On 19 May 2022, the Government of Mozambique published, in the Official Gazette of the Republic of Mozambique, Ministerial Diploma 55/2022 on the implementation of Biodiversity Offsets in the country. This legal instrument emerges as a requirement of the Environmental Impact Regulation (Decree 54/2015 of 31 December) and will enable the Government of Mozambique to ensure that Category A+ and A development projects with residual negative impacts on highly important biodiversity areas implement biodiversity offset management plans to restore/rehabilitate ecosystems equivalent to the losses, in locations outside the direct influence of their development project.

The approval of Ministerial Diploma 55/2022 represents an opportunity for development project proponents to contribute to the achievement of the country’s conservation targets through biodiversity offsets. The COMBO+ Programme, a partnership between the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the Foundation for the Conservation of Biodiversity (BIOFUND), and the National Directorate for the Environment (DINAB), has been collaborating since 2016 in the development of legal, technical, and financial instruments to enable the implementation of the mitigation hierarchy in Mozambique.

Through the COMBO+ Programme, BIOFUND and WCS continue to advise the Government of Mozambique, particularly the National Directorate for the Environment (DINAB), which has recently established the Division for the Assessment and Monitoring of Biodiversity Offsets for the implementation of the Mitigation Hierarchy and Biodiversity Offsets in Mozambique.

For more information about the Biodiversity Offsets Programme, click here.