Convention on Biological Diversity
Biodiversity is a vital component of multiple sectors, who depend heavily on its support for multiple ecosystem services essential for human well-being and economic development.
Agriculture, forestry, fisheries and aquaculture are particularly dependent on biodiversity for productivity and food security. These sectors also have significant direct and indirect impact on biodiversity and underpinning ecosystem services. Drivers of biodiversity loss are linked to unsustainable, unproductive and poor short-term decisions by farmers, forest managers and fishers; impacting the provision of essential ecosystem services.
The mainstreaming of biodiversity across agriculture, forests, fisheries and other sectors is essential to halt biodiversity loss, but this has significant costs to farmers, and other users of ecosystem services. CBD Parties have been encouraged to create enabling conditions, provide positive incentives and remove perverse incentives for the adoption of sustainable production practices that will benefit biodiversity. Single measures, implemented in isolation, are, however, unlikely to be sufficient to address threats to biodiversity and sustainable use, and enable associated improvements in productivity and food security.
The Incentives for Ecosystem Services (IES) approach enables the coordination of an appropriate mixture of multiple measures aligned with national biodiversity objectives (COP 6 Decision VI/15, COP 9 Decision IX/6 and SBSTTA 20 Recommendation XX/15). IES can, therefore, support the delivery of a 'package of actions' that combine better and enforceable legal frameworks, and include financial and non-financial incentives (Article XI, SBSTTA 19 Recommendation XIX/2) to reduce opportunity costs of biodiversity conservation for poor farmers, fishermen and forest managers.
IES packages can support improved coordination and longer-term programming of existing public programmes and private sector investment can co-finance a combination of these measure, together with regional dialogues to promote greater coherence of policies across sectors and corresponding government ministries. Such an integrated package of incentives can effectively protect biodiversity and ecosystem services, and assist in the long-term transition to the sustainable use of biodiversity and agricultural practices.