058 - Contributions of the Conservation-enabling Hierarchy to the post-2020 CBD framework

058 - Contributions of the Conservation-enabling Hierarchy to the post-2020 CBD framework

Latest version in this language: Version for electronic vote | Published on: 30 Sep 2021

RECALLING that Aichi Biodiversity Target 2 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) requires that “biodiversity values have been integrated into national and local development… and planning processes” by governments and other stakeholders;

FURTHER RECALLING that the IUCN Policy on Biodiversity Offsets supports the rigorous implementation of a mitigation hierarchy for biodiversity impacts, and states that this can contribute to positive biodiversity outcomes;

RECOGNISING that economic development is often necessary for enhancing human well-being, particularly in less industrialised or poorer nations;

NOTING that CBD Parties will adopt a post-2020 global biodiversity framework, driving action for the conservation of biodiversity for the next decade;

FURTHER NOTING that this framework is planned to reflect the means by which governments, businesses and stakeholders at all levels “have taken steps to achieve or have implemented plans for sustainable production and consumption”;

ALSO NOTING that it is hoped that this framework will recognise that actions to avoid loss and to minimise impacts, and remedial and compensatory measures to offset unavoidable losses, count as progress toward desired outcomes;

NOTING that the IUCN Global Inventory of Biodiversity Offset Policies shows over 100 countries to have policy machinery in place or under development that makes provisions either implicitly or explicitly for a mitigation hierarchy;

STRESSING that the most important step in the mitigation hierarchy is avoidance of biodiversity loss, which requires exploring multiple development options in the earliest phases of planning, in order to avoid areas of high environmental or socio-cultural importance; and

AWARE of emerging evidence that policies incorporating a mitigation hierarchy for biodiversity impacts of development can, given necessary conditions, result in neutral or positive net biodiversity outcomes;

The IUCN World Conservation Congress, at its session in Marseille, France:

1. ENCOURAGES the Director General, Commissions and all Members to work, as appropriate, with their national-level and other counterparts engaged in the CBD to encourage them to consider the following elements in its discussions, advocacy and advice relevant to the adoption of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework through the CBD:

a. explicit mention of those irreplaceable and/or culturally indispensable biodiversity features that are vitally important to protect (for example, sacred sites);

b. explicit reference to the Conservation-enabling Hierarchy of sequentially preferred actions (avoid, minimise, remediate, offset, additional conservation actions) as an operational structure for assessing biodiversity losses and gains from human activities, with the aim that the latter outweigh the former (i.e. seeking net gain); and

c. a requirement that conserving existing wildlife and natural habitats should be prioritised, and that any biodiversity losses due to economic development should be addressed in order of sequentially preferred actions and at least compensated for by comparable biodiversity gains, consistent with IUCN’s Biodiversity Offsets Policy;

2. INVITES all public-sector, business and civil society entities to work to ensure that the post-2020 global biodiversity framework be adopted at CBD COP15 (Kunming, China), including the aforementioned elements; and

3. INVITES the relevant donors to support implementation of the Conservation-enabling Hierarchy by governments and other entities, including through funding associated capacity-building and the development of monitoring and reporting mechanisms.

Economic development activities are key drivers of continuing biodiversity decline. The continuing erosion of biodiversity has ramifications for human wellbeing, as explored extensively by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the first IPBES Assessment report. Economic development often leads to considerable gains in human wellbeing; such development is desirable and a moral necessity, meaning that biodiversity cannot always be conserved everywhere. The challenge is how to decide when, where, and how development activities and any associated biodiversity losses should be permitted – from the perspective of achieving the best possible outcomes for biodiversity and people.
There is growing experience and evidence worldwide for the use of biodiversity impact ‘mitigation hierarchies’ to manage and compensate for biodiversity losses caused by development. A mitigation hierarchy is typically governed by an overarching biodiversity objective, such as ‘no net loss or better’, and details the set of sequentially-preferred conservation actions to mitigate losses (avoid, minimise, remediate, offset). The mitigation hierarchy is a well-developed framework for balancing development and conservation to achieve long-term social and biodiversity objectives, clarifying where biodiversity loss should be prevented, where it is permissible and where compensation measures are needed. Crucially, mitigation hierarchies can be employed at multiple spatial scales to require (1) recognition that everything which results in desirable or undesirable biodiversity outcomes (including retention and restoration on the positive side) should count; and, (2) a shift of emphasis away from top-down global targets and towards a process-based framework within which to capture progress towards desired outcomes at all scales and for all sectors and impacts.
As a result, recent proposals have been made – both in the scientific and grey literatures, as well as in the IUCN’s submission to the CBD for CoP14 – that all losses and gains of biodiversity caused by human activities be categorised under a global mitigation hierarchy (the so-called Conservation Hierarchy). Doing this would not only clarify how the diverse range of conservation interventions implemented worldwide contribute towards overall international biodiversity policy goals. It would also provide a framework for exploring different strategies for mitigating biodiversity losses from development (e.g. prevention-heavy vs. compensation-heavy), and a basis for empirical evaluation and prioritisation of conservation investments. It is the only available and feasible framework for determining how best to address biodiversity losses from necessary economic development activities across multiple scales, sectors, impact types and habitats.
For this reason, an approach based on the Conservation Hierarchy can contribute to the post-2020 biodiversity strategy, leading towards the CBD’s 2050 vision. The overall guiding objective of the framework should be based on the principle of net outcomes for biodiversity: e.g., an objective of a ‘net positive impact on biodiversity from all human activities’. Such an objective could be designed to complement and be conceptually consistent with the Paris Agreement under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, on acceptable net greenhouse gas emissions.
Resolutions 059; 061; and 067, and Recommendation 110, all from the 2016 WCC, are relevant to this motion.
  • PROVITA [Venezuela]
  • Synchronicity Earth [United Kingdom]
  • The Nature Conservancy [United States of America]
  • Wildlife Conservation Society [United States of America]
  • World Wide Fund for Nature - International [Switzerland]
  • World Wide Fund for Nature - U.K. [United Kingdom]
  • World Wildlife Fund - US [United States of America]

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