Immediately prior to the ICLEI World Congress, the ICLEI Cities Biodiversity Center partnered with the City of Belo Horizonte, SEBRAE and the Secretariat of Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to host the third Urban Nature Forum. The Forum provided an innovative science-policy-practice interface on urban biodiversity and ecosystem management. The importance of this event was indicated by the high caliber of many speakers, including inter alia: Marcio Araujo Lacerda - Mayor of the City of Belo Horizonte; Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias - Executive Secretary, CBD Secretariat; Babu M.T. Krishna, Commissioner of Hyderabad; and Thomas Elmqvist - Professor at the Stockholm Resilience Center.


The event brought together a unique mixture of mayors, city councilors, FutureCityLeaders, policy-makers, scientists, town planners, conservationists and other stakeholders from 22 countries and 39 cities around the world.  Of the representatives from cities, a number are members of the Local Action for Biodiversity (LAB) program, which Oliver Hillel from the CBD Secretariat referred to as the “gold standard” for cities on biodiversity management.


The Urban Nature Forum 2012 indeed lived up to its proud reputation, giving rise to fruitful discussion, interaction and the launch of exciting tools and initiatives. On the last day of the Forum,  a new global initiative called the Urban Biosphere (URBIS) Initiative was unveiled at which will serve as an open network fostering knowledge exchange to transcend the science-policy interface and to promote the implementation and achievement of the CBD Aichi Targets, specifically Decision X/22 and the Plan of  Action endorsed to promote engagement of local governments in the Convention.


Over 30 organisations joined the network thereby agreeing to, inter alia, contribute good-practice case studies to a global database and participate in learning  exchanges known as URBIS Dialogues. The aforementioned signing ceremony was followed by the announcement by the Commissioner of Hyderabad, Babu M.T. Krishna, whose city will play host to the CBD, that the City and Subnational Biodiversity Summit will take place in parallel.


The overarching message from the Forum Biodiversity underpins our wellbeing, security, and resilience as much as ever. Cities offer enormous hope: through social organization, resource mobilization, communication, education, efficiency gains, innovation and leadership. Many cities are taking action, but we need more, we need to upscale, to implement, to promote learning exchanges, to foster partnerships, to think out the box and ultimately take on the challenge and take responsibility to address the challenges we face.