How can the revised and updated Strategic Plan be made relevant to all biodiversity-related conventions/agreements and to the full range of stakeholders of society and the economy including those that have a significant impact on, benefit from or use biodiversity and its related ecosystem services?
Provide for coordination and consultations with other MEAs and stakeholders prior to the adoption of a new target
submitted by Anonymous
This should also be part of the marketing strategy to be devised.
submitted by Marie-Jeanne PERROT-MINNOT
The World Conservation Congress at its 4th Session in Barcelona, Spain, 5-14 October 2008 reaffirmed the values of ecological restoration and the role and values of public education, societal engagement, and indigenous and local community knowledge in undertaking such initiatives. It welcomed progress made internationally (e.g., by Canada, the Society for Ecological Restoration International and others) in developing ecological restoration best practices guidance and affirmed that ecological restoration should be effective, practical and affordable, enable full and effective participation of indigenous and local communities, and contribute to long-lasting outcomes of enhanced biodiversity, increased ecosystem resilience to climate change and other global changes, improved protected area management and human well-being.
Furthermore, the Congress requested the IUCN Director General to work in close cooperation with IUCN Commissions, with international terrestrial and marine protected area organizations, learned societies, sectoral management bodies, industries and non-government organizations involved in restoring the world’s ecosystems to:
a. Produce, prior to the next World Conservation Congress, a Best Practice Protected Area Guideline for Ecological Restoration
b. Work with governments on the dissemination, application and use of the Guideline; and
c. Develop and implement programmes for further guidance, awareness raising, capacity building, monitoring, and research in regards to ecological restoration in protected areas.
Finally, it encouraged all IUCN members to support governments and other stakeholders in implementing the initiatives enumerated above. The proposed expert workshop on ecosystem restoration would facilitate the development of a science-based approach for the CBD on ecological restoration that is consistent with and/or builds upon the related initiatives outlined above.
submitted by Yan Wang
Linking to climate change mitigation and adaptation:
The IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report concludes that human-induced climate change will be the most pervasive threat to biodiversity in forthcoming decades. Preventing biodiversity loss requires markedly scaled up efforts to mitigate and reverse global warming and to ensure that adaptation measures effectively enable ecosystems and species to cope with inevitable climate impacts. At the same time, biodiversity management can help us to achieve mitigation and adaptation goals.
The protection and restoration of intact natural ecosystems maintains and restores essential ecosystem services that can promote human resilience, especially for vulnerable communities, to the impacts of climate change. For example, rehabilitation and protection of wetlands provide essential and cost-effective protection to ecosystems and coastal communities from storm surges and sea level rise resulting from climate change, and act as an essential freshwater reservoir where climate change increases drought, while also significantly mitigating carbon emissions from existing degraded wetlands. Efforts to avoid deforestation and forest degradation could reduce emissions leading to global warming by 20%.
Recent CBD and UNFCCC decisions have further highlighted the linkages between biodiversity, climate change, and livelihoods. For example, CBD Decision IX/18 calls for increased consideration of the contributions of protected areas to climate mitigation and adaptation, while UNFCCC COP14 explicitly noted the contribution of biodiversity to solutions to the climate crisis. The CBD’s Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group on biodiversity and climate change is further stressing these linkages by identifying specific measures of progress and calling for action.
The Strategic Plan should ensure that the CBD:
• Provides technical advice to the UNFCCC to ensure that biodiversity considerations are appropriately incorporated into UNFCCC decisions, as the CBD is currently doing through the ad hoc Technical Expert Group on biodiversity and climatechange;
• Provides Parties and the UNFCCC with case studies and guidance that demonstrate the contribution of biodiversity conservation to climate change mitigation and adaptation activities;
• Develops suitable indicators in consultation with the IPCC that can help Parties to the CBD and UNFCCC to track their progress towards addressing climate change and its impacts on biodiversity. These indicators should also be designed to demonstrate how progress on biodiversity goals contributes to progress on climate goals.
This submission reflects the shared views of BirdLife International, Conservation International, IUCN – World Commission on Protected Areas, IUCN Countdown 2010, The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund for Nature, and the Wildlife Conservation Society.
submitted by Jason Spensley
To make the Plan relevant to the full range of stakeholders, it needs to be accessible, easy to understand, clearly linked to economic prosperity, long term sustainability, human health and well-being, and poverty reduction. It also needs to be action focused, clear on priorities and provide tools for implementation. Some things to consider in order to achieve this are:
- consider the framework used in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, particularly its focus on ecosystem services, as a way of incorporating the environmental dimension into sustainable development policy and planning
- incorporate elements of the strategic plans of the biodiversity-related conventions where relevant as well as elements of the strategic plans of health and economic organizations
- put priority on building the business case for biodiversity
- move beyond process to action, making it inspiring, outcome oriented, and achievable
- develop opportunities to involve those outside of the traditional biodiversity community, including business leaders, health promotion organizations, resource sectors and local governments in the discussion
- minimize the number and length of planning documents and frameworks by bringing together and simplifying the Strategic Plan, framework, targets and indicators.
- focus on communications , particularly targeted outside the biodiversity community
- promote the clearinghouse mechanism and make it more accessible
- develop specific case studies for specific sectors that demonstrate the importance of biodiversity to all aspects of human well-being.
Valuation of biodiversity and ecosystem services, such as that being provided in the TEEB report, is urgently needed to permit the integration of biodiversity in the economy and the mainstreaming in sector activities. The specific evaluations already done need to be made more available. “How to” kits are necessary for local implementation of these data in decision making.
The potential synergies between the CBD and the objectives of other conventions should be made clearer and the revised Strategic Plan could include mechanisms/objectives to make this happen. For example, the CBD and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change can contribute to meeting each others’ objectives.
submitted by Jennifer Norris
Engage other relevant conventions/agreements to achieve greater coordination and unified effort to achieve the new measurable targets suggested here; communicate that these are practical targets supported by existing data which can support efforts to identify and protect these sites by influential stakeholders outside the core of traditional biodiversity constituents; emphasize the importance of communicating the local and global benefits that flow from conservation of biodiversity at these sites and biodiversity in general: jobs, water, food, health, cultural values etc.
submitted by Mike Parr
The first step would be to engage the full range of stakeholders in the revision and updating process, so that to generate 'ownership' of the new Strategic Plan by as many stakeholders as possible. This online forum is a good first step. It would be good to devise some consultation activities with those who are less likely to use emails or internet to provide their input (such as indigenous and local communities) before the plan is discussed at WGRI-4 in 2010. Time is limited but as much consultation as possible should happen before WGRI-4. Once the plan has been adopted, national level committees composed of all relevant stakeholders should be actively engaged in the promotion and implementation of the plan at the national and local level.
submitted by Maurizio Ferrari
La première des priorités pour espérer un impact quelconque est le fait que le texte du plan stratégique soit accessible et connu de toutes personnes ayant à intervenir pour sa mise en œuvre (politiques, fonctionnaires, élus, militants, acteurs économiques). Ceci suppose donc
Sa disponibilité, particulièrement des les langues nationales.
Il doit être prévu des traductions et une impression en grande quantité (ou des aides aux pays pour sa traduction et son impression)
Il doit être prévu une stratégie de marketing pour inciter à sa lecture
La deuxième priorité est la formation à sa mise en œuvre
Des formations au niveau régional doivent être organisées pour les différents types de publics concernés
Enfin il doit être développé des « boites à outils » et des réseaux d’échanges de savoirs (y compris la mise en valeur de cas typiques)
Il pourrait être crée un prix annuel récompensant des actions particulièrement novatrices ou efficaces (y compris au niveau régional).
submitted by Jean-Patrick LE DUC
In part, one way to achieve this is to use indicators such as the Ecological Footprint that work at any scale, and can be aggregated or disaggregated depending on the problem to be addressed. In this way the effectiveness of solutions of any type or at any scale can be evaluated both in terms of addressing local problems, as well as in terms of the extent to which they are contributing to reducing overall pressure on global ecosystems. The latter capability is particularly important given the interdependence of national economies, and thus the difficulty in fully tracing the impact of human activities on ecosystems all the way back through global supply chains.
Human pressure on biodiversity can be looked at from either the production or the consumption side. Given the urgency of the problem of biodiversity loss, it is essential to simultaneously develop strategies and solutions that can be adopted both producers and consumers. So that stakeholders on both ends of this dimension understand that solutions can not simply come from one group or the other, it is important that pressure indicators be able to measure demand on the biosphere from both perspectives. This will enhance communication between producers and consumers, and the participation of both in the development of strategies will result in more substantial benefits to biodiversity than either side would be able to achieve alone. For example, product Footprints can help consumers make informed choices about which purchases are less likely to support activities that are driving biodiversity loss.
To effectively engage corporations in strategies that reduce pressure on biodiversity, it must be possible to allocate this pressure by industrial sector, and then to individual corporations or even to the production of individual products. The Ecological Footprint, used in conjunction with methodologies like input-output analysis and life-cycle analysis, can provide all these different forms of allocation, and in addition, can disaggregate results in terms of demands on forest, fisheries, cropland and grazing land, on area for building infrastructure, and on area required to sequester carbon emissions. In this way, the Ecological Footprint can be used as part of a basket of pressure indicator to provide a comprehensive map of the demand industrial activities are placing on biodiversity, which can then be used to identify the most effective points of intervention.
In order for a metric to be applied effectively, standards must exist that govern how it is put into practice. For the Ecological Footprint, Global Footprint Network’s Standards Committee has already developed standard that apply to analyses of the consumption of sub-national populations, and in the process of developing standards to evaluate pressure on ecosystems that result from the activities of an organization or those involved in supplying an individual product. The goal of these standards is to make Ecological Footprint analyses as consistent and repeatable as possible across different scales and over time.
The effectivenss of an accounting systems also depends on its ability to provide results at various levels of technical sophistication. Ecological Footprint results can be provided as a simple value (in units of global hectares—hectares of world average productive land or water area, or in number of planets), in a slightly more complicated way (disaggregated by land type), or in a much more detailed way (by sectors, activities, consumption categories, etc.) depending on the audience level and needs.
submitted by Oscar Mejia
Connect to people, suggest practical "real life" action, discontinue old patterns/attitudes, open up to global considerations, practical cooperation/coordination with true involvement of stakeholders,
submitted by Anonymous
