3GTW
the 3rd Global Taxonomy Workshop
Pretoria 2002
Paris 2003

3GTW: Towards Sustainable Development: Partnerships for Demand-driven Taxonomic Capacity Building

As our only home, Planet Earth, teeters on the brink of ecological collapse, at this, the start of the 21st century, we have come to realise that her resources are not infinite and that her ability to provide for the exponential rise in human numbers and our related consumption of resources, and assimilate the similar exponential rise in waste production, is reaching its limits. Along with many other related initiatives, one response on behalf of the global community has been the introduction of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), one of a number of Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) coming on-line in recent years to try and stem the tide of destruction. The CBD is built on three basic tenets:
· Conservation of biodiversity;
· Sustainable use of biodiversity;
· Equitable benefit-sharing from the use of biodiversity.

Not one of these ambitious, laudable and necessary objectives will be possible without the knowledge associated with the science of systematics (or taxonomy), the discovery, description, identification and classification of organisms, and elucidation and understanding of their relationships and ecological roles. However, the discipline of taxonomy over the last few decades has fallen off the global political, funding and academic agendas, to the point where it is often no longer possible to conduct fundamental baseline systematics at the level required to understand and sustainably manage the planet’s biodiversity. This puts not only the objectives of the CBD out of reach, but compromises all other MEAs and many other areas vital to human survival and well-being, such as agricultural, forestry and fisheries productivity, human, crop and livestock health, managing invasive alien species, quarantine services, environmental impact assessment, biotechnology and biosecurity. Further, adequate taxonomy is one of the necessary underpinning tools required for the global community to be able to implement the Millenium Development Goals and the development targets from the World Summit for Sustainable Development. Without adequate long-term investment in the human, infrastructural (including, importantly, biological collections) and information resources necessary to underpin the science of systematics, the now well-recognised global Taxonomic Impediment will continue to prevent adequate implementation of sound, scientifically-based sustainable, environmental management and development policies.

In recognition of the dire need to overcome the Taxonomic Impediment, at the 5th Conference of the Parties (CoP5) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), held at UNEP Headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya, in May, 2000, the Parties endorsed setting up a Global Taxonomy Initiative (GTI) to address this deficiency. Much work went into defining what needed to be done, and at the Sixth CoP (CoP6) of the CBD, held at The Hague, Netherlands, in April 2002, the Parties endorsed a GTI Programme of Work (PoW) as Decision VI/8. In that decision, Parties, governments and international agencies are called upon to implement the PoW and a number of activities are defined.

Where the PoW called for a ‘global workshop to define needs’, BioNET-INTERNATIONAL took the initiative and convened the Third Global Taxnomy Workshop (3GTW), in Pretoria, South Africa in July 2002. With some 300 participants from 95 countries, the theme of 3GTW was Partnerships for Demand-driven Taxonomic Capacity Building, a recognition of the fact that overcoming the Taxonomic Impediment must necessarily be a partnership amongst academic and scientific institutions, governments, technical agencies, NGOs, IGOs and International Funding Agencies, acting in a concerted, collaborative fashion. The most substantive output of 3GTW-Pretoria was a Plan of Action identifying the nine strategic-level activities required to fully implement the GTI PoW. 3GTW-Pretoria was followed by 3GTW-Paris, a meeting convened at UNESCO, Paris in February 2003. The focus at this meeting was the commitment by key organisations to implementing aspects of the Plan of Action agreed in Pretoria.

The documents and other materials presented here include the records and outputs of 3GTW and a number of other activities carried out in response to this CBD mandate i.e. the clearly stated needs for implementation of the GTI PoW to enable full implementation of the CBD. Also included is the record and outputs of much of the work which lead up to adoption of the PoW at CoP6. It is sincerely hoped that together these products will provide an easily accessible and readily usable set of resources for and by Parties, CBD and GTI Focal Points, biodiversity scientists and conservationists in general, and taxonomists in particular, worldwide. Most importantly, it is hoped that they will prove to be a catalyst for continued implementation of the GTI PoW. Further, this publication is targeted at those agencies who have expressed willingness in funding the implementation of the CBD and other MEAs, in the hope that they will fully recognize the fundamental importance of sound systematics as the basis for all biodiversity conservation and use and will step forward to provide the necessary financial support to build the required taxonomic capacity, in infrastructure, people and information resources, to overcome the Taxonomic Impediment.

Ultimately however, the responsibility for driving the initiatives that will overcome the Taxonomic Impediment rests with taxonomists themselves. For too long taxonomists have sat back and decried amongst themselves the depauperate state of their discipline and yet have been reticent to come forward and champion their cause. Taxonomists have not yet recognized that their primary market is not other taxonomists but all the other stakeholders who need taxonomic products – the ‘end-users’ such as policy-makers, conservation agencies, quarantine services, farmers and natural resource managers in general. Taxonomists have not done enough to show these other stakeholders why taxonomy is important as an underpinning tool for sound decision-making and why they should invest their resources in the discipline. Taxonomists have devoted insufficient efforts to producing products which address these user-needs. Further, each and every taxonomist needs to ‘get involved’ in important initiatives such as their local BioNET-INTERNATIONAL sub-regional network (www.bionet-intl.org), the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF; www.gbif.org) and the World Taxonomists Database (www. eti.uva.nl/database/wtd.html). Taxonomists need to accept this responsibility, find their voice and take on this task with vigour. This Resource Kit is offered as a tool to assist in these endeavours.

Dr Nicholas King, Director, and Dr Richard Smith, Assistant Director, BioNET-INTERNATIONAL Technical Secretariat, Egham, UK, October 2003. bionet@bionet-intl.org