President Bharrat Jagdeo was the 2010 Champion of the Earth for his pioneering carbon credit and low carbon development strategy. President Irfaan Ali is already renowned for his food security and blue economy leadership, and is now also making a mark for leadership in biodiversity conservation.
These presidents from the PPP, and the PNC’s President Desmond Hoyte – who added Iwokrama to Guyana’s Protected Areas Systems – have made remarkable contributions to Guyana’s growing reputation as a nature-friendly country.
During the high-level meeting of the UN General Assembly, H.E. President Irfaan Ali announced that Guyana, with other global partners, would be launching a Biodiversity Alliance in 2025 for more and better conservation of our terrestrial and marine biodiversity. As expected, the naysayers are frothing from their mouths, saying it is another crazy gimmick. But they said the same thing when President Jagdeo launched the LCDS. He insisted then that Guyana could earn more from our forest by keeping it intact instead of cutting it down, ending the policy of the forest as a non-renewable extractive resource, and transforming it into a permanent resource. This allowed Guyana to earn significant foreign currency while contributing a solution of the growing existential crises of global warming and climate change.
Jagdeo’s carbon credit “gimmick”, as some deemed it then, has earned Guyana a billion US dollars, US$250M from Norway and a sale of US$750M to Hess, with much more on the horizon.
Similarly, President Ali has called for a fair monetization of our biodiversity assets.
In 2009, when the LCDS was launched, it was clear that the LCDS was also about preserving our biodiversity. Almost 15 years later, President Ali stood in front of the world and declared Guyana is taking up the mantle of leadership in global biodiversity conservation.
Guyana is pursuing a genuine nature-based development strategy. In 2009, the focus was on the green component – the preservation of our forest with its enormous capacity for storing almost 20 gigatons of carbon and sequestering about 135 million tons of emitted carbon annually. President Ali has accelerated the second component – the blue economy – by accelerating efforts in mangrove restoration and driving unprecedented growth in aquaculture.
Guyana is now set to lift biodiversity to greater prominence with the 2025 launch of a biodiversity alliance with other countries and global institutions. One of the goals is to create a programme for biodiversity credits that is similar to the carbon credit programme. It is another visionary approach to development.
There is, in fact, a Biodiversity Credit Alliance, a partnership facilitated by UNDP and UNEP, which has been working to develop a credible and scalable biodiversity credit market; one based on a framework of high-level, science-based principles. In alignment with global biodiversity priorities and goals, such as the Aichi Biodiversity Targets and the Leaders Pledge for Nature, the objective is to incentivize biodiversity conservation efforts as part of national development strategies.
PPP governments under different presidents have always demonstrated an ability to develop and promote visionary strategies that have propelled Guyana from being a highly indebted poor country (HIPC) to now a high-income country. Consolidating our biodiversity assets and their conservation into a revenue stream is a prime example of this thinking-outside-the-box approach that has made successive PPP regimes successful. In fact, scaling up our biodiversity efforts is based on science, the link between biodiversity and climate change, and is consistent with global agreements such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Diversity Framework (GBF) which was agreed to at the 15th COP of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 2022.
The GBF established four long-term goals for 2050 and 23 action-oriented targets for 2030. Among these 2030 targets are the protection of 30% of the earth’s lands, oceans, coastal areas, and inland waters, and the restoration of 30% of degraded terrestrial and marine ecosystems.
In optimizing and situating its biodiversity assets in its socio-economic development, Guyana is set to double the 8.4% of its land acreage under a National Protected Areas System (NPAS) to 17% by 2025, and has committed to increasing this to 30% by 2030. The expanded NPAS would comprise terrestrial and marine protection that is framed by international biodiversity targets like the Aichi Biodiversity Targets and the Leaders Pledge for Nature, and would be in accordance with the Sustainable Development Goals and the CBD.
Guyana is situated in two of the world’s most biodiversity-rich zones: The Amazon Region and the Guiana Shield. This unique region extends to Suriname, French Guiana, and parts of Venezuela, Brazil and Colombia. Studies indicate that this region’s geographical formation is more than two billion years old, and spans 270 million hectares. Guyana’s many ecosystems, including our forests, savannahs, rivers and wetlands, contribute to an ecosystem which provides habitat for hundreds of species of flora and fauna.
Guyana’s Sixth National Report to the CBD indicated that current estimates for the major group of biodiversity – exclusive of other groups such as Arthropods, Fungi, Nematodes and Algae – are at 13,229 species; and this number is expected to grow as more research is conducted.
Even with further work required, we already know that nearly 100 of the vertebrate species found in Guyana occur nowhere else on Earth. These include 75 endemic fish species such as the armored catfish (Ancistrus Kellerae), only from the Kuribrong River below Kaieteur Falls; 19 endemic amphibian species, such as the globally-endangered Kaei Rock Frog, only from Maringma Tepui; and four endemic reptiles.
There are examples of various biodiversity credit projects around the world already, including Colombia’s Bosque de Niebla, Malaysia’s BioBank, the Rhino bonds in South Africa, and Zambia’s Tondwa Game Management Area.
Guyana has been acknowledged for leadership in food security, climate and environmental security, and energy security. Now we can add leadership in biodiversity conservation. Before he completes his terms as President of Guyana, President Irfaan Ali, following in the footsteps of President Bharrat Jagdeo, will be conferred with the title “Champion of the Earth”.
