Arend Kolhoff
Technical secretary
On request of the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), the NCEA drafted guidelines for integrating biodiversity in EIA/SEA.
Significant details
The secretariat of the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) requested the Commission to prepare an advice on guidelines for the integration of biodiversity issues in EIA and SEA. The advise will be prepared in close-cooperation with the International association for Impact Assessment.
The advice consists of two sets of guidelines: (i) Guidelines to integrate biodiversity in EIA, and; (ii) Guidelines to integrate biodiversity in SEA. An earlier set of them for EIS was already adopted at the Conference of Parties of the CBD in April 2002, The Hague (The Netherlands). These guidelines were also drafted by the Commission. The current set of EIA guidelines has been updated and extended a little. The guidelines for the integration of biodiversity in SEA has been developed for the first time. They were based on practical experiences provided by IAIA members from all over the world. These experiences have been used to draft the guidelines that were discussed by international experts at two international IAIA conferences in 2005. The guidelines for EIA and SEA are on the agenda for COP* of the CBD in March 2006 in Brazil.