Press Conference: From Aohan to Yerevan: China's Farmer-Led ABS Cited in the National Report — Women, Smallholders, Cooperatives and Enterprises Advancing Community Development and Sustainable Livelihoods, UN Convention on Biodiversity - COP 17

governments should respect and implement, but also the civil society and the government knows that we are suffering a crisis of climate change. at the base is to support brother and indigenous peoples and and local communities who are conserving biodiversity which is not only the benefit for us it's for the whole Humanity so for this even that we know that there is a pressures because we have natural resource in our land and territories there is also the urgency to protect biodiversity. And for this is what we think that we should not like, like, like how to say that we will have more problems is that we don't have the support to continue concerning biodiversity. No. Thank you.

Thank you. Hi. Thank you. I'm a journalist from India. I this is a question to Madhura. Probably she would know better. we, despite having very old indigenous population traditions, we have not recognized indigenous territories, even though we have recognized indigenous people through the Forest Rights Act. Similarly, we are now pushing climate-- this is a second question. We are now pushing climate change as a reason for taking up some of the hydroelectric projects in highly biodiversity-rich areas. Will there be a kind of recommendation on how these kind of things interact with the final goals of the COP?

Sorry, did you say it's India or Indonesia?

India.

India, yes. Yeah, thank you. I think we have a fundamental conflict in most developing countries between economic development and biodiversity conservation. and that is quite normal and it's to be expected. I think the key is really to pursue some solutions which are technically strong. There are new approaches such as using the mitigation hierarchy to recognize there are some areas that are completely protected from extraction, but there could be some areas where, you know, you can have some industrial activity. The issue of spatial planning, biodiversity inclusive spatial planning. So there are approaches and this is the way forward in ensuring that you're not having hydropower in areas that are important for biodiversity.

So with that and because we're stacked with other press conferences coming I think we'll have to wrap for today but thank you all for coming, thank you to our panelists and we do have some summaries and reports in hard copy but check there's a lot up on our site at earthinsight.org and thank you all.

And I want to invite the leaders, please come join the leaders, indigenous leaders here, please, over here. Please, please, please, very quickly. Repalia, Repalia, and BB, and, uh, Akka. No, no, Joseph, Joseph. Yeah. Venga, venga. That's the same. Ode, Ode, come on. Ode, Ode, Ode. Indonesia, Indonesia. Yeah. Indonesia, here. Yeah.

I guess I.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. How are you?

Good. Very good. Everything is going fine.

Tenía visto que era hoy, no sabía la hora.

Tenía visto que era hoy, pero no sabía la hora.

Play all songs of the Kapil Sharma Show.

Test, test, test. Test, test. Good afternoon, everyone. May I ask you all to please take your seats. The panel as well will begin very shortly. Welcome to the 2026 MARCOR Award press conference. My name is Thomas Pawlik. I'm here with the International Council for Game and Wildlife Conservation, also known as the CIC. The MARCOR Award is a joint initiative of the CIC and the Wild Sheep Foundation. as supporting us through the steering committee, the Convention on Biological Diversity and IUCN take part in this award and we're very happy to have them here today. Before announcing the award and this year's winner, we will be going to a few remarks from our panel, beginning with Director General of the CIC, Arne Wymphen, who from there we'll head to Astrid Schomaker, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity. and from there to Kurt Ault, Conservation Director of Wild Sheep Foundation and his colleague, Aybat Musbay. So soon we'll be hearing from the winner and I will now hand it over to Arno Wimpffen, Director General of the CIC.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of the International Council for Game and Wildlife Conservation, it's my pleasure to welcome you here at the press conference on the Markle Award. And my special thanks go to Ms. Astrid Schomaker, who is super busy here, of course, and that she took time to come to us. Our purpose today is very simple. We want to tell you about an award that celebrates something the world needs more of, conservation that works on the ground for wildlife and people. The Marco Award was established in 2008 by the CIC, and it's named after the Marco, the mountain goat in Central and Southern Asia, whose population was doing very, very poorly, and its recovery is one of our most great success stories in conservation. And this is the spirit of this award, really. The Marco Award recognizes institutions, individuals, communities who show that sustainable use of wildlife can protect biodiversity while also supporting the needs of local livelihoods. Many of these models are built on sustainable, regulated hunting and community-based management. Each case shows where local people have a stake in conservation. and the results speak for themselves. Every two years at every COP we hand out this award, and I just want to give a short overview of some of the winners in the past. The very first award in 2008 went to the Selous-Nyasa Wildlife Corridor in Tanzania, where communities were safeguarding vital elephant corridors. In 2010, we honored the Torgar Conservation Program in Pakistan, which revived the Marco population through sustainable hunting. In 2012, the Namibia Communal Conservancy Movement was recognized for growing wilder population through communal efforts. In 2018, we went to Finland, where hunters as well as local communities were restoring rural wetlands. And most recently in 2024, the award went to the Mansour Abad protected area in Iran for empowering communities to improve habitats sustainably. So you see the red thread through all these projects, it's always communities working in conservation. different continents, different species, different cultures, but one shared lesson. When people value wildlife, they protect it. Since 2024, the Wild Sheep Foundation and CIC are working together as equal partners in this award. And this partnership brings together decade-long experience, scientific expertise and global outreach. And the two organizations also have the shared belief that science-based wildlife management and human well-being go hand in hand. We are also very grateful for the support we get from IUCN and CBD. Their involvement helps to connect local activities to global policy. including the goals, of course, of the Global Biodiversity Framework. And why does this matter? Because conservation success stories are often not heard, and our award brings visibility and credibility to these awards. People can learn, can share, and can adapt whatever we learn from this project elsewhere. Ladies and gentlemen, let me conclude with biodiversity conservation, community resilience and responsible hunting are not competing each other, they are reinforcing each other. And the recipients of the Marco Award show this in a super way. Therefore, thank you very much and I hand over the floor to Ms. Astrid Schumacher.

Thank you so much and good afternoon, colleagues. It's a pleasure to be here. And, you know, we work very hard at these COPs, as you know. My team and I, we arrive at 7.30 in the morning, we go around midnight, and that's the same for most delegates. So we really work hard. We need to move an agenda forward. But then sometimes there are also moments when we can celebrate. And then I jumped on those moments that here's something we can celebrate. And I was so happy to join this moment today and celebrate with you the next award of the MARCO, the next MARCO award. What I find very, very interesting about the work that MARCO is doing and they were celebrating here, you know, we have three objectives in the convention. We protect, it's about sustainable use, and then the equitable sharing of benefits. The sustainable use part, also the third part, but the sustainable use part has its challenges because it is very much linked to integration of policies. And if you look at the global report at this convention, you see that's the most difficult part. What is so nice about the Makar award is how you combine objectives one and two. So this is about conservation through sustainable use. And that is a very, very important message because very often when we discuss biodiversity and when we discuss the need for more action on biodiversity, that's what this conference is about. We hear that, yeah, but this is difficult and this is costly and this is against other economic interests. And this award celebrates the reality that you can work with wildlife and with biodiversity, and it is not just for the benefits of biodiversity, nature and the planet, but for people. And that is a story that we would like to come out a lot more out of the conversations we have here at this COP. So well managed, sustainable use, provides incentives for conserving wildlife and habitats while supporting local livelihoods. And the experience is there, the Marcor award keeps highlighting it and keeps showing that it is a lived experience that can be brought to the negotiating rooms where it is very important to be heard and seen, but also to all the other conversations here where people need encouragement and models they can follow. But specifically in the negotiating rooms, as we now have the global report in front of us, we see we're not on track on the targets, including targets five and nine, particularly relevant to sustainable use of wildlife. They're not the worst, but they're not on track. And here we can see it is possible to accelerate and what could be ways of doing it. And I hope negotiators will take note of that when they formulate responses in the global review decision. So these mark our words and that's