The Gothenburg declaration

While approaching to the 54th general assembly that will be held in Vienna at the end of november, it’s worthy to recall what has been assessed starting from the previous GA in Sweden.

The Gothenburg Declaration

We, the General Assembly of the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF), after our meeting in Gothenburg, Sweden on the 10th May of 2023:

• Recognise that documented, understood and sustained biodiversity is fundamental to human well-being, a healthy planet, and the long-term economic prosperity for all peoples as well as it being key to ensuring the fulfilment of the 2050 vision of living in harmony with nature.

• Acknowledge that the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) builds on the achievements, gaps, and lessons learned to set out an ambitious strategic plan, incorporating the Kunming-Montreal 2030 Global Targets and the Kunming-Montreal Global Goals for 2050. We equally acknowledge that the GBF capitalises on transformative actions needed at national, regional and local governmental levels in collaboration with society to contribute to the objectives of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and to its Protocols.

• Appreciate further that the current loss of species and ecosystems, and the concomitant damage to ecosystem services vital to ensuring the sustainability of nature for the future generations and delivering benefits essential for the human being, pose a clear and ongoing threat and a complex but urgent challenge for science and society.

• Identify the major difficulties that Parties encounter in inventorying, protecting and preserving their biological diversity as well as in implementing biodiversity monitoring initiatives due to the existing knowledge gaps for many parts of the world and for numerous groups of organisms where the majority of species are not yet known to science or, where known, cannot be easily identified.

In this context, we,

• Recall the decisions of the Conference of the Parties to the CBD that established the Kunming-Montreal GBF and set out the objectives, targets for 2030 and goals for 2050;

• Appeal for the fundamental importance of the integration of taxonomic knowledge and taxonomic expertise into the GBF that will lead to the sustained management, conservation and restoration of biodiversity, the promotion of which is a crucial, and a rate-determining step in the proper implementation of the objectives of the CBD;

and thus, we,

• Highlight the global importance of the institutions that are members of CETAF, the scientific collections they hold, the taxonomic expertise of their staff and students, their programmes of geological diversity and biological taxonomic discovery and training, and their principle of sharing taxonomic information openly to serve excellent science and support science-based decisions;

• Emphasise the partnerships developed by members of CETAF with organisations and countries around the world, their extensive taxonomic capacity-building activities, and members’ engagement with global initiatives, including the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, the Catalogue of Life, the International Barcode of Life, the Consortium of Scientific Partners of the CBD, and others;

• Stress the ‘taxonomic imperative’ to boost sustained taxonomy capacity building initiatives that will ensure growth of taxonomic expertise, and to develop and make available taxonomic expertise, taxonomic knowledge, and biodiversity information to anyone contributing to the implementation of the CBD in a timely, effective and reliable manner.