GLOBE: an international platform helping legislators to get prepared for Rio + 20

At the Natural Capital Initiative Steering Group meeting this morning we received a very interesting talk about GLOBE International’s work.

GLOBE International was founded in 1989 with the aim to tackle pressing environmental challenges through legislation by creating an international and cross-party platform for legislators. Since then they have been actively working on facilitating dialogue in four major policy themes: climate change, natural capital, forestry and marine environment.

GLOBE, together with ZSL, organised a side event on ‘Legislative approaches to recognising the value of biodiversity and natural capital’ at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) 10th Conference of Parties (COP10) in Nagoya in 2010. On that event they tried to find answers on why the 2010 Biodiversity targets were not met. One of the possible problems according to GLOBE was ‘the real missing link is the political leadership that is necessary to integrate these [natural capital] values into policy decisions at the local and national level’. Their Natural Capital Initiative and Action Plan, which was launched in Nagoya, tries to tackle this problem by suggesting the creation of Ministerial Natural Capital Committees to stream the Natural Capital approach into other policies. The UK took on this initiative and is setting up such a Committee at the moment.

This year GLOBE is focussing on another big challenge by organising the 1st World Summit of Legislators before the Rio + 20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development. This event will be attended by high profile experts and politicians. The goal of the meeting is to inform legislators about relevant issues. GLOBE is preparing a publication on different Natural Capital Approaches within the EU at the moment. The other important outcome of the Summit will be to ‘negotiate and agree a legislators’ protocol to be ratified in the legislatures of the participating parliaments’.
If GLOBE’s initiative succeeds we can expect strong outcomes of the Rio + 20 Conference.