 Hello and welcome to another installment of TV30, a production of the Government Information Service. My name is Jesse Leons, Information Assistant at the Department of Sustainable Development, and boy do we have some exciting news for you. St. Lucia, through the Department of Sustainable Development, has been recognized by the United Nations alongside Pacific Islands Comoros and Vanuatu for a small island's developing state's restoration drive. And this collaboration was one of ten winning initiatives from around the world dubbed World Restoration Flagships for their role in restoring the natural world. The announcement was made at the UN Biodiversity Conference, or COP 15, in Montreal last month delivered by actor and environmental activist Jason Mamois himself. We had our permanent secretary, Mrs. Anita Montout, accepting this award on behalf of St. Lucia, Comoros and Vanuatu. Joining me to explain what this means for St. Lucia, as well as the overall outcome of this Biodiversity COP, is my colleague, Jeremiah Edmundt, one of our Sustainable Development and Environment Officers, who was part of that delegation to the Biodiversity COP. Jeremiah, thank you so much for joining us and also kudos to the Biodiversity team on this accomplishment. Good day, Jesse, and thanks for having me on the show today. Wonderful. For the benefit of our viewers, what is the Small Islands Developing States Restoration Drive, and in what ways will it benefit the implementation of its benefit St. Lucia and St. Lucia? Okay, the Small Island Developing States Restoration Drive, it's an initiative that the UN is undertaking under the Decade of Restoration. In 2021, the UN launched the Decade of Restoration after about 70 countries put forward a proposal and it was approved in 2021. So the SIDS Restoration Drive, it's actions taken in SIDS that show or demonstrate good practices of restoration and ecosystem management globally. We were selected from over 150 projects in over 50 countries globally and what this would do is that it helps in ramping up our restoration efforts in St. Lucia and not just restoration but also creating livelihoods and sustainably using the natural resources that we have here in St. Lucia. Okay, wonderful. So I know there are individual objectives per project, but what is the overall objective of the SIDS Restoration Drive and the other nine World Restoration flagships? What ground are we looking to cover overall in terms of restoration conservation and so on? So the overall goal is to restore about 68 million hectares globally and it looks at a variety of different geographic areas as well as ecosystems and land types. So you have SIDS, you have some mountainous areas, you have a dry forest corridor in Central America, you have some work being done in the Maldives, no in Dubai, sorry, you have also, it's like different geographic areas but it covers 68 million hectares globally and the intention is to restore these areas because most of them are identified as areas that have been severely degraded so they're trying to restore them within this decade of restoration. Wonderful. COP 15 ended with a landmark biodiversity agreement, tell us a little bit about that. Okay, so at the end of COP 15, one of the major items going into COP 15 was the adoption of a post-2020 global biodiversity framework. So it was adopted at the end of COP 15 and this framework, it has four overall goals and 23 targets. But the Convention on Biological Diversity, the vision for this framework is living in harmony with nature by 2050. So the goals go to 2050 and the targets are actionable targets set at 2030 to coincide with the SDGs. So this framework is very ambitious and it replaces the 2011 to 2020 strategic plan of action under the global biodiversity conservation. So this was considered the Paris Agreement of Biodiversity in terms of the magnitude and the scale that they want to look at it and they're looking at a whole of government and society approach where they want everybody involved, all sectors, all industries involved to ensure that by 2030 biodiversity is put back on a path where it could restore itself. Okay, wonderful. So just as we're saying COP 15, COP 15 for the benefit of our viewers, COP 15 is shorthand essentially for the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. So the global biodiversity framework that you mentioned, Jeremiah, it aims to address biodiversity loss, restore ecosystems and protect indigenous rights. Now as for our own national biodiversity strategy and action plan, we call it NBSAP. What are St. Lucia's priorities where these are concerned and how unique are they compared to other small island developing states? So our NBSAP, the priorities that we have would be conservation and sustainable use and sharing benefits for our local communities. Well, we don't really have indigenous people, so our local communities and the users of our natural resources. So our NBSAP is not that unique from other states because we face similar challenges and your NBSAP's intention is to reflect the progress of your efforts to conservation and that would feed into a global system so you would actually see your contribution would add up to the global targets. So in our case, our NBSAP was done under goals and targets based on the IAC targets which were with the 2011 to 2020 strategy plan of action. So coming out of COP, countries now have to align their NBSAPs with this new GBF. So it's most NBSAPs, they may have specific items, but in general, most of them would look at the same thing like what cities you want to look at, things like maybe alien invasive species, ecosystem management, sustainable use and access and benefit sharing for your resources and these kind of things. So it's not that unique because we face similar challenges like I mentioned earlier. And just to segue a bit from I know we're speaking NBSAP, but access and benefit sharing, that is something that features prominently in the whole negotiation process for COP 15. Can you tell us a little bit about where that is at right now in terms of countries around the world being able to share their information about biodiversity to be able to tap into it for economic purposes and so on? Okay, so in terms of sharing information, the convention, the CBD, there is a clearinghouse mechanism where countries would upload information. So your national reports and things of that sort, they upload on the platform. In terms of benefits and sharing benefits for use of resources in one country by outside party or a food party, the convention has a protocol which deals with this and then a Goya protocol which deals specifically with access and benefit sharing. Globally, not all parties to the convention are party to this access and benefit sharing protocol, but being party, what it allows you to do is that if someone comes in and they take your genetic resource and they use it for any commercialization, for commercial process, then they are supposed to compensate the source of that genetic resource so that they have to benefit from it. Now, San Lucia is party to this protocol as well. So if someone comes in and they use our resource and we could trace it to that product, then they have to compensate for using our resource because we are party to this protocol. Okay. Coming back to the NBSAP, what is the status of San Lucia's strategy and action planned for biodiversity? Okay, so our NBSAP is up for review. It was from 2018 to 2025, so we halfway through and with the new GBF, one of the outcomes of COP was that by the end of the year, parties should align the NBSAPs to this new framework, these new goals and targets, the global goals and targets. Now, Jeff, the global environment facility under the A-Cycler funding, there's a program that they're running, an early action support program where they provide countries with financial support to update the NBSAPs and align them with these global targets. San Lucia has applied and the funding has been approved, so this should be coming on stream anytime soon and it's the project run for two years, so from 2023 to 2024, where there are four options you could update, a quick review and update in your targets. You can look at the monitoring framework for your NBSAP, you look at aligning policies, environmental policies with the GBF and your NBSAP and the fourth one is developing a finance plan for biodiversity in your country, so these four areas are what the funding would cover, but San Lucia decided to focus on the first one, doing the review, the quick review and alignment of our goals and targets to the global biodiversity framework and component free of aligning our policies, so these are two companies that San Lucia decided to focus on. Okay, so going back to the wider picture, overall how successful has the world been in reducing biodiversity loss since the convention came into force in 1993? COP 15 overall has been dubbed the biggest biodiversity cop of the decade in a decade, is it because we have marked a triumph or are we still navigating trials that where nature is concerned? Okay, let me start with the end part of your question, yes this has been held the biggest biodiversity cop in decades and not because of triumphs but because of the realization at the rate of which biodiversity loss has been accelerating, so a lot of effort has been put into biodiversity conservation and sustainable use but a lot of biodiversity is still being lost because in many cases the drivers of biodiversity loss are not really addressed, so unless we could address these drivers and sometimes a lot of the drivers are economic factors, so countries would look to develop but in developing you clear your forests, you change land uses, so there's a give and take, so if you develop you lose biodiversity, if you conserve sometimes you don't develop as quick as you would want to, so we have not, I mean in specific instances you could see that sometimes you see a lot of work is done and you see restoration of a lot of areas and some species being brought back from close to extinction but on a global scale biodiversity has been, loss has been increasing year after year. Okay, and so how successful have we been in the work since 93? We have seen some gains a lot and in some areas you see a lot of gains in some areas like for example in the last strategic plan that the CBD developed, there were these ayachi goals and targets, there were 20 of them but most of these were not fully achieved, in some for some of them you had very little progress and some you had more than others, so on a global scale you may not see these big numbers but on country levels in some areas you see a lot of success on a smaller scale and you might see on the global level when you aggregate all of it, it may not look as much globally but in specific areas we have had a lot of successes. Okay, wonderful. We are due for our first break, we are speaking on biodiversity COP 15 and St. Lucia being recognized, do stay tuned when we come back we speak more on this important conference and where St. Lucia and the rest of the world goes forward in preserving, conserving nature. Stay with us. The world's climate is changing and that affects all of us. Storms are becoming increasingly intense, periods of intense drought and heavy rain, stress farm animals and destroy our crops. Higher average ocean temperatures kill our coral reefs and change the migratory patterns of fish. St. Lucia contributes only 0.0015% of global greenhouse gas emissions but is doing its part along with countries around the world to reduce the emissions that are warming our world and changing our climate. These efforts are called mitigation but decades of emissions have already changed the climate and the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere today will increase average global temperatures even more. We need to adapt, that is do everything we can to prepare for and respond to the actual and expected negative effects of climate change and everyone has a role to play. We need to protect our crops, build homes that withstand storms and keep our drains and waterways free of garbage to help us recover or bounce back from climatic events. Learn more about the government of St. Lucia's national adaptation plan and the steps you can take to protect yourself and your fellow St. Lucia's. Thank you so much for staying tuned. This is TV30. I am Jesse Leance, Information Assistant at the Department of Sustainable Development with some wonderful news of St. Lucia being recognized, one of the winning submissions coming from St. Lucia in collaboration with Comoros and Vanuatu, that is Pacific Islands for the Small Islands Developing States Restoration Drive. And this is one of ten winning initiatives from around the world dubbed World Restoration flagships being recognized by the United Nations towards this UN Biodiversity Conference COP 15 happening last month in Montreal. I'm speaking to Mr. Jeremiah Edmund, my colleague at the department who traveled on mission to Montreal for COP 15 and at this point I want to ask you, Jeremiah, what was your experience for COP 15? How did it differ from previous COP's? What did the environment look like in terms of negotiations and so on? COP 15 was busy, long days, long negotiation sessions. But in the end, the overall objective which was adopting a framework, that was done. But there was a lot of back and forth in fine-tuning the text of that document leading up to COP in December. There were like five other meetings to develop this GBF and it was a long and tedious process. Even days before COP, there was a meeting, an open-ended working group that was mandated by the parties to develop this global biodiversity framework. So they had the fifth meeting. The first meeting was in 2019, second in 2020 and the third one was part of which was done virtually in 2021 and in 2022, the second part of the third meeting was held in Switzerland. And negotiations were really going slow on developing the text, parties were introducing a lot of new texts after things were already decided, they were coming and just bringing something new out of nowhere. At times it got really frustrating where items or texts that were already negotiated, somebody would just come back and say something totally different and just throw it off and then you send back from zero. But in the end, I mean we have something that's fairly easy to read and understand and satisfies or would get the objective that the whole would need. I mean all parties were not happy with everything we got, but we got a workable document that could get us to our objective of living in harmony with nature by 2050. Okay, wonderful. I want to draw and acknowledge the linkages between biodiversity and bio-safety, which is your department and some of the other wood program areas within the Department of Sustainable Development and no, we are not just all about climate change, there are other areas like chemicals, biodiversity, we talk about the ozone protection and so on. And so nature is critical to meeting the sustainable development goals and limiting global warming, looking at climate change as well, global warming to 1.5 degrees. Biodiversity and climate change are linked in many ways, but they remain separate at the policy level. So hence COP 27 this year, people probably wondering what's all these cops about. But COP 27 was about climate change and COP 15 was about biodiversity. Jeremiah, what are some of the linkages that you can just draw now from the top of your head between climate change and biodiversity and how can they be tackled together? Any particular references made to that at COP 15? Okay, so let's start with the linkages. Climate change is one of the biggest drivers of biodiversity loss globally. And to reduce or to keep our temperatures from not to pass in 1.5, biodiversity is required. So the interdependent, if you have increases in temperature you're going to lose biodiversity. If you conserve biodiversity, like you restore more forests, you maintain more grasslands, you conserve your wetlands and you restore your wetlands, you can see much more carbon. So they're linked. But at a policy level, I don't know why a lot of people still try to look at them separately. But what the conventions are trying to do now, like the convention on climate change and biodiversity, they're trying to create more linkages with the convention so that the work, they could combine the efforts to meet their objectives. So for example, in the new framework, there's a target which specifically looks at reducing climate change and pollution. So target eight of the framework, it looks at climate change and pollution. So they try to fit it in there. So there's another one, another target which looks at reducing harmful subsidies. So for industries that use biodiversity or affect biodiversity, trying to reduce harmful subsidies to biodiversity. So they try to put in actionable targets that would actually help climate change as well as help biodiversity. So the links are there and at the policy level, we need to look at them as tackling one, you tackle the other, not as climate change by itself and biodiversity or by itself on the other hand. But by addressing climate change, you will be addressing biodiversity. But you need to put that in writing, in policy so that it's not just assumed. That's reinforced. Another point I wanted to bring up, I recall our World Wetlands Day panel discussion last year and it brought to the fore much controversy here in St. Lucia in terms of the way our biodiversity, our locations, our conservation sites and what have you are being protected. Can you speak to the significance of political will? I dare say as we're entering this new framework, this post-2020 global biodiversity framework, the political will that we will be required for the protection, conservation and ensuring the sustainable use of our spaces here, particularly on island. This GBF is extremely ambitious. So we would need the political will to match the financial resources, the capacities as well with human capacity. For this GBF to work, world leaders have to put or create the enabling environments for to achieve these goals and targets. So that will must be there. If we do not have that political will, you won't get close to achieving some of these targets. For example, you have one target which speaks of conserving or protecting 30% of your sea and 30% of your land. That is a huge political commitment that you have to make other countries to conserve 30% of your land mass or 40% of your ocean. And we know sometimes you have competing interests for land and for your sea spaces. So that will for that conservation. It must be seen as not just conserving for conserving sake, but you could conserve and still develop in a sustainable manner and use your conservation measures to generate income for your country. So the policy makers need to understand that conservation is not just about locking it away, but you conserve and you sustainably use so that you could derive the benefits of your conservation. There's no point in conserving a million hectares and it's just that no one can use it. No one can access it. What you want is for conserving it so that your people can access it and benefit from it. Okay, wonderful. We are wrapping up now and with the inroads made at COP 15, finally we have lodged a document that can be worked with, as you mentioned. What are we working towards for COP 16? What can we look forward to for this year's COP? Well, COP 16 will be next year, 2024, every two years. But looking towards COP 16, firstly, parties or countries need to update and align their national biodiversity strategic action plans to this new framework. So that's the first thing that you need to do because you need to align them so that you could reach the global goals and targets. Secondly, there are still some things that need to be ironed out like the monitoring framework for this, the monitoring framework for the GBF. How will it be monitored and the financing of it? So that's not been established yet. The monitoring framework node, the monitor is given to the CB, the convention to get a framework to a monitoring framework for it by COP 2016. But there's a resource mobilization plan, there's a capacity billing plan to help countries reach these goals and targets by 2050. I mean, we don't have much time, it's like eight years to achieve all 23 targets. So it's going to be a lot of work. It's going to take a lot of finance, a lot of capacity, a lot of political will, and a lot of collaboration from different sectors because it looks at a whole of government approach, a whole of society approach for this to be achieved. Everybody has to be on board. So we need a lot of awareness, public awareness and education critical for the success of this GBF. Wonderful. Thank you very much, Jeremiah Edmond, Sustainable Development and Environment Officer at the Department of Sustainable Development, overseeing biodiversity and biosafety and coming off of your trip to Montreal for the 15th meeting of the conference of the parties to the UN Convention on Biodiversity. Thank you very much for speaking to us on the outcomes of that. Thank you so much. Thank you, Jesse, what my pleasure. Wonderful. Thank you. I did get that St. Lucia has been selected out of many countries, many submissions to be part, to be a recipient under the World Restoration Flagship. We will be posting on our social media. You can go on to our Facebook page, the Department of Sustainable Development, St. Lucia, as well as our Instagram, Department of Sustainable Development, St. Lucia as well to get more information on what this award means, Small Island Developing States Restoration Drive, what it means for St. Lucia, how we can benefit, particularly the southeast coast. So that information will be flowing out to the general public in the coming weeks and months. My name is Jesse Leance for the Department of Sustainable Development and the Government Information Service. I'd like to thank you so much for watching. Do stay tuned for more NTN programming. Goodbye.