Market forces drive biological diversity deal

At the last possible moment, agreement was reached in Japan to create a new international plan to protect biological diversity around the world. There was considerable scepticism. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) held up 2010 as the year when efforts to conserve species would bear fruit. But ahead of the key meeting in Japan, there was much concern that the issue had been downplayed, with many targets missed and only junior officials heading for Nagoya. After last-minute efforts by the host nation to the talks, Japan claimed that it had achieved substantive results from the two weeks of talks following eight years of prior discussions. George Monbiot, writing in The Guardian in London, was concerned that the public had been misled about biodiversity protection. “The evidence suggests we’ve been conned. The draft agreement, published a month ago, contained no binding obligations. Nothing I’ve heard from Japan suggests that this has changed. The draft saw the targets for 2020 that governments were asked to adopt as nothing more than ‘aspirations’ for achievement at the global level and a ‘flexible framework’ within which countries can do as they wish,” says Monbiot. But the Japanese hosts and many participants believe differently. News focus