COP9

Completing the Unfinished Business of the Ten-Year Strategy

The legacy of the ninth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP9) held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was the completion of the unfinished business deriving from COP8 that took place in Madrid, Spain, in 2007, and where Parties had agreed on a ten-year strategic plan and framework to implement the Convention for the period 2008 to 2018 (The Strategy).

COP8 left crucial business pending, which became the subject of COP9, and culminated in 36 decisions and one resolution. Taken together, these decisions had three key outcomes. They aligned the work of the Convention’s institutions with the Strategy, put in place measures to support the efficient and effective implementation of the Strategy by all actors, including their related monitoring, and agreed on the resources to be provided to the Convention institutions for carrying out the work planned for 2010 and 2011. (The report from and decisions taken at COP9 are available here).

Institutional Reforms. Five significant institutional reforms emerged from COP9. First, the Committee for the Review of Implementation of the Convention (CRIC) was made a standing body of the Convention  with a mandate and terms of reference, primary, to guide the COP’s review, monitoring, assessment and evaluation of progress in the implementation of the Convention via the Strategy.

Second, the COP recognized the importance of mechanisms to facilitate regional coordination and outlined concrete steps to support such mechanisms. Third, in the light of the JIU report, it set in motion a process to evaluate institutional aspects of the Global Mechanism (GM), the entity responsible for promoting activities that would lead to the mobilization and channelling of financial resources, and to submit the evaluation’s findings for consideration by COP10.

Fourth, COP9 decided to enhance the global standing of the Committee on Science and Technology (CST). To this end, it authorized a continuation in the reshaping of the operation of the CST in line with The Strategy by organizing scientific conferences on CST priority themes, a review of its roster of independent experts, addressing the role and place of the science and technology correspondents, and a consideration at COP10 of the CST’s rules for electing its officers. And fifth, it defined the eligibility criteria to sponsor the participation of civil society organizations in official events and made provision for synergy with other Conventions, international organizations, institutions and agencies.

Setting the Beacons for Effectiveness. COP9’s other legacy was reaching agreement on the markers that will be used to assess and monitor the outcomes of the intended day-to-day activities and impact over time, putting the UNCCD on the path to both a quantitative and qualitative measurability of its outputs, outcomes and impact.

To this end, COP9 decided that all existing and new action programmes must be aligned with The Strategy. It also agreed on the short-term plans for 2010-2013 and immediate programmes or activities for 2010-2011 for the Convention institutions, including the planned work and next meeting of the CST and work programme and next meeting of the CRIC.

COP9 also defined new terms for reporting progress. The performance review and assessment of implementation system or PRAIS will use a unified set of the provisional performance indicators for measuring progress made by affected countries, as well as their partners, to implement The Strategy. In order to move towards standardizing the information and communication contained in the reports submitted about this progress, COP9 gave guidance on the elaboration of the reporting guidelines. The first such new type of reporting would take place at the end of 2010, followed by COP10’s consideration of the outcome report at its meeting in 2011.

In this context and to support the implementation of the Strategy particularly at the national levels, COP9 urged developed country Parties and the Global Environment Facility to, among other things, provide adequate, timely and predictable resources for the land degradation focal area in the fifth replenishment of the Global Environment Facility.

Later on, the performance review will be complemented by an assessment of impact on the livelihoods of affected populations and conditions of the drylands ecosystems. Thus, the COP also agreed on two mandatory and nine optional indicators, to be used for reporting starting in 2012. In addition, a mid-term review of The Strategy for 2013 was agreed to.

On the policy front, the Conference agreed that thematic policy frameworks for advocacy are needed and should be developed, gave consent on how to popularize the Convention’s work, including through the Decade campaign, and called for a follow-up of issues relevant to the Convention that came out of the 2008 and 2009 sessions of the Commission on Sustainable Development and of the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development.

And embracing the spirit of a learning community, COP9 agreed to deliberate on the outcomes of its 1^st Scientific Conference, and to keep a record of the reports from the interactions among ministers and among parliamentarians, as well as the declaration by the civil society organizations. With regard to the Land Degradation Assessment in Drylands, COP9 encouraged the CST to develop collaborative regional trainings on land degradation to improve the capacity to monitor and assess the Strategy’s implementation.

Finance, the Policy Bottom Line. COP9 decided that to follow-through with the activities for 2010-2011, parties would contribute approximately 16.4 million Euros to the core budget of the Convention for 2010-2011. The Parties also took note of the additional resource needs to be covered through voluntary contributions, which the secretariat and the Global Mechanism estimated to amount to about 25 million Euros.

As determined in the work programmes adopted by COP9, these changes would take effect on 1 January 2010.

Photos courtesy of IISD

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