in the Japanese version of the Cyber Dialogue. The Japanese version was linked to the Cyber Dialogue in English, to which only a limited number of participants could be invited to participate. Three separate, yet closely interrelated debates took place. One was the debate on the “Philosophy of CBD”, which was organised in Japanese and fed into the international e-conference. A second was a debate on indigenous communities and other communities living in harmony with nature, which was introduced in the i-dialog and evolved into a discussion on the unsustainability of the modern global economy. The indigenous communities and other traditional local communities – including nomad communities in Africa, dalits in South Asia, landless farmers from Latin America, and fisher-folks from the Asian coast regions – proudly called themselves the Climate Communities and were protesting against the Copenhagen Summit for leaving them out of discussions on global warming in spite of the fact that they were the ones who were helping to delay global warming through the subsistence lifestyles they lived in their respective ecological environments. Their lifestyle was difficult for some participants of the i-dialog to emulate. Whether Japan’s rapid growth economy could be abandoned fully was posed as a serious question. All i-dialog participants agreed, however, to prepare a document in response to the Climate Community Declaration. These two dialogues were translated in both English and Japanese. A third discussion, held in Japanese, was on selected themes including one on gender and biodiversity, which declared that both women and nature were the object of global trends following colonialism. In spite of these three Cyber Dialogue discussion outcomes, the organisers had to admit that they could not develop the Cyber Dialogue as fully as they had expected. One identified challenge took place in the first stage of the dialogue. The problem was largely a result of technical difficulties some participants experienced when logging in, probably attributable to a variation in IT literacy and competencies among individuals. In addition, even after logging in, a proportion of the participants became too busy and failed to post comments. As a way of solving this problem, the organisers decided to use mailing lists in addition to the SNS, forwarding comments from the mailing list to the SNS. 11 Press briefing of the Appeal at CO P 10 Phase 3: COP 10 The third phase of the Cyber Dialogue took place during CO P 10. At CO P 10, JCN-CBD and CREPN organised forums in order to present the outcomes of the Cyber Dialogue Project and the thematic groups of JCN-CBD. The forums were diverse public meetings on the different aspects of biodiversity. They included such sessions as “A Proposal of the 13 Grandmothers to CO P 10,”“Revival of the Bioregion,”“Biodiversity and Peace,” and “A dialogue of Japanese and International Citizens to Finalise the Aichi-Nagoya Appeal”. All these sessions were held in the Interactive Fair for Biodiversity which was a collective designation of side-events organised by the Aichi-Nagoya CO P 10 CBD Promotion Committee. Draft Declaration by Citizens of Aichi Nagoya The Cyber Dialogue discussions led to the preparation of a Draft Declaration by Citizens of Aichi Nagoya, the host of CO P 10 and the fifth meeting of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties (MOP 5). The first version of the declaration was drafted by Dr. Kinhide Mushakoji, Ms. Seiko Hanochi, Mr. Hiroo Komamiya and Mr. Junichi Ohnuma, and circulated and modified through further discussions on the SNS site and the mailing lists. The drafters were willing to publish it as a declaration of Japan’s civil society, acknowledged by the JCN-CBD Steering Committee. Nevertheless, some groups of JCNCBD had different sentiments on the draft’s suitability for the general public. The criticisms on economic growth, pointing out that “neoliberalism has adopted a ’growth principle‘, which regards ’economic growth‘ to be of top priority over anything else (CREPN, 2011 p4)” were not fully accepted. The draft of the declaration was circulated and signatures were collected both outside and inside the venue of CO P 10. Finally, the drafters made public the 81
Traditional Knowledge and Biodiversity
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