Workshop hosted to safeguard biodiversity

A CAPACITY-building workshop is being held by the Conservation and Environment Protection Authority to safeguard PNG’s rich biodiversity and ensure access and benefit-sharing.
Authority deputy managing director Dilu Muguwa said during the workshop in Port Moresby that PNG was blessed with rare flora and fauna.
“We need to protect the resources and the traditional knowledge associated with the use of those resources,” he said.
“The benefits that are derived from the use of those resources should be distributed fairly among the landowners as the beneficiaries.”
Access and benefit-sharing is the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the use of genetic resources, one of the three overall objectives of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) where PNG became a party to in 2010.
It comes under The Nagoya Protocol, a supplementary agreement to the CBD which intends to promote the objectives of the CBD and PNG is yet to ratify the protocol.
Head of the UNEP Pacific office Sefanaia Nawadra said the Nagoya protocol “looks at safeguarding communities and making sure they have some benefits from whatever we do with the assets that they have”.
“This places a big responsibility on all of us in the private sector, the Government, the non-governmental organisations and the universities, especially for those of us who are from the country where we are working in.
“A lot of those communities cannot effectively do things on their own so they rely on us to ensure that we safeguard their knowledge, their resources and that they get a fair share of the benefits and have a say on whether or not things should happen.”