USAID Biodiversity Policy
The USAID Biodiversity Policy builds upon the Agency’s long history of conserving a global biological heritage for current and future generations and reflects a deep understanding of the role that healthy natural systems play in achieving the Agency’s human-development goals. The Policy recognizes that biodiversity loss can be driven by unsustainable development, that there may be trade-offs that must be understood and managed between biodiversity conservation and development goals, and that biodiversity conservation itself can be a critical tool in the Agency’s toolkit for achieving sustainable development.
The USAID Biodiversity Policy provides a blueprint for how the Agency will work to achieve its vision of conserving biodiversity for sustainable, resilient development. The Policy deepens the Agency’s appreciation of the intrinsic value of biodiversity. It also recognizes that human wellbeing and progress are dependent on the health of biodiversity systems and that durable development gains are not possible unless these systems are valued and safeguarded. To this end, USAID will work hand in hand with host countries and the global community to conserve biodiversity for sustainable, resilient development.
This Policy represents a recommitment of USAID to conserve biodiversity through strategic actions to reduce threats and drivers, as well as a new focus on integrating biodiversity conservation with other development sectors. A roadmap for implementation highlights the most critical steps necessary for implementing this Policy. (See Annex II.)
Effective immediately, the Policy promotes the selective, focused, and strategic use of biodiversity resources through modifications to the Agency’s Biodiversity Code and through identifying priority countries/ regions for biodiversity programming. USAID will focus on high-biodiversity-priority geographies where the Agency has a comparative advantage for making positive change and can support host-country conservation and development priorities. USAID will support the conservation of priority sites, species, and genetic diversity and align biodiversity resources to national and regional development goals and the global public good.
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