Education

Education // Priority Activity 10
Tuesday // 9.23.2008

Priority Activity 10 for the Programme of Work on Communication, Education and Public Awareness: Formal and Informal Education

At their eighth meeting, the Parties agreed to focus their efforts on a few key activities to advance the programme of work for CEPA. Education was one of these elements. Parties agreed that they would:

“Taking into account the importance of both formal and informal education, initiate programmes to strengthen formal and informal education on biodiversity,”

  • Ensure that these programmes are informed by and linked with the UNESCO Decade of Education for Sustainable Development
  • Identify best practices in biodiversity education, including those initiated by indigenous and local communities, and seek to disseminate these for further adoption.
  • Education on biodiversity should seek to communicate, in language and methods suitable to a variety of age groups and communities:
  1. Biological Diversity and its role in sustaining human well-being.
  2. The importance of the interlinkage between conservation, sustainable use and equitable sharing of the benefits from the use of biological resources.
  3. Ways that people can identify and monitor biodiversity in the ecosystems in which they live
  4. Local and traditional knowledge about biodiversity.

To this end, Parties agreed that they should:
  • Taking into account the best practices at the international and national level, and drawing upon local experiences, initiate pilot projects for the strengthening of biodiversity education;
  • Encourage partnerships among Parties, Governments and stakeholders for the development of generic K-university biodiversity-related curricula for use at the national and regional levels;
  • Share best practices with parties through the CEPA portal.
  • Evaluate pilot projects with a view to extend implementation as specified in the plan of implementation for CEPA

The Executive Secretary committed to working with UNESCO and other international organisations to identify best practices and ensure their diffusion to Parties.

In March of 2008, UNESCO and the Secretariat, with the financial support of the government of the Netherlands, held an expert workshop on biodiversity and formal and informal education. Read the main conclusions of that meeting.