– as Guyana leads discussion on building biodiversity conservation model
As the world confronts a biodiversity crisis, world leaders have gathered at the inaugural Biodiversity Alliance Summit in Guyana to craft a deliverable model to strengthen protection of biodiversity assets on the global stage.
Vice President Dr Bharrat Jagdeo, the architect behind Guyana’s Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS), first coined in 2009, which has now transformed into the LCDS 2030, reminded delegates that big achievements often begin with modest steps.
“Do not be deterred by modest beginnings. When we started building the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS), we had an even smaller group and we were less resourced at the time,” Dr Jagdeo recalled in his address during the afternoon session of the GBA Summit in the dome of the Arthur Chung Conference Centre (ACCC) on Wednesday.
Despite not having access to resources, Guyana, through its LCDS 2030, became the first jurisdiction in the world to receive verified carbon credits for its efforts in reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.
Guyana’s LCDS success was based on several principles: rigorous research and technical work, protecting entire ecosystems rather than isolated pilot projects, strong monitoring, reporting, and verification systems.
According to Dr Jagdeo, the involvement of local communities to ensure their prosperity is not sacrificed for conservation, was key to this success.
“We are here now to look at how we get political support for the initiative; how we can marshall all of these things that we have done before and that we will do, into clear, concise arguments that will allow us to get more political support globally,” he said as he highlighted the principles on which the biodiversity model must be framed.
Political support, he underscored, is necessary if Guyana is to achieve the global target of protecting 30 per cent of its land and water by 2030.
“That is crucial,” he said.
He noted that even in countries where climate change is still debated, there is growing passion for protecting nature.
“If that works with them, then fine. Because we can achieve the same outcome from a different route, and later, we come to the climate arguments,” he added.
Important to this global model, he said, is securing global investment, to which he stressed the need for the model to establish credibility and structure around biodiversity services, similar to the approach taken with forest carbon under Guyana’s landmark low carbon strategy.
Guyana’s LCDS in 2009 attracted a groundbreaking US$500 million deal with Norway, allowing the nation to earn revenues from just protecting its vast forest resources. The country later sold carbon credits for US$750 million to oil giant Hess Corporation over 10 years, a feat made possible through the LCDS 2030.
Finally, the model must be more than a one-off success. It must be scalable, adaptable, and replicable across regions and ecosystems, and it must work not only for biodiversity-rich countries like Guyana, but for any other nation that wants to embark on a similar path.
“A lot of the developing countries who have been here, they have very limited capacity to strengthen their legislation…we have to assist them in doing that; we have to assist them in many initiatives,” the Guyanese leaders stated.
He also urged world leaders and those participating in the historic summit to remain focused, not only on the science but even more so on the strategy.
“I think we can be widely successful if we are focused. We had to keep that focus very tight when we were building our model with all sorts of distractions coming our way,” the leader, who was once honoured as the ‘Champion of Earth’, noted.
He further emphasised, “We keep the focus tight, we can come up with a model that can be useful, we can get the political buy-in and we can get financial flows at a scale.”
