Workshop on mobilization of financing for biodiversity conservation held at Borovoye

Participants of the meeting tried to find common approaches to a system of economic evaluation of natural resources to work out recommendations on conserving biodiversity. To target this Kazakhstan is now working on BioFin project. Its aim is to give support to participating nations in defining the status and trends in financing biodiversity nationally and resolving problems of resource shortages. Project donors are Swiss and German Governments and the European Union. Kazakhstan has become one of 19 pilot countries where the project is being run, the UNDP Kazakhstan said. "BioFin will run through 2017. Here in Kazakhstan we are hoping to have most of the preliminary work done by the end of 2015. And then in 2016 we will start implementing some of the resource mobilization strategy," - David Meyers, technical Advisor of BioFin at UNDP for Asia and the Pacific says. Biodiversity conservation is a complex process. It requires economic evaluation of natural resources in order to take account of all functions of natural resources and ecosystem services, which is important for mobilizing necessary resources to finance biodiversity conservation. Meruyert Sarsembayeva, National Expert on Financial Tools in Biodiversity at UNDP, says that when using natural resources one should understand that recovery of the said resources and their further conservation is a problem that needs to be addressed sooner, rather than later.

The participants of the meeting also worked in groups to explore how the resource mobilization mechanism operates in various sectors of the economy.