Advancing Human Rights-based Approaches to Target 3 Implementation

Paper Purpose and Scope

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This working paper explores concepts, considerations, and approaches to advance rights in the context of area-based conservation. Its purpose is to provide a practical resource on HRBAs for actors responsible for, participating in, and potentially impacted by Target 3 implementation.

The paper scope includes area-based conservation considerations and approaches for:

• Avoiding and providing remedy for rights infringements and violations

• Respecting rights-holders’ leadership, contributions, and equal partnership

• Contributing to enjoyment of human rights and equity, including by upholding responsibilities for a sustainable environment and equitable distribution of benefits, with intergenerational justice.

Addressing this broad scope of issues requires decisions and actions at both site- and system-levels10 and across multiple aspects of Target 3 implementation, including to:

• Transform power relationships and narratives in ways that advance rights and equity

• Ensure that designation, identification, and recognition of conserved areas upholds human rights norms, through three pathways (see Box 1)

• Enhance rights and equity in the governance and management of area-based conservation sites and systems The paper aims to contribute to the Road Map for Advancing Rights and Equity in Conservation and to complement the guide ‘From Agreements to Actions’, which focuses on an HRBA to the GBF as a whole.

While we explore a wide range of issues, it is also important to note the paper’s limitations. Conservation outcomes and relationships with nature emerge from a wide diversity of values, cultures, and lifeways. We aim to advance HRBAs that recognize and respect this diversity, including the knowledge, agency, and self-determined collective-action of those who often make the greatest contributions while often being simultaneously marginalised in mainstream conservation narratives. We also acknowledge that there are diverse worldviews and generational relationships of care and responsibility that cannot be fully captured in this paper. There are also ongoing and evolving discussions about what an HRBA to area-based conservation requires in diverse contexts. Action moving forward should be informed, in particular, by guidance from rights-holders and their representative institutions, including Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ networks and organisations.

For more information, visit the Human Rights and Biodiversity page