Biodiverse Landscapes Fund Stakeholder Engagement Event

Biodiversity is declining across the world faster than at any other time in human history. In the past 50 years, human pressures have increased while populations of animals, on average, have more than halved. The global rate of species extinction is already from tens to hundreds of times higher than the average rate over the past 10 million years and is accelerating. Drivers of biodiversity loss include habitat loss and land use change (including urban development and agricultural intensification), pollution, invasive species, unsustainable resource use and climate change. To address the challenges facing nature today, the UK Prime Minister announced at the 2019 UN General Assembly a £220 million International Biodiversity Fund. This includes a £100m Biodiverse Landscapes Fund to restore key landscapes and their ecosystems. The Biodiverse Landscapes Fund will deliver lasting protection and improvement of biodiversity in six global biodiversity hotspots, by aligning nature conservation and human development objectives at a landscape scale. The landscapes the Fund will target initially are: · Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, covering areas of Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe · Mesoamerica, covering areas of Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras · Western Congo Basin, covering areas of Cameroon, Gabon and Republic of Congo · Andes Amazon, covering areas of Ecuador and Peru · Lower Mekong, covering areas of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam · Madagascar Each landscape will be allocated £10m-16m over 7 years. Applications for funding will open in early-mid 2022, with projects expected to start in late 2022