ABS Monitoring Tool presented at CBD Global Monitoring Workshop, Bonn

01 Oct, 2019

Currently in India most users accessing bio-resources for research and commercial purposes are outside the purview of the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA), leading to potentially illegal and unsustainable use. Moreover, benefits arising out of its utilisation cannot reach providers due to lack of awareness. Thus, the NBA is seeking to enhance its capacity to monitor the utilisation of Indian bio-resources and associated traditional knowledge with the help of a digital application called as ABS Monitoring System (ABS-MS) developed under the scope of the ABS Partnership Project.

The Project was invited by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Secretariat at Bonn, Germany from 30th Sep- 2nd Oct 2019 to showcase a live demonstration of a working prototype of the ABS-MS. The prototype was explained with particular emphasis on the overall process of developing the system, generating key results, obtaining and using the information from this system as well as its limitations.

The Project was also invited to setup a booth to encourage discussions with the participants. Representatives of many countries such as Bhutan, Cambodia, Nepal, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Costa Rica, Peru, Hungary, Namibia and other African nations were interested in learning about provisions which would enable them to develop similar systems in their own countries. Even User countries like Germany, UK and Netherlands were interested to have a similar system to monitor Users for their own countries.