The 22nd meeting of the Convention’s Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA-22) and the second meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Implementation (SBI-2), which were held from 2 to 13 July 2018 in Montreal, Canada, represented the last preparatory processes before the UN Biodiversity Conference 2018[1] being held in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt this November.

The meetings resulted in recommendations to accelerate and scale up actions needed to achieve existing global biodiversity targets by 2020 (the Aichi Biodiversity Targets). During SBSTTA-22, delegates discussed pollinators and pollination[2] and they welcomed the draft global Plan of Action 2018-2030 for the conservation and sustainable use of pollinators and recommended that COP 14 adopt it. In the new Plan of Action, governments urged the engagement of businesses, indigenous peoples and local communities, and other relevant actors, involved in production landscapes, to address the drivers of loss of wild and managed pollinators in all ecosystems.

SBBSTA also considered the role of pollinators beyond agriculture and food production. The draft full report on the relevance of pollinators and pollination to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity in all ecosystems beyond their role in agriculture and food production[3] will be posted for peer review comments, and it will be available for the fourteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties.



[1]  Fourteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, 17 – 29 November 2018 Egypt; Ninth meeting of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, 17 – 29 November 2018; Third meeting of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-sharing, 17-29 November 2018; and the High-Level Segment of the fourteenth meeting of Conference of the Parties and concurrent meetings of the Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, 14-15 November 2018.

[2] Recommendation SBSTTA-22/9 Conservation and sustainable use of pollinators – https://www.cbd.int/doc/recommendations/sbstta-22/sbstta-22-rec-10-en.pdf

[3] CBD/SBSTTA/22/INF/21 – https://www.cbd.int/doc/c/3bf6/6dd2/f2282b216e6ae4bd24943d44/sbstta-22-inf-21-en.pdf