International Workshop on IT Monitoring Tool on ABS compliance in Chennai

25 Jan, 2020

A five-day international workshop was conducted jointly by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, National Biodiversity Authority, GIZ and the global UNDP project to provide practical training in methods and tools for monitoring access to genetic resources and benefit-sharing in India under the Biological Diversity Act.

This five-day workshop under the ABS Partnership project was organised from 19-24 January 2020 in Chennai, with international participants from Belarus, Botswana, Cameroon, Germany, Kenya, Madagascar, Philippines, Spain and UK along with Indian delegates from 15 State Biodiversity Boards, NGOs, Government Officials and staff from NBA. The event was followed up by a webinar organised by UNDP to reach other countries that had shown interest in the development of an IT tool for monitoring Bio-Resource utilisation in their countries.

The monitoring of access and benefit sharing involves the challenges of practically monitoring ABS and sustainably creating human and technical capacity to monitor ABS. In addressing human capacity to engage in monitoring it is important to recognise that ABS monitoring involves the use of knowledge and methods from a range of different disciplines, like biodiversity informatics; geographic data (coordinates and gis data); scientometrics/bibliometrics; patent analytics; the use of web services (application programming interfaces); visualization and network analysis; and software tools and basic programming skills. The challenge here was to ensure that the range of disciplinary skills required were represented and that a sufficiently large group of people was created to ensure long-term sustainability. Thus, the workshop aimed to contribute and create a small inter-disciplinary network to address the problem of long-term human capacity for ABS monitoring in India.