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SECRETARIAT:

Although the Secretariat has not been mandated any tasks by the Plenary, it was instructed to be guided by the contents of the unadopted working group reports. These include:

Preparation of a report on the progress of country studies and the preparation of national biodiversity strategies;

Preparation of formats for data entries in order to facilitate information;

Institution of regional training programmes on the use of data exchange formats; and

Mobilization of funds for workshops on regional approaches;

Preparation of a document describing various methodologies that could be used to estimate the financial resources needed to fund multilateral biodiversity assistance;

Examination of the relationship between incremental costs to the volume of resources available, the possibility of studying the financial benefits that developed countries derived from the use of biodiversity and that might be made available to developing countries in the form of international cooperation, and the provision of advice to countries intending to prepare biodiversity studies;

Invitation to international financial institutions to attend a meeting of the ICCBD to begin to address issues of mutual concern in relation to the implementation of the Committee, including criteria for funding eligibility and modalities for exchange of information between the COP, the financial mechanism under the Convention and other finance institutions and organizations;

Redrafting of the rules of procedure for the COP based on the comments in Working Group II;

Drafting the financial rules governing the funding of the Secretariat for consideration at the next session;

Drawing up a preliminary indicative list of incremental costs, and to look at current or planned projects, in collaboration with FAO, UNESCO, the Multilateral Fund for the Implementation of the Montreal Protocol, the Secretariat for the Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the GEF to see how the issue was dealt with and what elements were financed as incremental costs;

Examination of the methodologies that could be used to define and understand the meaning of the term "full incremental costs";

Identification of existing clearing-house mechanisms and existing mechanisms for information exchange and report on their expertise;

Cataloging of existing databases of relevance to the Convention and identifying their gaps and linkages;

Examination of the range of appropriate models for technology transfer; and

Examination of and reporting on existing examples and possible models for national legislation for regulating access to genetic resources (with due attention to its possibly conflictual nature).

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