Introduction:
- I am very sorry that I am unable to attend this important event and presenting the important World Wide Views on Biodiversity project.
- We ask the questions: Do we need to involve ordinary citizens in new ways in the global discussions on biodiversity?
- Do citizens understand the issues and trade-offs that decision-makers like me have to cope with?
- Will citizens be able to provide meaningful and useful input to the process?
- The answer to the questions is a big and loud: YES!
- My experience from citizen summits in Denmark is that our citizens are perfectly capable of having balanced and responsible discussions on complex biodiversity issues.
- And their discussions have given me, a good sense of how far people are willing to go in order to protect our biodiversity.
- Such information is important – both at the national and the international level in order to implement international decisions in to government policies.
- This is why “World Wide Views on Biodiversity” is important to me and why I recommend that you, my colleagues, pay close attention to the opinions expressed by the 3.000 participating citizens.
Bring politicians and citizens closer
- Citizens are often of the opinion that decisions made in the UN have limited impact on their lives. Projects like “World Wide Views” aims to close this gab.
- To my mind we should be using such methods more in the future - to strength democracy, quality and uptake of policies, and thereby securing the best results in real life – for the benefit of politicians, citizens and biodiversity.
The results support an ambitious policy
- The results from the World Wide Views on Biodiversity – show that there is a remarkably strong support among citizens from both the developed and the developing countries for sharing the costs of protecting biodiversity.
- This tells me that citizens are willing to spend money on biodiversity protection.
- You can read much from the results of the World Wide Views on Biodiversity – for example is shows strong support for establishment of protected areas in thee sea and on land
- And there is very widespread support for having users of genetic resources from the High Seas to share the benefit – for example through a global fund that supports the global biodiversity.
- Such a financial mechanism could maybe be a good supplement to the Nagoya
- I’m very impressed by the strong citizen support to stronger actions for global biodiversity, but at the same time the results gave me a warning sign.
- As I compare opinions between Danish citizens and citizens around the world it seems that the Danes are among the people who feel least impacted by the loss of biodiversity.
- I’m aware that the consequences of loss of nature is often more direct and harsher for people in developing countries than in the developed countries.
- But still this finding makes me concerned that public awareness on biodiversity in my own country needs to be improved considerably to achieve stronger support for biodiversity conservation measures.
- In this respect I think we can all learn from looking into the results of the “World Wide Views on Biodiversity”.
- Not only because we can learn more about our own citizens views on biodiversity, but also because we can compare and take lessons from the differences and the similarities across the globe.
Conclusion:
- I am very glad that the “World Wide Views on Biodiversity” was successful and was able to take place despite logistic and financial challenges.
- I would particularly like to express my gratitude to the strong support and very active involvement of Executive Secretary Braulio Dias and the CBD Secretariat as well as my Japanese colleague for co-financing World Wide Views and making the global coverage possible by supporting the participation of 15 developing countries.
- The World Wide Views is very encouraging to me. There is no longer any doubt that citizens from all over the world supports the politicians whenever we dare to be ambitious in our policy on biodiversity – and specifically in our agreements here at the COP11.
- Thank you.