The International Day for Biodiversity (IDB) is celebrated on 22 May annually to commemorate the adoption of the text of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) on 22 May 1992. The theme of the 2025 edition: “Harmony with nature and sustainable development”. The IDB 2025 campaign seeks to focus the world’s attention on the linkages between the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Goals and Targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) as two universal agendas that must be pursued in tandem in the spirit of the recently adopted Pact for the future.
The Nordic Agency for Development and Ecology (NORDECO) embodies the link between nature and sustainable development. For more than 30 years, NORDECO has been working with locally-based monitoring of natural resources to promote local participation and decision making in natural resources management. The term ‘locally-based monitoring’ implies a broad range of approaches, from self-monitoring of harvests by local resource users them-selves, to censuses by local rangers, and inventories by amateur naturalists.
Many of these approaches are directly linked to resource management, but the entities being monitored vary widely, from individual animals and plants, through habitats, to ecosystem goods and services. However, all of the approaches have in common that the monitoring is carried out at a local scale by individuals with little formal education, and that local people or local government staff are directly involved in data collection and (in most instances) analysis.
Our experiences include the establishment of a simple biodiversity monitoring system for protected areas in the Philippines, during the 1990s to more recent examples such as the PISUNA Program, co-developed with the Ministry of Fisheries and Hunting and other partners in Greenland,
NORDECO staff has published a large number of scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals and books about locally based monitoring and citizen science. Many of these articles are available for download.
