We appreciate Valerie Hickey’s remarks about mainstreaming biodiversity, including in the process to develop a truly sustainable post-2015 development agenda. As core member of the Women’s Major Group the Global Forest Coalition is very much involved in this process and we would like to applaud governments and institutions, including the Secretariat that have successfully highlighted the importance of biodiversity in this process. But I would like to highlight a related challenge, which is to address policy incoherences, including deliberate policy incoherences. GFC did an independent analysis of the implementation of the forest work program in 2008, and one of our conclusions that policy incoherence, including deliberate policy incoherence was the main cause of non-implementation of the CBD. Especially in some of the big forest countries, there was a clear willingness of the Ministry of Environment to protect forests but their efforts were frustrated by the policies of other Ministries. We see this a lot in the field of forest policy, where efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation are being undone by policies to promote the use of wood-based biomass, triggering overexploitation of forests and even old-fashioned clearcutting practices. So how can we address such deliberate and non-deliberate policy incoherences?
Intervention by the Global Forest Coalition, an international coalition of NGOs and Indigenous peoples’ organizations, at the Subsidiary Body of Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA-17) to the Convention on Biological Diversity, that started yesterday in Montreal, Canada.
