Economic development activities are key drivers of continuing biodiversity decline. The continuing erosion of biodiversity has ramifications for human wellbeing, as explored extensively by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the first IPBES Assessment report. Economic development often leads to considerable gains in human wellbeing; such development is desirable and a moral necessity, meaning that biodiversity cannot always be conserved everywhere. The challenge is how to decide when, where, and how development activities and any associated biodiversity losses should be permitted – from the perspective of achieving the best possible outcomes for biodiversity and people.
There is growing experience and evidence worldwide for the use of biodiversity impact ‘mitigation hierarchies’ to manage and compensate for biodiversity losses caused by development. A mitigation hierarchy is typically governed by an overarching biodiversity objective, such as ‘no net loss or better’, and details the set of sequentially-preferred conservation actions to mitigate losses (avoid, minimise, remediate, offset). The mitigation hierarchy is a well-developed framework for balancing development and conservation to achieve long-term social and biodiversity objectives, clarifying where biodiversity loss should be prevented, where it is permissible and where compensation measures are needed. Crucially, mitigation hierarchies can be employed at multiple spatial scales to require (1) recognition that everything which results in desirable or undesirable biodiversity outcomes (including retention and restoration on the positive side) should count; and, (2) a shift of emphasis away from top-down global targets and towards a process-based framework within which to capture progress towards desired outcomes at all scales and for all sectors and impacts.
As a result, recent proposals have been made – both in the scientific and grey literatures, as well as in the IUCN’s submission to the CBD for CoP14 – that all losses and gains of biodiversity caused by human activities be categorised under a global mitigation hierarchy (the so-called Conservation Hierarchy). Doing this would not only clarify how the diverse range of conservation interventions implemented worldwide contribute towards overall international biodiversity policy goals. It would also provide a framework for exploring different strategies for mitigating biodiversity losses from development (e.g. prevention-heavy vs. compensation-heavy), and a basis for empirical evaluation and prioritisation of conservation investments. It is the only available and feasible framework for determining how best to address biodiversity losses from necessary economic development activities across multiple scales, sectors, impact types and habitats.
For this reason, an approach based on the Conservation Hierarchy can contribute to the post-2020 biodiversity strategy, leading towards the CBD’s 2050 vision. The overall guiding objective of the framework should be based on the principle of net outcomes for biodiversity: e.g., an objective of a ‘net positive impact on biodiversity from all human activities’. Such an objective could be designed to complement and be conceptually consistent with the Paris Agreement under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, on acceptable net greenhouse gas emissions.
Resolutions 059; 061; and 067, and Recommendation 110, all from the 2016 WCC, are relevant to this motion.

• PROVITA [Venezuela]
• Synchronicity Earth [United Kingdom]
• The Nature Conservancy [United States of America]
• Wildlife Conservation Society [United States of America]
• World Wide Fund for Nature - International [Switzerland]
• World Wide Fund for Nature - U.K. [United Kingdom]
• World Wildlife Fund - US [United States of America]
• Zoological Society of London [United Kingdom]