11 RCE Chubu: Multicultural Dialogue for Sustainability – The Biodiversity Cyber Dialogue Project Reita Furusawa Kinhide Mushakoji RCE Chubu RCE Chubu is one of six RCEs in Japan, located in the area of Aichi, Mie, and Gifu prefecture. Instead of using a political or economic district to identify the regional centre, RCE Chubu adopted a natural environmental district with which to identify itself, the Ise-Mikawa Bay Watershed and the river basins draining into Ise-Mikawa Bay. The downstream reaches are heavily industrialised and upstream there has been considerable environmental destruction as a result. RCE Chubu emphasises the perspective of horizontal themes, aligned with the characteristics of the region. The themes to be taken up for promoting education for sustainable development (ESD) include manufacturing, energy, forest conservation, river and tideland conservation, and multicultural harmony (Figure 1). Figure 1 Ise-Mikawa Bay Watershed and themes of regional challenges Introduction The multistakeholder partnership established by RCE Chubu provided a number of benefits to the Biodiversity Cyber Dialogue Project initiative, including: • A focus on both the local and global dialogues on 78 biodiversity and sustainable development issues, thanks to participants who had different specialties and views on sustainability issues. • A useful means to link RCEs and other groups, such as the indigenous and local communities, to discuss common strategies in the fight against ecological, economic and/or social unsustainability. • The development of a multicultural approach, which will curb the unsustainable imposition of global standards that ignore the ecological and cultural diversity of the different bioregions. This chapter will highlight the outcomes of RCE Chubu’s Biodiversity Cyber Dialogue Project, which used a social networking service (SNS). The goal of the project was to develop a deeper, common understanding among all the global stakeholders about the urgent need to reduce the loss of biodiversity, as well as to promote ESD as a way to foster a global consensus on changing unsustainable human lifestyles and socioeconomic institutions to sustainable ones. The Biodiversity Cyber Dialogue Project was conducted before and during the Convention on Biological Diversity Conference of the Parties (CBD CO P) 10, which was held in the RCE Chubu region of Nagoya, Japan in Aichi Prefecture from 18 to 29 October, 2010. CBD CO P 11, which will be a continuation of what was discussed at CO P 10, is going to be held at Hyderabad, India in October 2012. Mutual, cross-boundary, national and international ESD learning among civil society participants was one of the major impacts of this initiative. This was especially true among the members of Japanese NGOs, which have wide ranging interests in biodiversity, with some specialising on particular ecological issues and others covering different social and economic aspects of ESD. The Cyber Dialogue Project and related collaborative projects with Japanese NGOs were good opportunities for the RCE to expand its network, with the promotion of ESD alongside the concept of biodiversity as the entry point. In addition, the Cyber Dialogue covered all environmental, social, and economic factors, and helped broaden the common point of view that biodiversity is only an environmental issue. Topics such as “Indigenous Peoples and Biodiversity,” “Gender and Biodiversity,” “Local Community Life and Biodiversity”, as well as “Traditional Wisdom and Biodiversity” have been crucial issues in the cyber dialogue. In the second stage of the project, following CO P 10, the 11 March 2012 East Japan earthquake and the explosion of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plants provided an additional focus for the Cyber Dialogue. Monitori ng, docume ntation, pr otection, and edu cation
Traditional Knowledge and Biodiversity
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