Title
Biodiversity Restoration Priority Assessment Tool: A Contribution for Biodiversity Offsets Implementation in Mozambique
Author(s)
Jones, Kendall R.; Grantham, Hedley; Costa, Hugo; Sidat, Naseeba; Nazerali, Sean; Nicolau, Denise
Abstract
As part of the Biodiversity Offset Program carried out by the Government of Mozambique, in partnership with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Foundation for the Conservation of Biodiversity – BIOFUND – a new regulation was developed for the implementation of Biodiversity Offsets, as required in Decree 54/2015 of 31 December on the Environmental Impact Assessment regulation. It involves the development of a series of tools and technical guidelines for the application of the regulation.
The development of tools that can be used by developers to plan their projects in advance is essential. One such tool is an ecosystem map that can be used by proponents to determine whether their project will impact the biodiversity considered most important. Complementary it would allow the developers and the environmental authorities to find areas of equivalent biodiversity that can be improved as part of the offset. Such a tool has been developed through a WCS-led project and is currently under improvement.
Once it is necessary to determine the type of biodiversity that needs to be offset, it is necessary to identify potential sites for restoration where offsetting can be implemented. This list of sites would be particularly useful for developers and the envrionmental authorities for the early planning of the biodiversity offsets according to the country’s requirements. This would imply identifying strategic areas that maximize the potential benefit of enhancement/restoration activities for targeted biodiversity, which would include understanding the current degradation of ecosystems, and identifying strategic areas for restoration. While final site choice will always require field verification, GIS based assessments can provide useful first-pass filters to identify potential target areas.
There have been previous attempts to identify ecosystem restoration priorities in Mozambique using the IUCN ROAM, that is the Restoration Opportunities Assessment Methodology approach (MICAIA et al., 2018; MITADER, 2018). While this approach compiled an impressive array of social and environmental data to assess restoration priorities, it was primarily focused on functional ecosystem restoration, for example to reduce riverbank erosion or increasing connectivity between forest patches. Such objectives are not directly applicable to restoration for biodiversity offsets, which should be related with a specific biodiversity enhancement. As such, there is a clear need for an updated assessment of restoration priorities in Mozambique, with a focus on identifying potential offset receiving sites.
The ROAM tool supports the identification and mapping of potential restoration areas, at different scales depending on the available information. Field validation studies can then be targeted to these areas to determine which are most suitable for restoration of a particular type of biodiversity. This includes the application of metrics for determining the ecological condition of the ecosystems that occur at those sites, so that biodiversity loss and gain can be calculated.
The approach proposed in this report will complement existing ROAM assessments and use similar analytical techniques, but will be focused on identifying restoration areas to achieve the objectives of Mozambique’s biodiversity offset legislation. It is important to note that the following data and methods described in this document are able to be revised based on feedback or provision of alternate datasets, and can thus be targeted for improvement. This approach focuses on identifying priority areas for ecosystem restoration, which is here used to refer to any kind of ecosystem improvement activity, regardless of whether the ecosystem being restored has been completely removed, or it is only somewhat degraded. No distinction is made here between restoration of degraded parts of a still existing ecosystem and restoration that aims to re-establish ecosystems in places where they have been totally lost.
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