The CAFF board meeting held on 5 and 6 September at the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, Stockholm. This meeting was first- time for the Swedish chair. About forty-five people from fourteen countries attended the meeting. Main work of the meeting was to confirm the present situation for each monitoring and project. As for monitoring, freshwater monitoring report was issued. Since The Circumpolar Biodiversity Monitoring Program(CBMP) expart groups have accumulated knowledge for management, data summarise and so on. It was suggested that chairs of each expert group attend other expert groups to learn above issues. Also, Sustainability of CBMP and facilitation of cross-cutting integration across the four CBMP monitoring groups to be a considered at upcoming scoping workshops meetings. It may be big news for observer countries that CBMP are welcome to receive resources from observer countries to support the CBMP.
Arctic Council approved the Arctic Migratory Birds Initiative Workplan 2019-2023. CAFF encourages non-observer countries as well as observer countries to engage in migratory bird conservation. Spain states offered to support the coordinator position for the African-Eurasian Flyway Coordinator.
Post 2020 Global Biodiversity Framework also discussed. CAFF could make documents on Arctic biodiversity priorities is the most relevant contribution and CAFF will submit the documents to the Convention on Biological Diversity.
We visited Tyresta National Park as an excursion during the meeting. It takes about 30 minutes from Stockholm city by bus. In Sweden, with increasing health consciousness, more people are visiting national parks. A Japanese word“Shinrinyoku”is known and used by Swedish people.
Masaki Uchida (NIPR / a member of Theme 6)
