Encouraging Ecological Sustainability

Through this pillar, BirdLife Botswana seeks to achieve two main outcomes:

(i) Demonstrate and advocate nature’s values and

(ii) Promote policies that support sustainability

Why influence policy?

While specific conservation action projects are important, laws and environmental policy set the wider framework into which all conservation efforts fit. Reform of legislation and environmental policy, while often challenging to accomplish, can have positive consequences far more reaching than work that is focused on a single site or a single species. Even where strong policy commitments exist, advocacy and monitoring by NGOs such as BirdLife Botswana are often essential to ensure that they are properly implemented.

For BirdLife, Policy means "the national, regional and global legislation, priorities, programmes and institutional arrangements that impact on birds and biodiversity".

Often, these can be categorised conveniently into differing sectors or focus areas (for example, climate change policies, agriculture policies and forestry policies), which may be linked with one or more mechanisms or approaches that operate at differing scales. For example, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is a vital international mechanism in which BirdLife Botswana is an active participant, while changing corporate practices, or influencing development financing are approaches to ensuring that birds and biodiversity policies are considered in decision making.

Our advocacy work seeks to influence policy and its implementation so as to help achieve our strategic objectives, for species, sites and habitats, ecological sustainability and people. This involves advocating for actions and targets which BirdLife Botswana believes are essential based on particular high-level stances,  derived from our scientific information and data and our conservation approaches and methodologies.