UICN - Union internationale pour la conservation de la nature

Switzerland National Committee of IUCN Members

01 August 2012 | Article

Switzerland, besides being IUCN’s global home, is host to an impressing and diverse list of IUCN Members, including global players such as the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA), internationally working organisations such as helvetas/Swiss intercoorperation and the Fondation Internationale Banc d’Arguin (FIBA), the Swiss and Liechtenstein governments and the 3 main national NGOs Pro Natura/Friends of the Earth Switzerland, SVS/BirdLife Switzerland and WWF, the Swiss Zoo organisation (Zooschweiz), the Swiss Academy of Sciences (scnat) as well as a number of others.

The Swiss Comittee is an important exchange forum between government authorities and NGOs. It has been helpful in preparing input to the CBD and discussing national policy processes such as the Swiss Biodiversity strategy. It was the Swiss IUCN comittee where Swiss activities related to the international year of biodiversity were developed and coordinated for 2010, with an online calendar of events and a dedicated web page.

Another important and succesful area of the Swiss Comittee’s work was to jointly make proposals in the frame of the Swiss Contribution to the EU Enlargement. Together with other partners, the Comittee set up a working group which has been successful in securing some of these funds for a Bulgarian-Swiss Biodiversity project on linking nature protection and sutainable rural development, which includes a broad spectrum of awarenss raising and capacity building activities for a sustainable development in Bulgaria.

The Swiss Comittee has stimulated regional bodies to become Members and be actively and critically engaged in the debate on business and biodiversity, regularly questioning IUCN’s involvement with corporates such as Shell. In implementing IUCN’s decisions from the 2008 World Congress, it is preparing a conference on financing biodiversity in Switzerland and joining with Botany experts to work on the implementation of the CBD’s Global strategy for plant conservation (GSPC).

Informations on the Swiss comittee and its members including an information brochure are available at www.iucn.ch (German) and www.uicn.ch (French).