“The adoption of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 under the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, committed the international community to a set of ambitious goals on ‘living in harmony with nature’. This requires immediate and ambitious action to protect both life below water and life on land, so as to conserve and sustainably use biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Economic instruments, such as taxes, fees and charges, tradable permits, payments for ecosystem services schemes, and environmentally-motivated subsidies, provide signals to both producers and consumers to behave in a more environmentally-sustainable way. These instruments also provide continuous incentives to achieve objectives in a more cost-effective manner, and most are also able to mobilise finance and/or generate revenue. Economic instruments are the so-called “positive incentives” embedded in the 2011-2020 Aichi Biodiversity Targets, notably Target 3.
The OECD Environmental Policy Committee (EPOC), through its unique database of Policy Instruments for the Environment (PINE), collects quantitative and qualitative information on policy instruments, in more than 80 countries worldwide. This brochure presents statistics on the biodiversity-relevant economic instruments and the finance they mobilise, based on currently available data in PINE. The data are relevant to monitoring progress towards Aichi Biodiversity Target 3 (on incentives), Target 20 (on resource mobilisation) as well as Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 15.a. on finance.”