The Thematic Group on 'Impact Mitigation and Ecological Compensation (IMEC)', operating under the IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management, and COMBO+ jointly hosted a webinar on 'Spatial Analysis for the Mitigation Hierarchy'. The webinar was held on 3 July 2023, and a recording is available here.
The aim was to highlight experience with preparing and serving biodiversity information for decision-making on development projects in Mozambique and South Africa. This was discussed by Kendall Jones, Conservation Planning Specialist, Wildlife Conservation Society, Jeffrey Manuel, formerly with the South African National Biodiversity Institute and now South African National Parks, and Ivan Nerantzoulis, Technical Advisor on the Mitigation Hierarchy, WCS and DINAB.
Herewith an introduction to the webinar:
Project development – to build mines, infrastructure, for commercial agriculture etc. – often has significant negative impacts on biodiversity and people. Currently, it contributes substantially to land and sea use change and the on-going loss and degradation of nature. To address these impacts and help reconcile economic development with nature conservation goals, governments and industry often use a decision-making framework known as the mitigation hierarchy, aimed at achieving no net loss or net gain outcomes for biodiversity. The effective use of the mitigation hierarchy at strategic and project levels, and the design of sound policy, require biodiversity information of a certain type and quality being available. This will be based on assessments and spatial planning /prioritisation processes done at different scales that help, for example, with identifying priority areas where impacts must be avoided, or where ‘like for like’ offsets may be feasible and linking mitigation outcomes with overarching targets for nature.
However, guidance on the necessary data and assessment techniques is often lacking, especially in countries where formal mitigation policies do not exist or are under development. Even where useful biodiversity data are available, these are often not arranged in a systematic and publicly accessible manner. In this webinar we use a case study in Mozambique to show relatively simple spatial analyses and outputs that can support the formulation of national policy and applying the mitigation hierarchy in practice, especially the avoidance and offset steps. Such analyses still need to be complemented with field surveys and data for development projects, but they offer rapid, low-cost approaches to providing consistent national data that help with planning and decision-making, especially in relatively data-poor regions. We also discuss efforts in South Africa, with two plus decades’ experience in generating world-class spatial biodiversity data, as well as in Mozambique to prepare and serve the resulting biodiversity information in a user-friendly way on public platforms (https://biodiversityadvisor.sanbi.org/ and https://sibmoz.gov.mz/), to ensure that it can be applied for biodiversity inclusive decision-making.