For example, the dueling proposals recently introduced in the U.S. Congress could have reverberations worldwide: The Federal Research Public Access Act would require articles resulting from research funded by any federal agency to be made publicly available 6 months after publication, whereas the Research Works Act would prohibit such mandates.

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Some 70 representatives from 42 world countries including representatives from FNR-Rio pilot countries, the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the United Nations Education, Science, and Cultural Organization, (UNESCO) and United Nations Environmental Program World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) all attended this event.

The Asia Pacific regional networks provides in depth look into improving standards of living through models, risk analysis and cost benefit analysis for ecosystem services.

They also discussed how to care about the future with long term human well being through bio-diversity and ecosystem.

source: http://www.presstv.ir/detail/231124.html

Welcome Remarks by Dr. Asghar Mohammadi Fazal, President of the ECO Institute of Environmental Science and Technology; at the The ECO meeting on “TRANSBOUNDARY MOVEMENT OF BIOLOGICAL SPECIMENS AND SPECIES" held on 9 March 2012 at the Olympic Hotel in Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran:

“In the name of God, the compassionate, the Merciful”

Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen;

First of all, I would like to convey the warm welcome of H.E. Mr. Mohammad-Javad Mohammadi Zadeh, Vice President of the Islamic Republic of Iran & Head of the Department of Environment, to all participants to The CEO meeting on “TRANSBOUNDARY MOVEMENT OF BIOLOGICAL SPECIMENS AND SPECIES".

We are delighted and honoured to host this meeting followed by Asia-Pacific Regional Capacity Building Workshop and Consultative Meeting on Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), to be held from 10 to 12 March 2012, in Tehran, here at the same venue of this meeting.

I wish to extend a warm welcome to fellow delegates from the various countries. I realize that you are fully dedicated to the sessions that will follow, but I do hope you will also take time to enjoy fascinating Iran with its beautiful nature, rich biodiversity, friendly people and multi-cultural traditions.

I recognize that this gathering enable the building of a productive dialogue between ECO State Member countries. This also provides an invaluable opportunity for networking and fruitful contacts between countries.

As a founding member of ECO, Iran has a serious commitment. Over the years, we have been supportive of the policies and projects under ECO, the most recent, establishment of the ECO Institute of Environmental Science and Technology in February 2011. And now we are delighted to be given the opportunity to host this meeting.

Distinguish delegates;

From the perspective of environmental and development policy and programs, transboundary resources and impacts have become an area of increasing concern. It applies to environmental management, planning and the assessment and monitoring of impacts, refers to resources and/or impacts that cross over one or more international boundaries.

A transboundary resource or impact is therefore, where two or more countries share, or should share, responsibility for ownership, management, and exploitation of physical and biological resources. It includes situations where activities of one country can directly increase or decrease the quantity, quality or availability of the same resource in another country. Transboundary impacts are where activities in one country are felt directly in another.

Both resources and impacts require regional and international co-operation for their management. Countries can benefit each other and there are much potential for countries to have positive impacts upon natural resources, both for themselves and others, through improved resources management.

Our practical examples from the ECO countries show that there is willingness for mutual and multilateral cooperation in the region and this meeting will enable new collaborations between us.

On behalf of the Government of Islamic Republic of Iran, I would like to welcome all participants in particular our guests from the ECO region, came to contribute to the success of this event.

Our meeting would not have happened without the help of:

• · Secretariat of the Economic Cooperation Organization;
• · ECO Institute of Environmental Science and Technology;
• · United Nations Environment Programme;
• · Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs;
• · University of Environment; and
• · Iranian Department of Environment.

I thank all of them, and wish you a very fruitful and productive discussions and results, and with that, I declare this meeting open.

Thanks you./

The draft was prepared by the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), in its capacity as the Secretariat of the Friends of the Conservation Commons. It was prepared as an input to planning for the future of the Conservation Commons, and as a contribution to the CBD and the future Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The draft incorporates input from a wide range of expertise across the sector, including from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

The document analyzes the major barriers to sharing data, information and knowledge related to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, along with an overview of initiatives already addressing these barriers. On the basis of this analysis, the gaps in current activity and areas requiring additional support are identified in a series of recommendations for future actions. [CBD Notification] [Publication: Review Draft: A Review of Barriers to the Sharing of Biodiversity Data and Information, with Recommendations for Eliminating Them]

The objective of this regional gathering is to provide information on the IPBES process so far, present the agenda and documents for the second session of a plenary meeting and facilitate an exchange of views on these among governmental stakeholders.

For more details see: http://www.ipbes.net/

A summary of the report can be found here: http://conserveonline.org/workspaces/fnr/documents/promoting-synergies-within-biodiversity-related

The complexity of the systems involved in creating thriving communities challenges researchers, planners, developers and managers.  But the potential returns are massive.

We invite papers and presentations on research and practice related to the challenge of creating and supporting thriving neighbourhoods and communities.  You may nominate whether you wish your abstract to be peer-reviewed or not.

For submission themes, dates and other information, please go to:  www.thrivingneighbourhoods.org

Free and unrestricted access to research results and publications, known as open access (OA), is key to speeding up scientific discovery. There is also growing evidence that OA maximises the impact of research through better dissemination and uptake of research findings.

But how can we make this a truly global and sustainable endeavour? This was much discussed at the recent Berlin 9 Open Access conference in Washington DC.

Unlock local research potential with open access

Leslie Chan

8 December 2011 | EN | 中文

The traditional journal publishing
system is not serving the needs
of developing countries

Flickr/moonlightbulb

The developing world is not well served by traditional research publishing, but can break new ground with open access, argues Leslie Chan.

Free and unrestricted access to research results and publications, known as open access (OA), is key to speeding up scientific discovery. There is also growing evidence that OA maximises the impact of research through better dissemination and uptake of research findings.

But how can we make this a truly global and sustainable endeavour? This was much discussed at the recent Berlin 9 Open Access conference in Washington DC.

There was a recurrent theme: that in today’s highly networked, open-knowledge environment, the traditional scholarly communication system — with the journal article as the key currency — can no longer serve the diverse needs of scholarship and discovery.

Conventional methods of evaluating research impact based on journal citations, particularly the reliance on Thomson Reuters’ journal impact factor, need to be reconsidered and redesigned to reflect new scholarly practices and the diverse means of engagement enabled by OA and the new wave of web tools (‘Web 2.0′).

OA offers an opportunity to rethink what constitutes research impact, how to reward scholarship and how to encourage research sharing — issues of particular importance for the developing world.

Emphasis on international appeal

For too long, research assessment in the developing world has closely followed practices and metrics created by wealthier nations. Even organisations such as UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) continue to reinforce the use of the journal impact factor and the registration of patents as metrics for national research performance.

As the impact factor is heavily biased towards journals from the developed world, researchers from poorer countries have been encouraged to publish in indexed international journals rather than national or local journals as a way to gain institutional and national recognition.

This has done much to shift the emphasis of research to topics that appeal to an international readership, obscuring local research agendas.

There is also a growing emphasis on university rankings as a proxy for excellence, based primarily on research productivity — prominent examples are Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings and the Academic Ranking of World Universities. This means that the impact factor continues to dominate research evaluation despite widespread criticism of biased coverage and a flawed methodology underlying its calculation.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in China, where researchers and institutions are given cash incentives to publish in high-ranking international journals. This is seen as essential for boosting China’s presence in world science.

So while the total scientific publication output from China, as measured by Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science, is now only second to the United States [1], the focus on external recognition undermines locally important research and creates disincentives for the government to focus on locally relevant policy and funding.

Openness can unlock potential

This should not be the model for the developing world to emulate. Instead,policymakers should encourage experimentation with practices that take advantage of the potential of openness — in research, data, source code, educational resources and innovation.

Open repositories for publications and data, new tools for knowledge discovery and new forms of representation and visualisation can bring exciting opportunities for innovations in scholarly communication. Examples are the Open Source Drug Discovery Network and the Virtual Open Access Agriculture and Aquaculture Repository.

We are seeing the emergence of what innovation-policy scholar Caroline Wagner calls the ‘new invisible college’ [2], where researchers collaborate across disciplinary and national boundaries, driven by common interests rather than by international funding agendas.

This is a good time for research institutions with nascent capacity to overtake those in well-off nations by adopting better mechanisms for the exchange of knowledge. And they may be better placed to adapt and innovate as they are not bound by tradition.

Signs to the open road

Policymakers and researchers must begin to take advantage of these capabilities. This means thinking beyond the confines of the impact factor and towards new forms of scholarly metrics enabled by social media andnetworking tools.

An encouraging development, announced at the Berlin 9 meeting, is the World Bank’s plan to provide open access to research it funds under a licence similar to that of Creative Commons — a clear sign that the organisation is beginning to see the links between openness and innovation.

Recently, UNESCO launched the Global Open Access Portal to mobilise and coordinate OA initiatives across its member states. This late arrival on the OA scene could duplicate existing efforts, but UNESCO’s action is significant and should spur other UN bodies into serious engagement with OA.

And next year’s Berlin 10 Open Access meeting will be hosted by the Stellenbosch University in South Africa, making its first appearance in a developing country. It will be a good time and place to take stock of progress on re-evaluating the default measure of research quality.

Just as the rapid growth of mobile devices in many parts of Africa has spurred innovations in social entrepreneurship, mobile health applications and educational opportunities, so too could networked science based on OA be a source of innovation and local problem-solving in the developing world.

Leslie Chan is director of Bioline International, a non-profit electronic publishing collaboration, and supervisor for the International Development Studies programme at the University of Toronto.

REFERENCES

[1] Royal Society Knowledge, networks and nations: global scientific collaboration in the 21st century (2011)

[2] Wagner, Caroline. The new invisible college: science for development. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press (2008)

source: http://www.scidev.net/en/science-communication/open-access/opinions/unlock-local-research-potential-with-open-access–1.html

"Mitigation" and "adaptation" are two important terms that are fundamental in the climate change debate. Climate mitigation is any action taken to permanently eliminate or reduce the long-term risk and hazards of climate change to human life and property.

Climate adaptation refers to the ability of a system to adjust to climate change (including climate variability and extremes) to moderate potential damage, to take advantage of opportunities, or to cope with the consequences. While mitigation tackles the causes of climate change, adaptation tackles the effects of the phenomenon. A successful adaptation can reduce vulnerability by building on and strengthening existing coping strategies.

OECD data show that one-third of the estimated climate-change-related aid in 2010 went to support adaptation (USD 9.3 billion) while two-thirds was for mitigation (USD 17.6 billion, up 69 percent from 2009).

These estimates reflect aid activities in which, according to OECD, climate change mitigation or adaptation was either the principal or a significant objective. About 60 percent of the total climate-related aid had mitigation or adaptation as the principal objective.

"Measurement of climate-related development aid by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) is an important contribution to the tracking of climate financing," says Angel Gurría, Secretary-General of the 34-nation grouping of industrialized and a few emerging economies.

"We have been tracking aid in support of mitigation since 1998. This is the first time we are also reporting on support for adaptation to have a more complete picture of climate change related aid. Going forward, we urge donors to step up bringing in both mitigation and adaptation considerations into their development policies," Gurría, a Mexican national, adds.

According to OECD, in certain cases, funds can be tagged as both mitigation and adaptation-related. So it is important to avoid double-counting. Of the total USD 22.9 billion in finance, an estimated USD 4 billion supported both mitigation and adaptation objectives.

"All our aid data are publicly available, bringing transparency and accountability to what countries and multilateral institutions are doing in this area," Gurria assures.

The OECD, which claims to have been working on climate change economics and policy since the late 1980s to identify and implement least-cost policy responses, is also advising governments on how to design and use innovative financial instruments – such as green bonds – to attract new sources of capital, including from pension funds and other institutional investors.

The organisation has also recently launched the climate change chapter of the Environmental Outlook to 2050 and is implementing its Green Growth Strategy.

Rio Conventions

The developed countries that signed the three Rio Conventions in 1992 committed themselves to assist developing countries in the implementation of these Conventions. Since 1998 the DAC has monitored aid targeting the objectives of the Rio Conventions through its ‘Creditor Reporting System’ (CRS) using the so called "Rio markers".

The Rio marker on climate change mitigation was established by the DAC in close collaboration with the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to track aid flows that support the implementation of the Convention.

In December 2009 the DAC approved a new marker to also track aid in support of climate change adaptation. This complements the climate change mitigation marker, and thus allows the presentation of a more complete picture of climate-change-related aid.

First data on the new marker, relating to 2010 flows, will become available at the end of 2011, the OECD says in abackground paper. Work is on going to extend the coverage of DAC statistics on climate finance to bilateral non-concessional flows and multilateral flows, it adds.

At the 15^th Conference of Parties (COP15) in Copenhagen in 2009, developed counties agreed to provide "new and additional resources" for adaptation and mitigation "approaching USD 30 billion for the period 2010-12".

For the longer term, developed countries committed to "a goal of mobilising jointly USD 100 billion dollars a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries" through a "wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance".

The DAC helps monitor the implementation of these commitments by making available aggregate statistics on climate change-related aid as illustrated in this note. Information on the underlying projects can be accessed in the DAC’s online database.

Every aid activity reported to the CRS is screened and marked as either (i) targeting the Conventions as a ‘principal objective’ or a ‘significant objective’, or (ii) not targeting the objective.

Biodiversity-related aid is defined as activities that promote at least one of the three objectives of the Convention: the conservation of biodiversity, sustainable use of its components (ecosystems, species or genetic resources), or fair and equitable sharing of the benefits of the utilisation of genetic resources.

Desertification-related aid is defined as activities that combat desertification or mitigate the effects of drought in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas through prevention and/or reduction of land degradation, rehabilitation of partly degraded land, or reclamation of desertified land.

limate change mitigation-related aid is defined as activities that contribute to the objective of stabilisation of greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system by promoting efforts to reduce or limit GHG emissions or to enhance GHG sequestration.

In December 2009 the DAC members approved a new marker to also track aid in support of climate change adaptation. This new marker will complement the existing climate change mitigation marker, and thus allow presentation of a more complete picture of aid in support of developing countries’ efforts to address climate change. [IDN-InDepthNews – December 8, 2011]

Image: How climate change, associated with increased carbon dioxide levels, has affected plant growth.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Related IDN Articles:
http://www.indepthnews.info/index.php/global-issues/planet-earth/climate-change

2011 IDN-InDepthNews | Analysis That Matters

source: http://www.indepthnews.info/index.php/global-issues/596-donors-helping-to-tackle-climate-change

From 7-9 December, 2011 Germany will host a workshop in Bonn in coordination with UNEP for about 100 international experts. The workshop will prepare the 2nd session of theIPBES plenary scheduled for April 2012 and focus on theIPBES topic "policy support/policy relevance".

This topic is of particular interest from a German point of view. It is vital that the scientific results of IPBES are made available both on demand and for policy makers and thus constitute an important basis for day-to-day political decision-making. By hosting this international workshop Germany intends to proactively push an important topic and thus further contribute to the international process. The Network-forum for biodiversity research Germany (NeFo) at the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) will prepare and organise the planned workshop.

Further information on the workshop, in particular for participants