ID: 1549
Presenting Author: Jean Hugé
Session: 653 - Biodiversity Impact Assessment: Information Disclosure, Risk Identification, and Legal Regulation
Status: pending
In order to ensure a better integration of biodiversity in impact assessment practice, the plural values of biodiversity need to be included, which can happen through citizen science.
Biodiversity is under threat from anthropogenic pressures, in particular in biodiversity-rich low and middle-income countries. International development cooperation actors, who traditionally focus on the improvement of socio-economic conditions, have almost all be acknowledging the linkages between poverty and biodiversity, e.g. by embracing ecosystem services framework. However, there are many different framings which can motivate the integration of biodiversity and which influence how biodiversity and development are linked. Moreover, there is a gap between the lip service paid to biodiversity integration and the reality of development cooperation interventions. This contribution analyses how biodiversity framings are reflected in environmental impact assessment (EIA) practice, and how these framings influence EIA and decision-making. The findings, based on an qualitative analysis of EIAs undertaken in West Africa and in Peru, indicate the incoherent quality but also the dominance of ‘utilitarian’ and ‘corrective’ framings, which respectively stress human use of nature and the mitigation of negative unintended development impacts. In order to complement such often one-sided utilitarian framings of biodiversity, we explore the potential of citizen science. The use of biodiversity-focused citizen science platforms and apps has exploded in recent years, and we propose a reflection in line with the plural values of nature-approach fostered by IPBES. One-sided, incomplete framings of biodiversity may indeed lead to an overly instrumental approach towards biodiversity in IA.
Jean Hugé works at the Open University of the Netherlands, Ghent University and the Vietnam National University, on conservation effectiveness, impact assessment and conservation social science.