TEEB appoints the Executive Secretary of the CBD to its Advisory Board 

Copenhagen, 15 December 2009.  On 27 November 2009, Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), was appointed, with immediate effect, to serve on the Advisory Board of the initiative on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB).

“I am very pleased to welcome Ahmed on board and look forward to our close cooperation. His strategic advice will be critical in the coming months as TEEB is working intensely towards feeding its economic insights and results into key events in 2010, the International Year of Biodiversity, and into CBD’s preparations  for the 10^th Convention of Parties of CBD in Nagoya in 2010,” said Pavan Sukhdev, the TEEB study leader.

On his part, Mr. Djoghlaf said: “I am deeply honoured by this appointment to serve together with such an eminent group of political and intellectual leaders on the global biodiversity cause. We will not achieve the objectives of the Convention on Biological Diversity without taking the economic dimension of biodiversity loss fully into account, and the TEEB initiative will make a significant global contribution to better understand and act upon this dimension.”

This appointment comes at a critical time as a report (one of a suite of four TEEB reports) comprising recommendations for national and international policy makers has been recently released under the initiative. The report, entitled TEEB – The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity for National and International Policy Makers and its extract Summary : Responding to the Value of Nature 2009, demonstrates how we can take into account the value of ecosystems and biodiversity in policy decisions and identify and support solutions, new instruments, and wider use of existing tools in order to pioneer a way forward.

Mr. Sukhdev said that:  “By releasing this volume of the TEEB study now, we hope to provide guidance for policy makers in considering actions that recognize and address the economic dimension of biodiversity and ecosystem service losses.  By making its chapters available on the web, we are providing deeper information for those that require it, while also keeping the door open for further inputs, in keeping with our open-architecture model.”

Any additional recommendations from ongoing discussions will be included in the final published chapters of the report, which will be released on time for the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention, to be held in Nagoya, Japan, in October 2010.

“The release of the recommendations for policy makers is extremely timely and will make a significant contribution to the preparatory work of the international community for a series of critical events to mark the International Year of Biodiversity in 2010, including the high‑level event on biodiversity during the sixty-fifth session of the United Nations General Assembly, as well as the meeting of the Conference of the Parties in Nagoya and the adoption of the new Strategic Plan of the Convention,” said Mr. Djoghlaf.

Background information

Hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme and supported by the European Commission, the German Federal Environment Ministry and the United Kingdom Government's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, recently joined by Norway’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Netherlands’ Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment, the TEEB initiative seeks to draw attention to the global economic benefits of biodiversity, to highlight the growing costs of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation, and to draw together expertise from the fields of science, economics and policy to advance practical action to address the biodiversity crisis. The initiative was welcomed at the ninth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, and Parties were encouraged to contribute.

The Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity is cooperating closely with the TEEB initiative by providing strategic advice and by contributing to its various outputs, including the report for policy makers.

The TEEB for Policy Makers report comprises ten chapters and a separate summary document, and can be accessed on the TEEB for Policymakers tab on this site.

For further information on the CBD please go to: www.cbd.int