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SADC countries vouch to improve information sharing on Biodiversity
IUCN - The World Conservation Union - Regional Office for Southern Africa (ROSA)
August 05, 2002

Countries in the Southern African Region have reaffirmed the need to improve interaction and sharing of information on biodiversity issues, to promote the development of Environmental Information Systems (EIS) and an improved understanding in the area among member states.

Delegates to the just-ended four-day workshop on Information Exchange Procedures and Data Standards workshop held in Gaborone, Botswana, agreed on the need to improve information exchange, as there was reluctance to share information due to a lot of scepticism among member states and organisations.

The workshop, which was organised by the Southern Africa Biodiversity Programme with funding from Global Environment Forum and the United Nations Development Programme, aimed at addressing the problem faced in disseminating information on biodiversity, as well as agree on core data sets for key information and procedure.

Other concerns cited as reasons to this mistrust were property rights and ownership of data and the inadequate agreed terms and procedures for information dissemination.

With technical support from IUCN - The World Conservation Union, the 5-year project, aims to promote the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity in Southern Africa by strengthening regional biodiversity planning and information exchange.

IUCN Regional Programme Co-ordinator, Dr. Eben Chonguica noted that in order to address these apprehensions, the Programme Implementation Unit of the Southern Africa Biodiversity Programme is taking a multi-sectoral approach to try and clear this wind and discuss ways of
strategically exchanging information on biodiversity.

"Effective utilisation and management of genetic resources requires a state-of -the-art information on their status in space and time dimensions. A biodiversity information system, therefore, is a critical management tool providing the knowledge base to be used as a decision support system to guide intelligent use and management of the important biological resources of our planet.

This, it was hoped, would help come up with clear-cut information exchange procedures in the SADC region.

Programme Officer in the Programme Implementation Unit of the Southern Africa Biodiversity Programme, Estere Tsoka said the involvement of governments was imperative, as it would help in coming up with national policies, which would be shared by the region.

"Governments commitment," she said, " will enable concrete resolutions to be made so that different expertise can be shared among SADC member states."

"Presently, a taskforce is drafting a memorandum of understanding which will be signed by Government Heads in December as a way of committing themselves to this process," she said.

Welcoming this development, the IUCN Programme Assistant who was at the workshop, Freddie Kachote, observed that currently it is difficult for member countries, to come up with a common position in developing fully-fledged data standards and classification systems applicable throughout the region.

He said whilst there was a general consensus acknowledged for the need to share information on conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity at national, regional and international levels, more work needed to be done to make the environment conducive for this to occur.

"There is a lot of suspicion among member states because of previous unfortunate incidences and this is making it difficult to share information," he said.

The delegates, drawn from 10 SADC countries and including representatives of Government departments as well as from the Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO), also discussed ways of ending the current information management system at regional level, which was still a fuss and was not conducive for information exchange.

This, they said, needed the involvement and participation of Governments in such consultative gatherings so that they developed a better understanding and appreciation of the need to share information at regional level.

The aim of the establishment of the Southern African Biodiversity Support Programme (SABSP)'s Regional Biodiversity Information Systems (RBIS) was to build on the national environmental information systems known as Biodiversity Information Centres (BICs) and the Clearing House Mechanisms.

This was being developed in most Southern African Counties with the support of the Global Environment Facility under the National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP) development process.

SABSP would be instrumental in bringing together a network of national Biodiversity information institutions and individual experts and brokering agreement on regional data-set standards, information classification systems and compatible software and information management procedures.

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