As of 19 May 2008

• Title: 9th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity

• Speaker: Federal Minister Sigmar Gabriel
• Occasion: Opening speech of COP 9
• Date/Location: 19.05.2008, Maritim Hotel, Bonn

I warmly welcome you all to the UN city of Bonn to the ninth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the CBD! Let us all work together under the motto "One Nature - One World - Our Future"! Thank you very much for the trust you have placed in me! It is a great honour. And I am very aware of the big responsibility that comes with my new role. But I depend on the support of the CBD family as a whole! Do we take our commitments to the CBD and the 2010 target seriously? Of course I will do everything in my capacity to enable us to take ambitious decisions on reaching our targets. But I won't be able to do this alone; at the CBD we need unanimous decisions, which we will only achieve if we listen to each other, if we are flexible and if we acknowledge the successes of others rather than merely pointing out deficits. Sometimes it helps if you just imagine being in the position of your counterpart. Let’s try to understand the view of the other. Let’s work hard to meet on the middle ground.

Germany is taking over the CBD Chair from Brazil, which was such an excellent and welcoming host two years ago in Curitiba. Over the past two years, the CBD was led in a thoughtful and committed way under Marina Silva’s presidency. I was very moved by the resignation of Marina Silva last week. I believe that many of the world’s environment ministers have sleepless nights about how to close the gap between what has to be done and what is being done. And it is indeed a Herculean task to get the entire world community, but also each individual country, on the right path to sustainability. Just as it is extremely difficult in my country to organise our strong chemicals, energy and automobile industries in a way that does not overstep ecological boundaries for climate protection in particular, it is also difficult for other countries to change a development model that for decades has been based on converting forests or other ecosystems into agricultural land. To manage all this, environment ministers all over the world need a great deal of support in addition to their own personal commitment. Support from heads of state and government and other ministers, but above all from the public. Mr. Ambassador we understand that the appointed minister Mr. Carlos Minc is not able to attend this opening ceremony of COP 9, as he is going to have his inauguration only tomorrow. Please pass all our best wishes to him! We are absolutely sure that he will be an excellent partner for our common work in the run-up to 2010.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

the CBD is not a nature conservation convention. It is much more than that. It is about how to organize our life on earth. It is about protection of nature, about the sustainable use of biodiversity and not the least about the access to and the fair sharing of benefits that arise out of genetic resources - ABS.

16 years after Rio, Life on earth is at a crucial point! The rate of extinction of species is 100 to 1000 times higher than the natural extinction rate. We are overfishing our seas to an extent that will lead to the collapse of fish stocks not allowing us to have any commercial fisheries by 2050! The world’s forests are under incredible threat! Imagine that each and every year the world looses virgin forests in a size three times of Switzerland!

Ladies and Gentlemen,

In 2002 in Johannesburg the world community agreed to significantly reduce the loss of biological diversity by 2010. This was - honestly - already not a very strong target. The truth today in 2008 is that we are still on the wrong track. If we follow this path we can foresee that we will fail to meet the target. In Johannesburg the heads of states and governments also reaffirmed their commitment to the establishment of an ABS-Regime. If someone would ask me whether I trust in the signatures of 191 states to a Convention of the United Nations I certainly would say "yes"!; but I also say that 16 years after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the Convention on Biological Diversity has reached a crossroads. We have to answer inconvenient questions: Do we continue to produce huge amounts of paper with little content or do we start to take our responsibility seriously.

Destroying the world’s biological richness is not a concern for romantic conservationists. Above all it affects the life of the poorest. It is about their fundamental needs for living! I learned the following example from Pavan Sukhdev the leader for our study on the economic value of biodiversity. 550 Million Indians are directly dependent on healthy ecosystems. If the fish stocks would collapse as mentioned before, this would rob the only protein source of the billion poorest of this world.

An American biologist once viewed biodiversity as the manual for the operations of our one planet. What we are doing every day is to delete a page out of this manual. Maybe some of them are of minor importance. But continuing would mean that at some point we will loose our knowledge about key operations of life on earth. If our children would need to consult the manual, they would realize that their parents and grandparents had destroyed the essential information to survive. Some 30 years ago an aggressive virus destroyed all rice seeds from India to Indonesia. Scientists screened 6.273 rice species. They found a single one that was resistant against the virus. Imagine the disaster if this one would have been on one of the pages we tore off the earth manual.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Germany is confident that this conference will be a success. More than 6000 participants are here at the river Rhine to discuss the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity and access and benefit sharing. Our negotiations will be followed closely by very many people in Bonn, Germany and the world. Public expectations for this meeting are high and I hope that together we will be able to live up to them.

One crucial aspect is progress on the issue of ABS, access and benefit sharing. Developing countries rightly describe it as biopiracy when industrialised countries help themselves to genetic resources in rainforests, produce medicines from these resources, but do not pay a single cent back in return. We need equitable benefit sharing. The countries of origin - in which the majority of our planet biodiversity can be found - want to get something back. I don't know how much economic profit we are actually talking about to be shared out. Maybe it will be huge, if for example the world’s researchers succeed in finding medicine to cure mankind’s most deadly diseases. Perhaps the profits will be less than some of us currently hope, if research and development is not able to provide us with such innovations. But in my view the financial volume is not even the priority aspect here. It is a matter of principle. The industrialized world has to recognize that the yields from biological resources have to be shared with those who have safeguarded them to this day for mankind. This is what we are talking about. I will do my utmost to enable us to make significant progress in this area over the next two weeks and in the upcoming 2 years under our presidency. A regime has to be in place in 2010, and to achieve this we have to create the prerequisites. For this I - as your new CBD President - need a clear Bonn mandate which allows me to successfully structure the negotiations over the next two years!

We also urgently need open discussions on improving the financing of global biodiversity conservation. It is way too easy to simply urge people in developing countries to stop clear cutting tropical rainforests or the destruction of other ecosystems. If those people don’t have any other possibility to survive, they will continue to do so. It is not difficult to say what is needed to protect biodiversity. It’s also not difficult to say what should be done to develop regional economies. The difficult thing is to bring these two demands together.

The adoption of a strategy for resource mobilisation is therefore of utmost importance. For Germany I have already taken action and from this year, a share of the revenues from the auctioning of CO2 allowances - starting with 40 million euro - will be used for the conservation of ecosystem sinks such as forests, bogs and savannas. Some of these revenues will also go towards adapting habitats to climate change.

With regard to the global network of protected areas we need a new dynamic, despite all successes to date. The "LifeWeb Initiative" is one option - an instrument for the accelerated implementation of a global network of protected areas on land and at sea. I will present this initiative at the high-level segment.

Despite the target of establishing a global network of protected areas at sea by 2012, the high seas are completely unprotected. We have to protect areas in the seas to allow fish stocks to regenerate. We want to adopt criteria for the selection of marine areas in need of protection. This will ensure that such protected areas are established in places where it is ecologically needed.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

In my view climate change and the loss of biodiversity are the most alarming challenges on the global agenda! And in no other area is international action more urgently required. Furthermore, I see the linking of these two issues. After all, biodiversity helps us to protect the climate. And conversely, we need a successful climate policy to ensure that species loss does not occur at an even quicker pace than is already the case. The ice is melting away from under the very paws of polar bears, and entire regions and their habitats are in danger of drying out. In short: nature conservation is climate protection and climate protection is nature conservation. This means that we have to use climate protection instruments for nature conservation and vice versa.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We have an ambitious programme ahead of us for the next 14 days on shaping global biodiversity policy. This meeting has been prepared in excellent cooperation with the CBD Secretariat in Montreal. I would like to take this opportunity to warmly thank our Executive Secretary Dr Ahmed Djoghlaf for his tireless commitment and the excellent work of his team.

I hope that the working atmosphere here in Bonn will contribute to moving global conservation of biological diversity a decisive step forward. I wish us all every success, constructive and lively discussions and ambitious decisions at the end of our meeting! Hosting a UN conference such as this is a great challenge for any country and involves a huge amount of work. But it also makes us immensely proud to be host and to serve the international community as CBD President. I promise you that that we will do our utmost to ensure fairness for all those involved!
Thank you!