October 2012: World Wide Views on Biodiversity, a global project aiming to raise awareness of biodiversity values, published its Results Report and presented it at the 11th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 11) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The project addressed Aichi Target 1 of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020, which states that “By 2020, at the latest, people are aware of the values of biodiversity and the steps they can take to conserve and use it sustainably.”

The project, supported by the CBD Secretariat, aimed to help close a widening democratic gap between citizens and policy-makers, as policy-making grows more global in scale. It gathered citizen views on international biodiversity policy issues – involving 3,000 citizens in 25 countries spanning five continents – and disseminated them to policy-makers involved in CBD deliberations.

The results of the global consultations showed strong public support for taking further political action to stop biodiversity decline. The results also highlight, among other issues, that: incentives and subsidies leading to overfishing should be phased out; protection of coral reefs is a shared responsibility; more protected areas should be established in the high seas; all countries should pay for protecting biodiversity in developing countries; and benefit-sharing should apply to genetic resources already collected. [World Wide Views on Biodiversity Website] [Publication: World Wide Views on Biodiversity: From the World’s Citizens to the Biodiversity Policymakers – Results Report]