National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan

One of the four existential threats humankind faces today is the loss of biological diversity. The others are climate change, food insecurity and poverty. Biodiversity, most simply stated, is life on Earth, the wealth of ecosystems, species and ecological processes that make up our living planet. It is humankind‘s living natural resource base, our biological capital in the global bank. Managing biodiversity sustainably is critical to the survival of humanity and thus needs to be given the utmost serious consideration by all actors.

As is true globally, an unexampled rate of extinction of marine and terrestrial animal and plant species is plaguing Liberia‘s biological resource base. It now approaches a crisis proportion that requires urgent and concrete actions for mitigation. This crisis is impelled, almost invariably, by the direct and indirect threats of agro-industrial plantations of rubber, recently oil palm that are replacing the natural forests, giant logging concessions and related contracts, mining, unsustainable and destructive extraction and collection of firewood, charcoal production, shifting cultivation, uncontrolled hunting and fishing practices, ineffective community-based forest management and strategy, invasive alien plant species, , the lack of a national land use policy and strategy, climate change, poverty, the extreme lack of knowledge about ecosystem values, the lack of recognition and employment of local knowledge systems in natural resource governance and management and the lack of a national energy policy and strategy.

National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan

Quick Links