Study identifies economic incentives as a key to saving biodiversity

A new report from the Convention on Biodiversity on the role of economic incentives in shaping environmental behavior concludes that the removal of subsidies which lead to environmentally damaging practices, and the promotion of incentive schemes that promote positive ones, can produce economic and environmental benefits if they are coordinated and well-implemented.

The report incentive measures for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity: case-studies and lessons learned is the result of a series of international workshops on incentive measures held in 2009, and builds on the work undertaken under the study on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB).

It provides key information on the reform of harmful incentives and the promotion of positive incentive measures, identifies succinct lessons learned, and presents a geographically balanced set of concrete cases.

"If humanity is going to achieve a sustainable future of living in harmony with nature, we are going to need to change our economic behavior", said Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity. "This report shows the ways that we can move away from our disastrous business-as-usual practices."

Reforming perverse incentives, in particular environmentally harmful subsidies that under-price natural resources or encourage unsustainable increases in production, for example, has multiple benefits. It stops encouraging environmentally harmful behavior, may remove wider economic distortions, and, in the case of harmful subsidies, may free up scarce fiscal resources. Moreover, removing or mitigating perverse incentives can reduce the need to introduce positive incentive measures.

Measures that provide incentives to conserve biodiversity and use its components in a sustainable manner, such as payment for ecosystem services, or performance payments for sustainable agricultural practices, as well as other indirect measures, such as community-managed systems for natural resource management, are increasingly recognized as an important tool to ensure that biodiversity considerations are reflected in all relevant economic sectors - that they are "mainstreamed" across government and society.

The Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 reflects the urgent need to act on incentive measures by calling for the removal, phasing out, or reform, by 2020, of incentives, including subsidies harmful to biodiversity, and for the development and application of positive incentives for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.

The report, released as CBD Technical Series Nº 56, is available on the website of the Convention at www.cbd.int/ts.

Source: Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity / United Nations Environment Programme