Heading for COP 15 in China

The evaluation of 15 years of biodiversity interventions can help to shed light on two important themes in the 2019 international negotiations and at COP 15 in China in 2020: achieving conservation and development objectives for protected areas and mainstreaming biodiversity into development policies and programmes across all sectors and in a cross-cutting manner.

Protected areas where conservation dovetails with development

The objective shared by the international community translates into various intervention logics in the field. Experience shows that these two outcomes are rarely achieved simultaneously and that one is generally more prominent than the other. However, intervention logics can be improved by adapting the scale of projects to the size of their targeted communities and surface areas, and by tailoring development and conservation actions to the targeted landscape features. Crucially, these development projects need to include actions enabling any pressure exerted on protected areas to be mitigated. Local communities must also be more involved in selecting the development activities. Yet, good feasibility studies and good intervention logics are not enough. What often makes the difference is the quality of the project sponsors and the local project management – and therefore human resources – along with the dynamism of local institutions and the political and institutional will.

To systematize baselines and monitoring–evaluation

Most projects struggle to demonstrate the results and impacts achieved because they do not have baselines prior to project inception or systems to monitor biodiversity and economic outcomes during implementation. It is, however, possible to minimise these difficulties by using open-source digital tools, by applying a robust open data policy to the biodiversity monitoring data and by encouraging participatory scientific monitoring. This enables knowledge to be shared with local stakeholders, while reducing the cost of ensuring the sustainability of the monitoring system.

To adapt financial tools to strategic needs

International donors must tailor their financial tools to the strategic results they want to achieve. Otherwise, they run the risk of conducting a strategy guided rather by what financial resources they can commit and their clients’ demands. Loans have become AFD’s most used instrument for financing biodiversity conservation. The volume of grants has been reduced over the period studied and interventions are now geared in priority to the major emerging countries – to the detriment of the African continent and least developed countries (LDCs). This means there is a real risk that projects will be undertaken in creditworthy countries with satisfactory public finances at the expense of countries with a greater need for them. Grant funding, which is crucial to biodiversity conservation in LDCs and other developing countries, must be maintained and, if possible, increased. Moreover, projects produce better results when an action spans 10 to 15 years, whereas AFD only funds projects over an average of 3 to 5 years. One avenue towards improvement would be to acquire financing instruments that can fund a wider spectrum of activities over significant areas, with interventions being phased in over longer periods of time. One of the evaluations thus recommends implementing a 12-year system with three four-year phases based on multitranche funding.

Back policies that mainstream biodiversity

Mainstreaming biodiversity conservation as a cross-cutting issue implies reducing the negative impacts of interventions not dedicated to conservation (access to drinking water, transport, industry, urbanisation, agriculture, energy and finance). This often requires grant funding for initiatives that provide assistance to contracting authorities – often little mindful of this issue – through policy dialogue, an analysis of their capacity-building needs, and dedicated resources to help them move towards sound environmental standards.

To better monitor the financial commitments for this objective

This means not only that biodiversity co-benefits should be maximised, but also that the financial commitments and results in terms of reducing negative impacts on biodiversity should be counted as aid dedicated to biodiversity mainstreaming. This will give an overall, non-truncated picture of a donor’s financing.

To develop interventions with biodiversity co-benefits

Moving into this field on sectors that are currently sidelined (urban development, transport, energy, education, health, etc.) supposes measuring impacts more effectively, quantifying them in terms of project portfolios and sharing the lessons learnt with the beneficiary countries as part of a high-level political dialogue. Furthermore, strengthening nature-based solutions is an opportunity to obtain both climate and biodiversity co-benefits if we furnish sufficient efforts and resources on impact monitoring.

To set verifiable objectives and monitor performance

As for climate, setting verifiable objectives and giving countries the means to monitor their performance are priorities for developing a “positive agenda” for biodiversity and reaching an ambitious international agreement on biological diversity at the next CBD conference of the parties. The lessons of the Paris Climate Agreement and the recent biodiversity conservation negotiations show that the challenge should enable each country to identify the pressures on biodiversity and make commitments to reduce them. Support for public biodiversity policies backed by AFD could accompany these voluntary approaches.