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WORLD BANK AND IUCN SOLIDIFY PARTNERSHIP FOR FUTURE ENVIRONMENTAL COLLABORATION

THE WORLD BANK AND IUCN – THE WORLD CONSERVATION UNION:
GROWING COLLABORATION IN THE FIELD OF NATURAL RESOURCES MANAGEMENT

As a result of their signing a 1995 Aide Memoire, the World Bank and IUCN – The World Conservation Union have developed a wide range of collaborative work at both the policy and operational levels. Today’s signing of a Memorandum of Understanding formalizes this relationship and ensures ongoing and future collaboration in the conservation of biodiversity and in the sustainable and equitable use of natural resources, which is fundamental to the alleviation of poverty.

World Bank – IUCN joint work now stretches around the world. It includes staff exchange, advisory groups, joint programs, and specific projects. A sampling of the collaboration follows.

Together, the World Bank and IUCN established the World Commission on Dams and leveraged the financial resources for the Commission to convene for two years — reporting back to the international community in 2001 with recommendations on when, where, whether, and how to build large dams.

With the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), we are providing technical and policy assistance on water resources management for Southern Africa.

IUCN will provide technical and policy input to the new World Bank initiative, the Consortium on Natural and Technological Catastrophies (CAT-NAT), on the role of sustainable natural resources management in the prevention and mitigation of natural disasters.

Together, IUCN and the World Bank, with support from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), are playing a leading role in developing the water and nature component of the World Water Vision, to be agreed in The Hague in 2000.

At the global level we are working together on the role of transboundary parks and protected areas in sustaining and building peace, and we are working together in planning for the 2002 World Parks Congress organized by IUCN’s World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) in South Africa. Two additional Bank-WCPA collaborations have been Economics of Protected Areas and Guidelines for National System Plans for Protected Areas.

The joint publication of a 4-volume set on a Global Representative System of Marine Protected Areas led to the World Bank and IUCN’s setting up marine protected areas in Samoa and Vietnam, with another under preparation in Tanzania. These will foster better management of marine resources and limit the impacts of unsustainable land based activities on the marine environment.

IUCN is assisting the Bank in its forest policy implementation review and strategy development, which involves extensive multi-stakeholder consultations in all regions of the world aimed at reversing trends of forest loss and degradation.

With resources from the GEF, the World Bank and IUCN have undertaken a study in Benin on the feasibility of creating, financing, administering, and operating a protected areas trust fund in Benin.

In Burkina Faso, IUCN has worked with the Bank and others to build the capacity of West Central Africans — in both the public and private sectors — to integrate environmental concerns into policy, program, and project design, emphasizing environmental assessment as a tool for decisionmaking.

In Congo, we have worked together to develop a management plan for the Conkouati reserve which reconciles the immediate needs of the population living around the reserve with the need to conserve the biodiversity of the region.

In Eritrea, we developed a Biodiversity Strategy as a means of identifying priority actions for biodiversity conservation and management.

In Ghana, the World Bank and IUCN have collaborated in the management of the Shai Hills, including a game ranch, and have developed a Management Plan for the forest areas of Bia and Ankassa.

In Kenya, IUCN supported the World Bank in the development of the Nile Basin Initiative (ICCON).

In Lesotho, the World Bank and IUCN have collaborated in supporting Indigenous Knowledge Systems.

In Senegal the institutions are collaborating on a coastal project.

In South Africa, the World Bank and IUCN are setting-up Environmental Assessment Training and Capacity-Building Centers, on which they two will collaborate.

In Sri Lanka, IUCN and the World Bank are working on the conservation and sustainable use of medicinal plants, planning to conserve globally and nationally significant medicinal plants, their habitat, and promote their sustainable use. The Bank supported preparation of local language field guides on birds, mammals, and plants in many Asian countries, in collaboration with IUCN’s Colombo office.

In Vietnam, IUCN has assisted the World Bank in the organization of a workshop that will discuss the draft World Bank report on the impact of limestone quarrying on the country’s biodiversity and cultural heritage.

The Species Survival Commission involves IUCN–Bank collaboration as part of the Biological Conservation Information System work.

The Bank’s Environment Family contributed $20,000 to the IUCN workshop, Engaging the Private Sector in Conservation, part of the incentives work done under IUCN’s Biodiversity program.

In addition, collaboration is growing at the regional level and across all parts of the World Bank, from the Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development network (ESSD), to the World Bank’s training arm, World Bank Institute (WBI), and the Operations Evaluation Department (OED). In addition IUCN is developing its work with the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Areas for future collaboration include desertification, climate change, and carbon sequestration, while conserving forest biodiversity.

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