Mobilization and Innovative Financial Mechanisms.
The Convention on Biological Diversity includes a clear commitment that "The developed countryParties shall provide new and additional financial resources to enable developing country Parties to meet the agreed full incremental costs to them of implementing measures which fulfill theobligations of this Convention and to benefit from its provisions".2In a position paper for the 10th Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Biodiversity,members of the CBD Alliance recommended that "Strategies to provide financial and other support to biodiversity conservation and restoration should not embrace risky approaches like forest carbon offset markets, biodiversity offsets and the Green Development Mechanism. Parties at COP 10 should agree on an ambitious target for developed countries to provide new and additional public financial resources."
Balance between Conservation and Exploitation
Indigenous communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHTs) of Bangladesh are managing forests around their homesteads in a sustainable way despite exclusion of customary rights on government managed reserved forests. Bangladesh, as one of the forest poor countries in the world, iscontinuously struggling to conserve its forest resources. However, community managed Village Common Forest (VCF) represents an influential model of forest management, serving multi-functions to the dependent indigenous communities. The current study was conducted in the 12 VCF areas of Rangamati and Bandarban districts in CHTs employing semi structured interviews to the members of Forest User Group (FUG). The study found that VCFs are enriched with more biodiversity than that of Government forests. Moreover, indigenous management of resources in VCFs were sustaining a balance between exploitation and conservation. Finally, the study suggests that for halting degradation of forest resources in Bangladesh, VCF could be used widely as an effective tool.
Agriculture Biodiversity and Food Security
Two Sides of a Coin
Recent worldwide food crisis has raised the issue of food security to an urgent basis. The current study, therefore, anchors on the issue of indiscriminate agriculture biodiversity loss and its impacts on food security. Bangladesh is considered as one of the fertile deltas in the world. Along with favourable climatic condition the country is also endowed with highly productive native crop varieties. Nevertheless, the study has shown that lack of proper use of agriculture biodiversity and practice of so called modern agriculture systems that are based on hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides without paying much attention to the native varieties are responsible for recent food crisis in agrarian Bangladesh.
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Resuscitating the Sundarbans |
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Customary use of Biodiversity and traditional Cultural Practice in Bangladesh |
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