'Conference will help raise biodiversity awareness'

Kim Sang-hoon, director of the CBD Organizing Committee

By Kim Se-jeong

Kim Sang-hoon, director of the organizing committee of an upcoming international meeting on biodiversity, hopes that the gathering will help raise awareness of the importance of biodiversity, especially among young people.

Biodiversity is the various forms of life, different species, ecosystems and or genetic variations within a given area.

He said the committee is working to make the meeting as

environmentally friendly as possible.

The Convention of Biological Diversity’s (CBD) 12th conference will be held in PyeongChang, Gangwon Province, from Sept. 29 to Oct. 17. The first meeting took place in 1994 in Nassau, the Bahamas. The goal of CBD is to maintain biodiversity on earth, and its participants are encouraged to discuss and create plans with the aims of preserving this.

Kim said he is most excited about the meeting’s carbon offsetting program. He added that the committee is trying to help people, in particular youngsters, to realize why biodiversity is important in their daily lives.

“For a participant from Kenya, for example, we will calculate how much carbon dioxide was emitted by his air and road travel and by his stay in PyeongChang,” Kim told The Korea Times.

The committee will use an existing program to calculate the amount of CO2 emitted by a participants’ travel and stay and will ask the participant to donate money equivalent to that amount. The organizing committee will donate the money for tree planting in other countries, and is consulting with the Korea International Cooperation Agency, the state-run development aid organization.

The committee will also mobilize 78 environmentally-friendly vehicles, including five electric vehicles, for the participants during the meeting. It has also placed resource-saving features in the meeting halls, namely water fountains located outside the halls to eliminate the need for bottled water. LED lights will be installed in rooms to minimize electricity consumption and flat screens to eliminate the need for paper brochures and other materials.

More than 20,000 delegates from 194 countries, including delegates from international organizations, governments and indigenous tribes, are expected to attend the meeting.

A highly anticipated topic during the meeting is the Nagoya Protocol, an agreement on access to genetic resources and fair sharing of benefits arising from their utilization.

The protocol was adopted in 2010 during the meeting in Nagoya and will be implemented from Oct. 12. At the PyeongChang meeting, parties that ratified the protocol will start negotiations on implementation details, such as fundraising, building a monitoring and reporting system, raising awareness of the protocol and establishing a benefit sharing program that would involve four countries or more.

Korea will only be an observer at the meeting since it has not ratified the accord but is nevertheless making significant efforts to address environmental issues.

For example, the Korean government is pushing to raise the profile of the Demilitarized Zone along the inter-Korean border as a symbol of biodiversity on the peninsula. A seminar on that topic will be held during the meeting.

Seoul has twice invited Pyongyang to the meeting, but the latter has not yet responded.