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Home$Latest News$Announcing new Wildlife Guidelines for NDCs – Integrating wildlife conservation into national climate action plans

Announcing new Wildlife Guidelines for NDCs – Integrating wildlife conservation into national climate action plans

By 2025, countries participating in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) must present their updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), detailing renewed strategies to address the escalating climate crisis.
ACC Admin
22 November 2024
IFAW wildlife guidelines cover screenshot

The comprehensive guidelines from IFAW (International Fund for Animal Welfare) address the critical need to align national climate strategies with biodiversity goals, to tackle both crises in tandem and to ensure that conserving ecosystems and wildlife can contribute to carbon sequestration while also supporting economic development and climate resilience.

The 2025 NDC update process offers countries an excellent opportunity to integrate wild animals and the conservation or restoration of key wild animal populations and their habitats into their climate action plans.

The paper presents governments, conservation agencies, and policy makers with a set of step-by-step guidelines, examples and case studies on how they can approach this.

The 10 wildlife guidelines explained in more detail in the paper are:

  1. Establish the contribution that key wildlife species and wildlife habitats can make to climate change mitigation and adaptation in your country.
  2. Identify the major risks that threaten the wildlife populations and ecosystems that contribute to climate mitigation and adaptation in your country.
  3. Specify the wildlife species and ecosystems that the country seeks to protect and restore as part of its NDC commitments.
  4. Describe plans to include wildlife nature interactions within the national greenhouse gas inventory.
  5. Set high-level targets for delivery of climate change mitigation and adaptation through conservation and restoration of wildlife populations and biodiverse ecosystems.
  6. List the actions the country will take to deliver wildlife and climate targets.
  7. Specify the financial support required to implement NDC actions that link climate action and wildlife conservation.
  8. Outline the capacity support and technology transfer required to implement NDC actions that link climate change and wildlife conservation.
  9. Explain how your country will align institutional arrangements for managing the country’s response to climate change and biodiversity loss.
  10. Identify linkages between the NDC and other domestic and international policy frameworks that seek to protect wildlife and biodiversity.

Download the guidelines from the IFAW website here https://www.ifaw.org/resources/wildlife-guidelines-for-ndcs, and they have also been added to the ACC website Resource Library.