Strengthening biodiversity conservation

Our Landscape Initiative for the Far Eastern Himalaya (HI-LIFE) Initiative organised the second episode of the HI-LIFE webinar series, ‘Strengthening biodiversity conservation’. This episode focused on sharing policies, experiences, emerging issues, collaborative opportunities, research findings, new ideas and technologies, technical guidelines, and approaches to biodiversity conservation and protected area management, transboundary collaboration, and community conservation of the Far Eastern Himalayan Landscape (FEHL).

Key messages

The two-day webinar included two keynote addresses, 18 thematic presentations, and one-panel discussion that focused on corridor development and human-wildlife interaction. The first session and its thematic presentations covered a wide variety of subjects from fostering transboundary cooperation in wildlife trade, water pollution to corridor development and human-wildlife conflict.

The second session emphasised the need to achieve the 30×30 targets, which calls for protecting 30 percent of the world’s terrestrial and marine habitats by 2030. In order to achieve this target and address biodiversity conservation, there is need for green financing and investment. The session also discussed other effective conservation measures (OECMs) as a valuable diversity conservation tool that can contribute to achieving international targets. India’s experiences on identifying and recognising OECMs categories provided good learnings for other countries.

Through different expert talk sessions, participants were able to understand transboundary conservation as a cooperation process to achieve conservation goals across one or more international boundaries. Experts also talked about the tools and techniques employed to assess and strengthen transboundary conservation of conventionally protected areas. They also discussed the transboundary issues faced by protected areas and emphasised the need to collaborate and coordinate beyond borders.

Some of the key messages from the webinar are listed below:

• Transboundary conservation has multiple benefits including ecological integrity, contribution to species’ long-term survival, strengthening political relations, and generating substantial sociocultural and economic benefit.
• The IUCN diagnostic tool for transboundary conservation planners supports the decision-making process leading to the institutionalisation of transboundary conservation.
• Illegal wildlife trade is a widespread challenge to biodiversity in the HKH region. HKH is a source, transit and consumer area for wildlife pets, parts, and products. Transboundary collaboration and coordination are required to address issues such as transboundary water pollution, illegal wildlife trade, climate change impact, illegal logging, and non-timber forest products collection.
• Partnerships and development policies must be strengthened and mainstreamed for biodiversity conservation.
• Development of connections between the ecological and economic systems is crucial for preserving biodiversity.
• Moving beyond the protected area paradigm, a landscape-based strategy to biodiversity conservation is required. Besides protected areas, OECMs is an emerging concept that could help in achieving the 30×30 target.

Diversity in participation

The webinar brought together a diverse group of professionals – scientists and communication experts, policymakers, practitioners, and funding agencies. Nearly 200 participants from China, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Nepal, United Kingdom, and various countries representing international organisations participated in the webinar.

Sunayana Basnet