Branding biodiversity in the 21st century - CEPA IAC workshop

The way we communicate is fundamental to the success of biodiversity conservation. The chosen communication channels should be selected carefully, as each individual channel impacts the audience in different ways. The CEPA IAC meeting held on 28-29 July in Montreal addressed these issues.

Release date	05/08/2016
Contributor	Marianne Schlesser

In the run to save biodiversity biodiversity by 2010, communication branding for biodiversity was mostly embraced by the formula "LOVE +ACTION = Public Change; NEED + ACTION = Policy Change ; Personnalize / Humanize / Publicize messages"

The first meeting of the Informal Advisory Committee to the CBD , held on 28-29 July in Montreal, had a closer look at communication strategies and needs in order to meet the Aichi 2020 targets, review the CEPA toolkit, define the theme of the International Biodiversity Day 2017, and to leverage on the adoption of the SDG's framework to 2030. Participants felt biodiversity should be branded as a SOLUTION in support of all the Sustainable Development Goals, on top of goals 14 and 15.

Opportunities and constraints of social media were debated, as well as the need to embrace the diversity of meenings for the word "biodiversity" and its social, cultural, economic, and health and well-being dimensions. Many other brainstorming ideas on communication messaging and strategies came out of the meeting, e.g. :

there is a need to identify the most important values of the target audience ( love/health/family/security/life/harmony/aesthetics/evolution/learning/discovery/entertainment...) to make the public understand that biodiversity is a concrete solution / opportunity to support its values; No need to demonstrate all the values of biodiversity;
India indicated the success of its campaign on microbes / micro-organisms (link to everyday life > yoghurt);
the CBD Secretariat provoked the opinion of the participants by proposing using the blobfish (Psychrolutes marcidus, see picture above), a non-charismatic species that could well craze interest of some target public, like teenagers.

For more information, please have a look at the full report of the meeting and up-coming Global Communication Strategy to be adopted by COP-13.