

Open Compliance under Aarhus

My first impression travelling from Berlin's hippest street to Moldova's capital Chisinau with its crumbling sowjet-area buildings are two worlds apart.
This appeared to be even more the case when the preparation meetings to the Aarhus Convention MOP4 started - but suddenly it was the other way round.
The day started with a meeting of the Compliance Comittee - the body that decides whether Parties breaches the conditions, either in general or specific cases.

Submitted by Antje on 28 Jun 2011.

Finance, targets, green economy and innovative financial mechanisms

Discussions on funding, financial targets and innovative financial mechanisms were extremely difficult during the COP10 in Nagoya in October 2010 and clearly revealed the divide between North and South. They also reflect a wider struggle going on over the effectiveness and implications of market‐oriented approaches to the three Rio Conventions, including biodiversity conservation. This struggle that is going to be central for "Rio+20", the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development where 'green economy' is one of the two main topics on the agenda.

March 2011

H. Paul & A. Lorch, ECO, Vol. 36(1)

Resource mobilisation for the CBD: Innovative financial backtracking?

It was clear from the beginning of the biennial United Nations biodiversity conference in Nagoya that money was - and is - a crucial issue. Unfortunately, the conference confirmed a consistent pattern of failure to make sufficient provision for developing countries to enable them to implement their commitments under the CBD.

December 2010

Antje Lorch, Third World Resurgence No. 242/243, Nov. 2010

Amflora authorized for contamination

On of the first things new EU Commissionair for Health and Consumers John Dalli did today was to authorized BASF's GM potato Amflora.
The EU Commission is only in office since a week, and the responsibility for GM crops was moved from DG Environment to DG Health. Yesterday Dalli talked to members of the EU parliament, but he then nevertheless took a fast decision then.

Submitted by Antje on 2 Mar 2010.

Agriculture and Climate Change - Real Problems, False Solutions

Few would deny that agriculture is especially severely affected by climate change and that the right practices contribute to mitigate it, yet expectations of the new climate agreement diverge sharply, as well as notions on what are good and what are bad agricultural practices and whether soil carbon sequestration should be part of carbon trading.

December 2009

Helena Paul, Almuth Ernsting, Stella Semino, Susanne Gura & Antje Lorch (EcoNexus, Biofuelwatch, Grupo de Reflexion Rural, NOAH - Friends of the Earth Denmark), and The Development Fund Norway.
Report published for COP15, of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen, December 2009.

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