{"id":2038,"date":"2015-06-01T09:00:24","date_gmt":"2015-06-01T08:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/?p=2038"},"modified":"2015-06-09T16:40:46","modified_gmt":"2015-06-09T15:40:46","slug":"business-biodiversity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/2015\/06\/01\/business-biodiversity\/","title":{"rendered":"Business & Biodiversity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Next June 16th, I will be speaking at an event being put together in Warsaw by the Polish chapter<\/a> of the European Union’s Business @ Biodiversity Platform<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0and since Biodiversity has not been covered in much depth in these posts to date, I thought I would dedicate the next few posts to the topic and the issues it raises for business.<\/p>\n

Biodiversity, the basics<\/strong><\/p>\n

According to an American group, The National Wildlife Federation<\/a>, Biodiversity or Biological diversity is the variety of life on our planet. \u00a0According to them, estimates of the number of different\u00a0species\u00a0range from 3 to 30 million although\u00a0most are insects and tiny\u00a0organisms.<\/p>\n

In parallel with its concern about climate change, the United Nations also established a Convention on Biodiversity<\/a> in Rio in 1992 and the Convention has 196 states<\/a> that have agreed to its terms as well as the United States which signed the agreement but has not yet ratified it in the U.S. Senate. The full text of the convention is available here and so far there have been 12 international conferences of the parties in a number of cities around the world with subsequent agreements and targets named after specific cities.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a>The convention is presently pursuing its strategic plan for the period 2011 – 2020 with twenty targets<\/a> grouped in five areas.<\/p>\n

The targets are tremendously ambitious and essentially call for the world to stop damaging its fisheries, forests, wild growing plants and endangered species by 2020 and for all of the parties (countries) to have biodiversity strategies in place by 2015.<\/p>\n

Fisheries, for example, is target number 6 and there is growing evidence that at our current rate of fishing is being done in an unsustainable manner. The enclosed video form the economist, produced in 2012,\u00a0reports an alarming situation in the world’s fisheries which will require tremendous political action to get turned around by 2020.<\/p>\n