Sixth Review Conference of the Bioweapons Convention in Geneva

The deliberate use of biology for harm is a problem that spans many familiar problems, but equates to none, and a diverse set of professional communities find themselves on the front lines in dealing with it.  However, existing governance approaches are not well suited to a problem with such a decentralized set of actors or diversity of perceptions, and they do not effectively establish the linkages that can identify and take advantage of synergies among communities that deal with different aspects of the problem.

On November 30th, David Heyman and Gerald Epstein, co-Directors of CSIS' Biological Threat Reduction project (BTR), presented a new approach to biological threat reduction to delegates at the Sixth Review Conference of the Bioweapons Convention in Geneva.   Their briefing, titled “Governance for Biological Threat Reduction:  A Comprehensive, Interdisciplinary, International Approach”, described a new framework that could substantially advance steps on a global level to reduce the risk of bioterrorism or other misuse of biology.    In the briefing, they presented a blueprint for a new Global BTR Forum, one that could be adopted to implement U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan’s call for a global forum of stakeholders.   Under this proposed framework, traditional arms control, nonproliferation, and diplomatic approaches play an important role, but must now be supplemented by new mechanisms to address changing threats, technologies, and times.