April 5, 2022
From 14 to 29 March 2022, the third session of the SBI, the 24th SBSTTA and the third open-ended working group on the Global Biodiversity Framework were held in Geneva, Switzerland.
The IPC Working Group on Agricultural Biodiversity participated in person in the first week of the meeting, with a delegation from Latin America. Several problems related to the obligatory bureaucracy prevented several delegates from the African region, mainly from civil society, from arriving in Geneva for what was supposed to be the last round of negotiations before CoP15, and this unfortunately also hurt the IPC delegation.
The three weeks of meetings were intense and saw the Parties and also the observers – whenever possible – intervene strongly to defend their positions after two years of virtual consultations in which the Parties never wanted to expose themselves with definitive statements due to the limits imposed by the virtual meetings.
We expected a stronger outcome from these three meetings, with a more mature awareness of the urgency of addressing the real drivers of biodiversity erosion to reverse the devastating course that has been underway for decades.