A group of environmentally committed journalists joined some 450 delegates from all corners of the world at a major international conference on ways to conserve the world’s vital ecosystems in Paris from September 19 to 21.
The group of seven Franco-Spanish, Italian, Macedonian, Brazilian and Senegalese journalists attended a training workshop in tandem with the conference aimed at sharpening their writing on biodiversity issues to give it force with the widest possible public. The workshop was led by the Reuters Foundation and sponsored by the Com+ Alliance of Communicators for Sustainable Development.
The conference, organised by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) under the title “Biodiversity in European Development Cooperation”, focused on ways in which European nations could gear their aid to developing countries to stem the apparently inexorable loss of biodiversity. It was part of the international Countdown 2010 campaign to halt the loss of biodiversity by that date. Latest figures show that more than 60 per cent of the world’s natural resources, on which humans depend for their food, welfare and livelihood, are being used up at an unsustainable rate and species are dying out at up to 1,000 times the normal speed.
Practical exercises in the workshop were based on the findings of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), a four-year study of the world’s ecosystems launched in 2000 by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, involving 1,360 experts worldwide and culminating in 2005 with a wide-ranging report on conditions and trends in ecosystems and scenarios for the future.
Participants developed stories from material in the report, on the increase in endangered species and on the severe degrading of coastal and marine ecosystems. They also attended the opening and closing sessions of the conference and a high-level press conference on the opening day, and had question-and-answer sessions within the workshop with IUCN experts.
In their final workshop session, the journalists discussed techniques for keeping biodiversity in the news to raise public awareness of the seriousness of the situation and humanity’s responsibility for it.
All the participants found the setting of the workshop in parallel with the conference very helpful and stimulating. They were able not only to attend some conference sessions but also to immerse themselves in the atmosphere in the corridors and salons of the International Conference Centre, set up interviews with delegates and make contacts with relevant experts.
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