In March 2006, at their eighth meeting (COP-8), Parties adopted the first decision under the Convention focusing exclusively on business engagement. The message was as clear then as it is today. The Convention will not be implemented without an increased understanding and participation of the business community.

This message has been relayed in several critical policy fora, as witnessed, notably, by the inclusion of ‘business and biodiversity’ in the Potsdam Initiative, the Biodiversity Communication of the European Commission, and the Biodiversity Agenda of the EU Presidencies Germany, Portugal and Slovenia. I believe that the study on valuing the economic cost of biodiversity loss, which has just begun under the able leadership of Pavan Sukhdev, will go a long way to illustrate the business case for biodiversity.

Another sign has been the adoption, shortly after COP-8, of the Global Environmental Facility’s Strategy to Enhance Engagement with the Private Sector.

Likewise, several major events have taken place, notably in Portugal (last November) and in Germany (in April of this year). Several contributors to this issue provide feedback on these events.

Germany, as host to the COP, has been particularly active in mobilizing the business community on biodiversity. This work will be profiled on 27 May and again during the High Level Segment, on 29 May. An itinerant exhibition throughout the COP will also be showcasing the work of the signatory companies to the German Business and Biodiversity Initiative. Another clear signal of this booming agenda has been the number of requests the Secretariat has received for business related side events at COP-9. In this regard, I am also delighted that the Secretariat is organizing — with colleagues at UNEP and UNU-IAS, and others — a Business and Biodiversity Forum.

In this issue of the newsletter, we provide an overview of business and biodiversity in order to help guide the discussions on business engagement tabled for COP-9. This should be read in conjunction with the formal Note prepared on the subject (1).

The issue contains four sections: (1) a general update on business and biodiversity (e.g. what governments are doing at the national level; tools to assess a company’s dependency on ecosystem services; updates from NGOs on business engagement); (2) a sector by sector overview of recent initiatives, with a particular emphasis on agribusiness, given this year’s theme for the International Day for Biological Diversity (IBD); (3) biodiversity offsets — one of the instruments explicitly highlighted in decision VIII/17; and (4) Access and Benefit-sharing (ABS).

We launched this newsletter in October 2006 in order to accompany the implementation of decision VIII/17. Over the course of the last year and a half, we have received positive feedback from Parties, businesses and others. During the COP, we will be carrying out an informal survey on how to improve this product. I would like to invite you to take part in this exercise.

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(1) UNEP/CBD/COP/9/21/Add.1