Side Event
Meeting sustainable development objectives: opportunities and limits to biodiversity offsets
Organizer
CAISSE DES DEPOTS ET DES CONSIGNATIONS, Mission economique de la Biodiversité
Date and Time
14 October 2014 18:15 - 19:45
Meeting
Twelfth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity
The conservation of global biodiversity alongside economic development is a key challenge for the 21st century. Impact mitigation and biodiversity offset need to be contextualised in the broader context of biodiversity, climate change and sustainable development. To allow biodiversity offset schemes to effectively contribute to reducing biodiversity loss, a combination of sound and solid safeguards have to exist ex ante. Globally, the existing safeguards necessitate further improvements and others are still under development. Thus, international exchanges upon how to clarify what compensation is and how it should be implemented, is useful and may help to identify emerging research needs. This is why, the Mission Economie de la Biodiversité of CDC wishes to initiate an international dialogue on ecological compensation safeguards and will organize a side event on this set of issues at the next COP 12 in Korea, in October 2014. The aim of this side-event is to engage in a discussion on the conditions in which Biodiversity offsets can work to support sustainable development. Drawing from a range of experiences (success and failure), the aim of this side-event is to engage in a discussion on the conditions in which biodiversity offsets can work to support sustainable development. This side-event will provide an overview of the existing safeguards, their limits and margins for improvements, and will shed light upon research needs and tools to be developed: this topic still require a great deal of improvements to effectively address the radicality of the biodiversity losses around the globe and an overriding conceptual framework to ensure proper rigor in the implementation process is yet to be established. This side-event is an opportunity to exchange on the mechanisms that are used in various national contexts to implement biodiversity offset schemes in the most efficient way to contribute to sustainable development. There is indeed much to learn from each other on how to provide guidance, how to ensure that the scheme gives priority to avoidance and reduction measures, on how to ensure that the environmental authorities have the appropriate oversight capabilities and that the responsibilities for managing and monitoring credit sites are clear and on how to ensure permanence. Bringing together various international experiences on safeguards will offers a rich pool of information to work with and will create a solid basis for constructive and interacive discussions during the side event. KEY QUESTIONS: - In order to contribute to meeting sustainable development objectives, what are the necessary safeguards to ensure, over time, proper rigor in the implementation of compensatory measures? - What are the existing tools and who is in charge? The agenda items which will be addressed with 2 ppts and a roundtable discussion (moderated by BBOP) are the following: - safeguards and the mitigation hierarchy framework to ensure biodiversity assurance and long term outcomes (French Ministry of Foreign Affairs; EU No Net Loss, DG Env) - the practical challenges of BO process (Stockholm Resilience Centre; German compensation agency GmbH; Min. Env of Peru / Brasil) - research requirements and recommendations for BO to work to support sustainable development (WCS; Min. Env of Spain; Minister of Environment of Gabon)