GEF Investments on Payments for Ecosystem Services Schemes
The Global Environment Facility (GEF) has engaged in pioneering development of mechanisms that reward good stewardship of natural resources, including the structuring of Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes. For the GEF, the concept of PES includes a variety of arrangements through which the beneficiaries of ecosystem services compensate those providing the services. This publication summarizes the investments of GEF in PES from a variety of institutional, thematic and geographic perspectives. The publication also highlights some of the trends and opportunities for the establishment of PES schemes to generate global environmental benefits. Investments have ranged from global projects aiming at building the human and institutional capacity necessary to establish PES schemes, to stand-alone agreements between buyers and sellers in watersheds of high biodiversity value.
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GEF-6 Biodiversity Strategy
The new strategy lays out goals and objectives of the biodiversity focal area during GEF-6
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The GEF-6 Biodiversity Strategy
The goal of the GEF’s biodiversity strategy is to maintain globally significant biodiversity and the ecosystem goods and services that it provides to society. To achieve this goal,the strategy encompasses four objectives: 1) improve sustainability of protected area systems; 2) reduce threats to biodiversity; 3) sustainably use biodiversity; and 4) mainstream conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity into production landscapes/seascapes and sectors.
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Mainstreaming Biodiversity in Practice - A STAP Advisory Document
The challenges confronting the conservation of the planet’s richness of life threaten to overwhelm our collective efforts to limit species loss and degradation of ecosystems and the services that they deliver. The foundation of biodiversity conservation for well over a century have been protected areas (PAs). While successful, they are increasingly vulnerable to land use changes taking place around them. In response to these trends, conservationists and international organizations have developed and actively supported a new biodiversity conservation paradigm: biodiversity mainstreaming.
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Assessing the Effects of Terrestrial Protected Areas on Human Well-Being: A STAP Advisory Document
The creation of protected areas (PAs) has been a central strategy of biodiversity conservation for more than a century. Increasingly, in the last few decades of the 20th century a new requirement was added – that the cre¬ation and maintenance of PAs should strive to alleviate poverty, and should in no case exacerbate it. The Durban Accord agreed at the Vth International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Parks Congress in 2003 was a milestone in the process of mainstreaming PAs in development agendas.
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Payment for Ecosystem Services
This publication summarizes the investments of the GEF since its inception in projects involving Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES).
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Impact of Marine Debris on Biodiversity: Current Status and Potential Solutions
Large quantities of debris can now be found in the most remote places of the ocean, and persist almost indefinitely in the environment. This represents a significant cause for concern, although much of this growing threat to biodiversity and human health is easily preventable with solutions readily available.
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Marine Spatial Planning in the Context of the Convention on Biological Diversity: A Study Carried out in Response to CBD COP 10 Decision X/29
Marine spatial planning represents an important step to improving collaboration amongst multiple users of the marine environment towards a shared vision and outcomes. Understanding successes and challenges in marine spatial planning and scaling up these experiences to large marine areas and trans-boundary regions are therefore essential to effective achievement of the Aichi targets on marine and coastal biodiversity.
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Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS)
A summary of the GEF investments on ABS and the opportunities in support of the implementation of the Nagoya Protocol.
Financing the Achievement of the Aichi Targets
This publication summarizes accomplishments of the GEF in biodiversity focal area.
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