New and improved Biosafety Clearing-House platform now available online to assist Parties in implementing the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety
• New user-friendly platform helps ensure consistency between three main clearing houses of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and its Protocols
• Biosafety-Clearing House is a key tool for the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety and thus an open-source platform that enables governments and others to access the latest information on developments in the biosafety arena
• The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, a supplementary agreement to the CBD, provides international rules that seek to ensure an adequate level of protection to biodiversity and human health, focusing on transboundary movements of living modified organisms.
8 December 2021. To ensure consistency among the platforms and strengthen coherence and integration between the three main clearing-houses of the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), an improved Biosafety-Clearing House (BCH) platform is now available online to help align the BCH with the Access and Benefit-Sharing Clearing-House (ABSCH) and the CBD’s Clearing-House Mechanism (CHM).
“The Biosafety Clearing-House is at the core of the Cartagena Protocol implementation. The Protocol provides that Parties can take their own decisions on living modified organisms, but they must share these decisions and associated risk assessments with the world so other countries can also take informed decisions,” said Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, CBD Executive Secretary.
“This balance between concerns for biodiversity and sovereign rights is what makes the Cartagena Protocol a successful agreement, and in this light, the new BCH platform is clearly a necessity in our work and not a luxury.”
The BCH is free and available to everyone at http://bch.cbd.int.