Biodiversity Impact Assessment (BIA)

Biodiversity Impact Assessment (BIA) is a decision-support tool that folds biodiversity considerations explicitly into development planning and implementation, ensuring development proposals are legally compliant, include real mechanisms for conserving biodiversity resources, and provide for fair and equitable sharing of any benefits that come from using biodiversity. Supporting this assessment work is biomonitoring — the ongoing observation and assessment of the current state and changing condition of ecosystems, biodiversity components and landscapes, including natural habitats, populations and species — and increasingly, agricultural drones, unmanned aerial vehicles that give farmers and assessors a bird's-eye view of fields to reveal irrigation problems, soil variation, and pest or fungal infestations, and that also allow safer, more cost-effective, precisely targeted spraying of pesticides and fertilisers than ground-based methods. In practice, biodiversity impact is assessed along several specific dimensions: change in land use and land cover, habitat fragmentation and isolation, resource extraction, external inputs such as emissions, effluents and chemicals entering an ecosystem, the intro …