June 2014: The latest edition of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) Technical Series provides guidance to standard setting bodies for strengthening biodiversity safeguards in voluntary standard and certification schemes.

CBD Technical Series No. 73, titled ‘Best Policy Guidance for the Integration of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in Standards,’ outlines how the integration of biodiversity safeguards, such as habitat and species protection, in standards can be improved and expanded to cover key pressures on biodiversity and ecosystem services.

The document reviews current practices for safeguarding biodiversity and ecosystem services in standards, followed by a discussion of high-level considerations suggested for standard setting organizations, such as: biodiversity and ecosystem services commitments, mitigation hierarchies, an ecosystem approach, a landscape/seascape approach, and defining biodiversity and ecosystem terms.

The last section provides guidance on addressing the five pressures that economic activities exert on biodiversity and ecosystem services, namely: habitat and land cover change, harvest and resource consumption, pollution and external inputs, climate change, and invasive alien species and invasive genes introduced through living modified organisms (LMOs).

The guidance was developed in collaboration with the World Conservation Monitoring Centre of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP-WCMC) based on an earlier publication that reviewed the biodiversity requirements of standards and certification schemes (CBD Technical Series No. 63). [Publication: Best Policy Guidance for the Integration of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in Standards]