European Commission lauds Los Baños-based Asean Center for Biodiversity

LOS BAÑOS, Laguna, Philippines – The European Commission (EC) has lauded the ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) based here for its key role as “a center of excellence for the promotion and protection of biodiversity in Southeast Asia.”

“The European Commission is proud to have contributed to the establishment of the ACB,” said European Union ambassador to the Philippines Alistair MacDonald.

He added: “I am very confident that the Centre will continue to make a crucial contribution in strengthening regional cooperation in this essential domain.”

MacDonald spoke at the “ASEAN + 3 Regional Workshop on Global Taxonomy Initiatives (GTI): Needs Assessment and Networking” held recently at the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA) here.

Organized by ACB headed by executive director Rodrigo Fuentes, the scientific meeting was supported by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and other Japanese agencies, French Agricultural Research Center for International Development (CIRAD), French Research Institute for Development (IRD), Museum of Natural History of France, European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT), and Global Network for Taxonomy (Bionet).

The conference was attended by about a hundred scientists from member-states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam), China, Japan and Korea.

The participants expressed concern that Southeast Asia’s biodiversity continues to be endangered because of massive wildlife hunting, deforestation, rapid human population growth, pollution, climate change and other causes.

Biodiversity (or biological diversity) is defined as “the total richness of all the living forms and the processes of our planet. It is the web of life that includes ecosystems, their component species, and the genetic variety of these species produced by nature.”

MacDonald recalled that since the mid-1990s, the European Commission has been assisting ASEAN in its efforts to establish a regional institution to promote knowledge sharing about best practices and common efforts in biodiversity.

“Already in 1995, we were talking to ASEAN about helping establish the ASEAN Regional Centre for Biodiversity Conservation (ARCBC, the predecessor of ACB),” he said.

Following ARCBC’s successful implementation, the EC signed a financing agreement with the ASEAN Secretariat in 2005, granting an additional contribution of six million euros to support the creation of ACB.

MacDonald noted that since the ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity was formally established, the results have been “impressive”.