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.

Additional information: Stakeholder Engagement Event : We are hosting an information day for interested potential delivery partners on Thursday 13th January 2022. You are invited to join one of the two web conferences we are hosting - one at 0930-1130 GMT, and one at 1430-1630 GMT. The two sessions will be identical and have been scheduled to account for the different time zones of interested parties based outside the UK.

This event will be of particular interest to organisations with a track record of delivering high quality, large-scale projects in the interface between conservation and development. We will welcome bids from consortia and hope that this event will be helpful for organisations in forming consortia with others.

The event will provide us with an opportunity to share more information about the Biodiverse Landscapes Fund. There will be a presentation from the programme team which will outline the objectives of the Fund, setting out the basis upon which suitable projects will be identified. We will also detail the Fund's procurement processes and timelines, management structure, finance and monitoring and evaluation requirements. Finally, we will share information about the landscapes we are targeting and the indicative outcomes we hope to achieve.

There will be an opportunity for attendees to ask questions during the event. We also encourage attendees to submit questions to our email address [email protected] before the event, so we can tailor the presentation to areas of interest. The deadline for submitting questions before the event is 0900 GMT Monday 10th January 2022.

How to take part: follow the below weblink :

https://defra.bravosolution.co.uk/esop/guest/go/opportunity/detail?opportunityId=53078

Other Information: The events will take place in English, and live translation will not be available. However, all materials used on the day, including the presentation, a transcript of any questions answered, and a list of participating organisations, will be published in the following languages on Defra's e-tendering system BRAVO after the event: Spanish, French, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Lao and Khmer. A recording of the event will also be available. Please note that expressing an interest on BRAVO is required to enable access to these materials.