March 2013: The Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has issued two notifications with a focus on biodiversity financing: it invited parties’ views on a discussion paper on safeguards for scaling-up biodiversity financing and possible guiding principles; and called for nominations for the second phase of the High-level Panel on Global Assessment of Resources for implementing the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity.

Authored by Claudia Ituarte-Lima, Maria Schultz, Thomas Hahn and Sarah Cornell of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the discussion paper, titled ‘Safeguards for Scaling-up Biodiversity Financing and Possible Guiding Principles,’ examines the notion of safeguards and explores guiding principles that may be useful for the design and application of safeguards in the process of scaling-up biodiversity financing under the CBD.

Parties are invited to provide their views on the paper, which will be presented to the Trondheim Conference on Biodiversity to be held in Norway, in May 2013, in order to advance understanding of the issue in an informal setting, and then to the fifth meeting of the CBD Working Group on Review of Implementation in 2014.

According to the paper, “safeguards in biodiversity financing mechanisms” refer to measures for maximizing the protection of biodiversity and people’s livelihoods while minimizing negative impacts. The paper shows that safeguards in the environmental arena have evolved from an original defensive nature to a more comprehensive one. It suggests that a rights/duties-based approach to safeguards that goes beyond a defensive attitude can serve in constructively finding consensus for equitably allocating biocultural rights and duties among the parties involved. Moreover, the paper proposes certain elements and guiding principles for safeguards in all the examined biodiversity financing mechanisms. For example, on fiscal reforms, safeguards can serve to reduce perverse incentives, such as avoiding subsidies to environmentally unsustainable practices with adverse impacts on biodiversity.

Furthermore, the CBD Secretariat has called for nominations for the second phase of the High-level Panel on Global Assessment of Resources for implementing the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity. The role of the High-level Panel will be to: provide strategic leadership and guidance to the research and identify the priorities within it; work directly with researchers and the Secretariat to draw out key messages from its research; engage with other relevant institutions and initiatives to secure the cooperation and provision of evidence for analysis; engage with parties to raise awareness of the study and its findings; and assume responsibility for the key findings and recommendations of the second phase of the High-level Panel and summarize these in a draft report for considerations at the fifth meeting of the Working Group on Review of Implementation and in a final report for the twelfth meeting of the CBD Conference of the Parties (COP). [CBD Notification on Submission of Views on the Discussion Paper on Safeguards for Scaling-up Biodiversity Financing and Possible Guiding Principles] [CBD Notification on the Call for Nominations for the High-level Panel] [CBD Webpage on the High-level Panel]