Representatives from India and Asean shared experiences and best practices in applying the City Biodiversity Index to promote biodiversity in their respective cities in a workshop in Singapore last week.
Also referred to as the Singapore Index on Cities’ Biodiversity, the City Biodiversity Index is a self-assessment tool for cities to evaluate and monitor the progress of their biodiversity conservation efforts against their respective baselines.
The index gives scores to cities based on 23 indicators, which gauge native biodiversity, ecosystem services provided by biodiversity, and the governance and management of biodiversity.
“This activity is timely, with the recognition of the need for nature-based solutions to deal with the impacts of climate change,” said Dr. Leong Chee Chiew, deputy chief executive officer of the National Parks Board of Singapore (NParks) at the opening of the workshop.
NParks hosted the workshop in partnership with the Asean Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) and the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) of India.
The workshop, dubbed “ACB-NBA Cooperation: Capacity-Building Towards Implementing the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-Sharing, the City Biodiversity Index and the Strategic Plan on Biodiversity,” was part of a series of capacity-enhancing activities under the auspices of the Asean-India Cooperation and financed by the Asean-India Green Fund.
Dr. Vinod Bahari Mathur, newly appointed chairman of India’s NBA, welcomed the participants from nine Asean member-states and seven cities in India.
In his speech, Mathur praised Singapore’s efforts to establish green spaces saying, “What Singapore has done is something the world should see and learn from.”
According to studies presented during the workshop, cities with a large amount of tree cover are usually 3 degrees Celsius cooler than cities that don’t have many trees.
Likewise, city residents exposed to greenery are generally healthier and have a calmer disposition to deal with day-to-day challenges.
The effort to develop the City Biodiversity Index was a collaboration of NParks, the United Nations and an international UN task force of experts on cities and biodiversity.
It was adopted at the 10th Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Nagoya, Japan, in 2010.
Around 30 countries all over the world have already applied the City Biodiversity Index, Dr. Lena Chan, senior director for International Biodiversity Cooperation of NParks, said.