This publication presents the GEF-6 biodiversity strategy for 2014-2018. As the financial mechanism of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) the GEF provides funding to help countries implement the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity, 2011-2020, and achieve the Aichi Targets. I am pleased that donors during the recently completed replenishment pledged $1.296 billion towards the biodiversity focal area for GEF-6, making it the largest individual focal area within the GEF. Consistent with the CBD Strategic Plan, 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. The GEF-6 biodiversity strategy is composed of ten programs that, through a continuum of measures, address the most critical drivers of biodiversity loss across entire landscapes and seascapes. The programs include direct conservation/protection, threat-reduction, sustainable use, and biodiversity mainstreaming approaches. Each program provides a focused and calibrated response in a specific ecosystem or location in a landscape or seascape. In addition, for the first time, the strategy addresses the most critical underlying driver of biodiversity loss; the failure to account for and price the full economic value of ecosystems and biodiversity. Achieving the Aichi Targets will require more than money. To have transformational results will require landscape-level and sector-wide approaches that integrate the sustainable management of biodiversity into multiple sectors and that require engagement and ownership with stakeholders beyond the environment sector. GEF’s new biodiversity strategy acknowledges this reality and provides ample opportunities for countries to pursue new biodiversity management solutions that are systems-oriented, that address underlying drivers and direct pressures of biodiversity loss, and that engage all sectors of Government and society. We look forward to supporting a new generation of biodiversity investments that match the scope of the challenge and the aspirations inherent in the Strategic Plan and we commit to work together with the CBD, donors and recipient countries, GEF agencies, and civil society towards the joint achievement of the Aichi Targets.
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