Stakeholders to validate BIOFIN workbooks |14 October 2015

The Biodiversity Finance Initiative (BIOFIN) national team yesterday held a third workshop to validate workbooks focused on reviewing biodiversity related policies, institutions and expenditures.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) launched the project in October 2012 as a new global partnership seeking to address the biodiversity finance challenge in a comprehensive manner which aims to enable the government to develop a sound business case for increased investment in the sustainable and equitable management, protection and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystems.
 
The Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climate Change (MEECC), in collaboration with the Ministry of Finance, Trade and the Blue Economy launched BIOFIN in Seychelles last year.

The discussions during the workshop yesterday were led by BIOFIN national team consultants, Bertrand Rassool, the project leader and senior public finance expert Herve Barios, the national expert on environmental economics. Annike Faure is the project manager.

They presented the first part of the BIOFIN workbook which has three components. In workbook 1A the planners will be able to identify the suite of sustainable and unsustainable policies and practices, and their contributing factors that drive biodiversity and ecosystem change across a suite of different sectors.

In workbook 1B the planners can analyse a wide range of institutions across multiple sectors, to identify for each the specific role in biodiversity planning and finance, the impacts and dependencies on biodiversity, the degree of alignment with national biodiversity goals, and the overall institutional capacity.

And in 1C the planners can identify national budgetary and expenditure trends, and identify specific biodiversity-related budgets and expenditures across several years to gain a baseline overview of expenditures by institution and by major biodiversity strategy.

BIOFIN will support in making the business case for funding the biodiversity financing gap and developing a resource mobilisation plan for Seychelles’ National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP).

The BIOFIN workbook has three parts and it will provide countries with the tool to understand the cost implications of implementing the strategies of the NBSAP and understand how to mobilise the required resources.

During the workshop, the stakeholders also had the opportunity to discuss part two of the workbook which focuses on calculating the full costs of implementing each of the biodiversity strategies within the revised NBSAP.

The third part looks at developing a resource mobilisation plan.

These two workbooks are subsequently being worked on by the national BIOFIN team and will have subsequent technical and validation workshops in the coming months, leading to 2016.

In his opening remarks, the UNDP programme manager Roland Alcindor said that according to an assessment report conducted under the auspices of the global assessment resource to implement the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) strategic plan 2011-2020, global investment required ranges between US $130 to $140 billion annually.

“This is why a new methodological framework is now being piloted under the BIOFIN to help countries scale up their efforts and bridge the financing gap for biodiversity management and meet the 20 Aichi targets as defined in the CBDs strategic plan itself,” he said.

Present during this workshop was the principal secretary for the Blue economy Rebecca Loustau-Lalanne, principal secretary for environment Alain Decommarmond, the global BIOFIN team senior technical advisor Dr David Meyers along with various stakeholders from governmental and non-governmental environmental organisations.

A German TV crew, Deutsche Welle (DW), was also present to film a documentary on Global BIOFIN project involving Seychelles, the Philippines and Costa Rica.