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This document reports on a project reviewing the use of economic measures in National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans, carried out by IUCN - The World Conservation Union between September 2000 and September 2001. This project was funded by the GEF as part of the Biodiversity Planning Support Programme (BPSP), with co-finance provided by the Swiss Agency for Development and Co-operation (SDC) under the project Supporting Global Action to Conserve Biodiversity and Sustainable Use Biological Resources: Phase III

Economic incentive measures play a crucial role in nature conservation at all levels of society – local through to global. At the community level, though, it is particularly important to have appropriate incentive measures for nature conservation as natural resource use is so closely linked with livelihood issues at this level. This section give a bit of background of the linkages between economic activities and natural systems at the community level and then outlines the structure for the rest of the document and resource kit.

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is one of the global conventions on environmental conservation that came out of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. By signing and ratifying the CBD, countries have agreed to support its goals and aims. The three main objectives of the CBD are the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components, and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilisation of genetic resources. To achieve these objectives, the CBD includes 42 articles, each dealing with specific aspects of biodiversity conservation, sustainable use and equitable benefit sharing.

Incentive measures have long been used by governments to manipulate the ways in which macro and sectoral economies work. It is however only relatively recently that they have started to be applied to biodiversity conservation. An incentive for biodiversity conservation can be defined asi: “A specific inducement designed and implemented to influence government bodies, business, non-governmental organisations, or local people to conserve biological diversity or to use its components in a sustainable manner. Incentive measures usually take the form of a new policy, law or economic or social programme.”