Work Programme Item: Good Practice Guidance

The 2004-2005 Work Programme appended to the June 2004 Terms of Reference calls on IUCN and ICMM to produce and test Good Practice Guidance (GPG) in the areas of biodiversity assessment and management. The GPG is to be owned by ICMM, and the Dialogue is intended to achieve the following:

• provide a means for ICMM to engage with and benefit from the views and experiences of the wider conservation community in the development of the GPG;
• to identify suitable sites, partners and processes for field testing provisional GPG, and
• to document experience and lessons learned that will be considered in preparation of the final GPG.

In initiating the GPG work, IUCN and ICMM established a joint Advisory Group which has provided continuous oversight and advice on the development of the GPG – from the drafting of the Terms of Reference for the consultants, through to reviewing comments submitted on the draft guidance. The members of the Advisory Group are:

*co-chairs of the Advisory Group

The Good Practice Guidance for Mining and Biodiversity was published in June 2006.

In addition to the GPG, ICMM has recently produced, with the help of the Advisory Group, two papers related to the topic of biodiversity offsets. The first paper is an “ ICMM proposition statement”, which provides an industry perspective on offsets. It addresses those aspects of offsets on which different groups disagree, for example: How to establish offsets? Which activities are acceptable offsets? How to compare the biodiversity lost through the mining activity with gains through the proposed offset? The second is a “ synthesis paper” aimed at industry managers and executives in the mining industry. It takes a practical approach to the subject and makes it much more accessible to practitioners.