Palestinian institutions have started getting funding for Biodiversity from global and regional institutions. There is a need for: a) diversifying sources of funding, b) investing more public financing in biodiversity (currently miniscule), c) improving spending effectiveness, d) investing in infrastructure and human resources, and e) leveraging global finance. Relevant projects could include a botanical garden, a natural history museum, an environmental center or a mixture of these. They must: a) be found in areas near people (e.g. distributed across Governorates) and b) be led by people whose philosophy is to go to the people (especially remote villages) and not expect the people to come to them. Funding for all work related to the environment should be streamlined and have certain guidelines such as a) ensure outcome driven projects and insist on evaluation of outcomes, b) give priority to funding joint projects, not funding to a specific NGO or government agency, c) give priority to projects that address national priorities agreed to by stakeholders together, and d) be transparent with as few overheads as possible.
Recommendations on Funding
- Financing for biodiversity in SP should be more outcome-driven. For example, holding workshops for 200 people does not necessarily translate into behavioral changes, which is the point after all, not merely being informed.
- Funded activities like education should lead to behavioral change.
- Funded research studies should be based on impact on conservation efforts. It is recommended that aid projects to the Palestinian territories get impact assessment studies, whether by independent auditors or via participatory impact assessments of the type described by Catley et al., (2007). Such evaluation is critical if investments in biodiversity conservation are to be justified (Ferraro and Pattanayak, 2006).
- GEF funding for large grants must be made available to SP.
- There is a significant number of resources now available that is focused on climate change (e.g. Green Climate Fund (https://www.greenclimate.fund/) but there is a need to connect the nexus to biodiversity, ecosystem services and endogenous people needs. Even crowdfunding can be used successfully (Gallo‐Cajiao et al., 2018).
- Sovereignity and ending the occupation are critical for the successful implementation of projects.
- A mechanism needs to be established to avoid redundancy of projects and better project coordination so as to achieve the NBSAP. This should also be added to the function of the Palestine National Biodiversity Committee (PNBC).
- Resources that are not financial can be better leveraged, including networking, attending conferences, emailing colleagues to seek their support, and much more. There are even groups whose function is to support SP scientifically (e.g. Science for the People https://scienceforthepeople.org/).
- In many cases, the list of species requiring conservation action will exceed the available financial and human resources. Consequently, a decision has to be made on: which species and how many populations of each should be conserved, and in which areas where the species occurs should conservation or recovery actions take place (Heywood et al., 2015). To do this, some countries have created ranking systems. For example, in New Zealand: A = Highest priority for conservation action, B = Second priority for conservation action; C = Third priority for conservation action; D = Plants about which little information exists but which are considered threatened; M = Plants that are rare or localized and of cultural importance to the Maori; O = Plants which are threatened in New Zealand but are thought to be secure in other parts of their range outside New Zealand; X = Plants which have not been sighted for a number of years, but which may still exist. A similar system should be adopted in SP .
- Focus on the nexus of Water-Food-Energy-Climate for biodiversity support.
- The European Commission recently confirmed that it promotes an extreme form of biodiversity offsetting, called 'like for like or better' or ‘Nature-Based Solutions’. In this system, the destruction of one habitat can be offset by the restoration of the habitat for another species. These ‘Nature-Based Solutions’ are in turn in the taxonomy of sustainable finance (link).
Sources of funding are many (see https://futurefornature.org/other-funding-and-award-options/)
List of Possible-funders
See References in the Publications