AEWA Standing Committee Meets in Paris
Participants at the 12th Meeting of the AEWA Standing Committee © Elise Reclus
Bonn, 10 February 2017 – the 12th Meeting of the AEWA Standing Committee was held from 31 January to 1 February, hosted by the French Ministry of Environment, Energy and Sea at its premises in La Défense, Paris and was chaired by Barirega Akankwasah of Uganda. This was the first full intersessional meeting of the Committee since MOP6 in 2015; the Committee will next meet in 2018.
The busy agenda included reviews of the implementation of the Recommendations of the Standing Committee Report to MOP6 on the Progress of implementation of the AEWA Strategic Plan 2009-2017 and of the African Initiative for the Conservation of Migratory Waterbirds and their Habitats and consideration of the development of the AEWA Strategic Plan 2019-2027 and AEWA Plan of Action for Africa 2019-2027.
The Standing Committee has called for voluntary contributions to enable the mandatory reports to be produced as stipulated by Article 7.4 of the AEWA action plan, especially the Conservation Status Report and the Review of the Network of Sites. The Secretariat will have to commission these reports in the first quarter of 2017 in order to allow production in time for submission to the Meeting of the Parties to examine the results and take the appropriate decisions. The Secretariat will be contacting the Parties again regarding contributions for this work and any funding will be very much welcome.”
Jacques Trouvilliez, the Executive Secretary of AEWA
Outputs provided by the Technical Committee were examined and approved (i.e. the delineation of selected waterbird populations, the assessment of the need for prolongation, revision and retirement of species action and management plans, the formats of conservation guidelines and of single and multi-species action and management plans). A new Arabic translation of the Agreement text provided by the depositary was also discussed, and a report on the Joint CMS/AEWA Information Management, Communication and Awareness-raising Unit was presented.
The Standing Committee considered the status of the four current cases under the Implementation Review Process and decided on the next steps for each of them. This item also included review of the May 2016 joint on-the-spot appraisal mission report with the Bern Convention to Iceland regarding the impact of their national forestry policy on the breeding migratory waterbirds.
With regard to financial matters, the Committee agreed to publish the status of assessed contributions to the AEWA Trust Fund to ensure that National Focal Points were aware that payments had been received and in order to encourage Parties to pay their arrears. Furthermore, the Committee recommended that in the budget scenarios for 2019-2021 to be presented to MOP7 in 2018 the Secretariat should investigate the possibility of reverting to the UN Scale of Assessment to calculate Parties’ contributions.
Last updated on 09 May 2017