Climatelinks celebrates biodiversity on Earth Day

This year’s Earth Day theme, Protect Our Species, highlights the roles of all living things and the importance of protecting endangered and threatened species, such as coral reefs, elephants, bees and other insects. Biodiversity conservation is essential for human well-being and helps maintain the ecosystem services that sustain life, from providing food, fish and timber to breaking down waste and regulating the climate. Changes in climate can drive biodiversity loss, which can, in turn, impact the ecosystem goods and services that form the foundation upon which human development depends.

USAID invests in biodiversity conservation and natural resource management to enable resilient development. USAID's Biodiversity Policy describes the Agency's commitment to conserving species and ecosystems in priority places, with a focus on integrating biodiversity with other development sectors, including climate adaptation and mitigation.

In this work, USAID uses comprehensive and evidence-based approaches to conservation with the aim to sustain biodiversity-dependent livelihoods, build resilient and self-reliant societies, and protect our species.

Here is a selection of Climatelinks’ numerous resources related to biodiversity.

Projects

• The Climate-Resilient Ecosystems and Livelihoods project diversified incomes from sustainable natural resource management for 360,000 people and helped 875 villages sustain their natural resources in the face of climate change impacts.
• Fish Right is a sustainable fisheries management project in the Philippines that aims to sustain ecosystems via an ecosystem-based approach to fisheries management, building on the successes of the ECOFISH project. USAID climate risk management (CRM) specialists praised Fish Right’s climate risk analysis as one of the best examples of putting climate risk management into practice in the field.
• The Conservation and Adaptation in Asia’s High Mountain Landscapes and Communities project takes an integrated, climate-smart approach to snow leopard conservation using climate adaptation activities in Bhutan, India, the Kyrgyz Republic, Mongolia, Nepal and Pakistan.

Evidence and Tools

• The Using Cost-benefit Analysis to Identify Ecosystem-based Solutions to Climate Change Challenges blog discusses the costs and benefits of traditional and “green” approaches to climate change adaptation and summarizes a recent report from USAID’s CEADIR project and recommendations for incorporating ecosystem valuation into cost-benefit analysis.
• The Ecosystem-Based Adaptation (EbA) for Development Results blog discusses different entry points for integrating EbA approaches into USAID programming and analyses across sectors. Learn more about USAID’s EbA evidence summaries and case studies.
• The Economics of Ecosystem-based Adaptation evidence summary highlights the economics of ecosystem-based adaptation approaches, which can offer cost savings and benefits such as biodiversity conservation.

Other Blogs

• The Benefits of Integrating Biodiversity Conservation and Climate Change Adaptation in Global Development blog examines the instrumental role of integration in making people, places and wildlife more resilient to climate change.
• There is still time to participate in USAID’s Biodiversity Integration Case Study Competition, which invites examples of biodiversity integration across all sectors in USAID’s portfolio. Applications accepted through May 3, 2019.