[FMAL-03] Big, Anxious Dog
The world outside is warm and windy, but my real world these days is tube lights and power strips. Makes you all jealous, I imagine. As always, this is Fondue, or Maybe A Lake, and I am Bernard Soubry . This is your third email.
Perhaps you have not, unlike me, closely followed the processes of the Convention on Biological Diversity for the past three years. Maybe you haven’t, unlike those I’m hanging out with this week, taken naps on a dozen couches in a dozen conference centres of a dozen cities while you worked on your pallor-tan from not seeing the sun for weeks at a time. Maybe some explanation is in order about what the heck is going on.
The Geneva meetings are one conference; they are also three meetings. They are three heads all talking at once on the body of a big, unruly dog. They all want different things, which is the same thing, which is a new global framework for how countries should govern biodiversity.
The dog is the Convention; the Convention wants to preserve biodiversity. The Convention grew up in the 90s, after a big party in Rio; it’s been through a lot. It tried to set up targets in 2010 to halt truly horrifying biodiversity loss, and it failed miserably. The Convention wants a comeback. It wants a Global Biodiversity Framework. It was supposed to happen in 2020, and then COVID stopped everything, and it is hungry for it now.
The first head is the OEWG: the Open-Ended Working Group for the Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework. All it wants is to build that post-2020 GBF. It’s been trying. It’s two years late, and it’s been spending the pandemic herding a bunch of virtual meetings, trying to scrounge up a consensus about what countries should do (so much) and whether it’s legally binding (fat chance) and how to implement the whole thing (considering the last bit failed). The OEWG is tired and slobbering and desperate to be done.
The second head is the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical, and Technological Advice - the SBSTTA. The SBSTTA is the helpful head. It wants cuddles. All it wants to do is tell you how to do things: how marine areas should be defined and what countries do with the stuff they find at the bottom. How to keep an eye on frameworks. The SBSTTA has all the L docs you need, baby, if you’d only let it use them.
The third head is the SBI. The SB on Implementation. The head that chomps at the bit to get it, get it, there it is the minute you point it out. The Convention needs it to find the money, find how to collaborate with other conventions, sniff over review mechanisms and make sure it all works. The SBI shouldn’t be taken for walks without a strong leash and a good recall.
The dog wants what it wants: three same-but-different things. And today, the job of everyone sitting in every meeting room was to yell at it to SIT / STAY / REFLECT GENDER-RESPONSIVENESS, one after the other, in carefully worded party statements. 196 human voices telling the big, anxious dog what to do.
So, today: one big opening plenary, three little opening plenaries - everybody in the same room, moving from body to body, and setting out what has to be done over two weeks. Sat in the back and typed notes for six hours, as is our wont, and came out with a little bulletin.
Another way to talk to the dog, I guess.
Tail-waggingly yours,
B