Open AccessMaking space: Putting landscape‐level mitigation into practice in Mongolia
Author(s) -
Heiner Michael,
Galbadrakh Davaa,
Batsaikhan Nyamsuren,
Bayarjargal Yunden,
Oakleaf James,
Tsogtsaikhan Battsengel,
Evans Jeffrey,
Kiesecker Joseph
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
conservation science and practice
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2578-4854
DOI - 10.1111/csp2.110
Subject(s) - environmental resource management , environmental planning , government (linguistics) , business , context (archaeology) , natural resource , biodiversity , hierarchy , geography , political science , environmental science , ecology , archaeology , law , biology , philosophy , linguistics
Growing resource demands are driving rapid development to new frontiers in developing countries with important biological diversity. The mitigation hierarchy is a critical tool to manage the impacts of development projects on biodiversity, embedded into numerous government, lender, and corporate policies. However, implementation faces obstacles, in particular deciding when impacts should be avoided. Offset design, the last step, faces difficult questions about location of offsets relative to impacts and how to address uncertainty and conflicts with future development. Planning for conservation and development are typically separate processes, and environmental impact assessments are typically conducted on a project‐by‐project basis that does not consider the landscape context and cumulative impacts of multiple projects. Here we present a mitigation framework for Mongolia with an example from the Mongolian Gobi Desert, a landscape with globally significant biodiversity facing rapid development. This landscape‐level planning approach has been replicated across Mongolia to produce a national level mitigation framework to guide both the government policy commitment to protect 30% of all natural lands and application of the mitigation hierarchy. This has led to protection of 177,000 km 2 in new national and local protected areas, and development of an offset design mechanism based on the conservation plans.