Side Event

National Alliances for Zero Extinction and the 2010 Targets

Organizer
Conservation International and Alliance for Zero Extinction (AZE)

Date and Time
26 May 2008 18:15 - 19:45

Meeting
Ninth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 9)

As part of the Program of Work on Protected Areas, the CBD has mandated national protected area gap analyses to assess how well protected areas conserve biodiversity, and where the highest priorities are for expanding and reinforcing existing protected areas. Additionally, the Potsdam Initiative 2010 states: “Focusing all our efforts on the achievement of the 2010 target of significantly reducing the loss of bioidiversity in the coming years, we acknowledge the urgent need to halt human induced extinction of biodiversity as soon as possible. In this context we welcome the Countdown 2010 Initiative and the Alliance for Zero Extinction. We will develop and implement national targets and strategies in order to achieve the 2010 target and beyond.” As 2010 approaches governments may be seeking tools to help them meet the obligation to conduct national scale gap analyses. To this end, the Ministry of Environment of Brazil proposes to host a side-event during the 9th Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity to illustrate how sites identified through national alliances for zero extinction can help fulfill the 2010 target for protected area gap analysis. Sites identified at the national level using the criteria established by the Alliance for Zero Extinction but using local datasets can be extremely effective in identifying priority areas and opportunities to consider when government agencies consider policy changes for expansion of protected area systems. AZE criteria have been defined such that they can be easily and consistently applied across all biogeographic regions and taxonomic groups. They are designed for application through a national, bottom-up, iterative process, led by national governments in collaboration with local stakeholders, to maximize the usefulness and the prospects of implementation of the resulting site priorities. Through a series of three presentations, we will illustrate how national alliances for zero extinction can be effective in the prevention of biodiversity loss by allowing government agencies to identify those unprotected areas that are most urgently in need of conservation efforts.