With fewer than two weeks to go to the opening of the 2017 CIBJO Congress in Bangkok, Thailand, on November 5, 2017, the eighth and the final of the CIBJO commissions’ Special Reports for this year has been released. Prepared by Vincenzo Liverino, President of the organisation’s Coral Commission, the report calls for an educational campaign to differentiate between precious coral varieties, which are harvested in a responsible and sustainable manner, and non-precious varieties, some of which are seeing their numbers dwindle as a result of climate change.

“One of the main concerns of the Coral Commission is to make sure that all precious coral in circulation in the marketplace has been harvested and handled in accordance with the applicable regulatory legislation associated with the protection of wildlife. This is being done for the sake of sustainability, a key doctrinal orientation of the UN charter,” Mr. Liverino writes.

Precious corals, which are subject to national regulatory legislation, are harvested in strict observance of responsible practices, and should be perceived as sustainable and responsible products, Mr. Liverino notes. But this is not the way things are sometimes portrayed in the media. “There has been for many years a misunderstanding that precious coral species are the same as those endangered non-precious coral species. It must be stressed that, despite sharing a common name, threatened coral species are not used in the jewellery industry,” he adds.

“An educational campaign must be undertaken, to properly explain to the environmentally conscious consumer that the corals that have been used as a biogenic gem material in jewellery for millennia are not the ones that studies have shown to be damaged by climate change, posing a serious challenge to the marine ecosystem in many parts of the planet. It must be underlined that we in the precious coral and jewellery sectors share common global environmental concerns with most of the scientific community,” Mr. Liverino writes.

To download a full copy of the CIBJO Coral Commission’s special report, PLEASE CLICK HERE.