Sowing the Countdown 2010 seeds in Japan
Countdown 2010 expands its network and spreads the word on biodiversity conservation to the far East. Sebastian Winkler, Head of Countdown 2010, engaged Japanese stakeholders while attending the Asahi Shimbun International Symposium Conference for Biosphere Security—Policy Message for the G8 leaders .
Asahi Shimbun, one of the largest newspapers in Japan, organized the high-level symposium in preparation for the G8 Leaders Summit in Hokkaido, Toyako and to celebrate their 130th anniversary. The conference attracted more than 700 participants and was structured to address the issues of climate change, biodiversity and water.
In his keynote speech on biodiversity, Mr. Winkler focused on the Kobe Call for Action and the recent interim findings of the Pavan Suvdhek report on the Economics of Ecosystem and Biodiversity (TEEB) and highlighted the major outcomes from CBD CoP9 and the expectations for CBD CoP10 in Nagoya in 2010. “Japanese people are still more knowledgeable on climate change than on biodiversity,” he commented. “However, I was delighted to discover that there is great interest to learn more about biodiversity issues in light of the CBD CoP10.”
With this symposium, Asahi Simbun tested what could well become a sequence of high-level environment conferences that have the objective of informing their readership on the pressing global environmental issues.
IUCN is invited to support Asahi Shimbun in the organization of subsequent events, which will reach out to millions of people and Japan has shown a strong interest to work with Countdown 2010 and IUCN to establish a Countdown 2010 national platform in Japan.
