Step 5.2C: Prioritize initial pre-costing
A prioritization exercise should be implemented during and after the process of refining the NBSAP actions into costable actions. This should identify those strategies and activities that are: i) the most likely to achieve results; and ii) the most important for achieving the biodiversity goals and vision of the country. Prioritization criteria will differ among countries and can be elaborated by stakeholders through the consultation process described above, and converted into a scoring system.
This is an initial prioritization based on the impact on biodiversity. It does not consider costs. The output is a list of the most important strategic priorities amongst biodiversity targets, strategies, and actions. The list may be ranked, or simply grouped (e.g. into high, medium and low priorities). Higher priority strategies and actions may be programmed for earlier delivery compared to lower priority strategies, and this will influence the timing of the financial needs analysed in steps 3-5. The proposed prioritization exercise does not seek to eliminate low priority actions.
Box 5.4: Building a Catalogue of Costs
Mexico identified a set of questions to decide if NBSAP actions were feasible to cost, e.g.: “Does the action have concrete activities for its implementation?” and “Can the action be costed and assigned a particular unit cost?” By answering these questions, the actions were classified as ‘highly feasible to estimate the cost’, ‘feasible to estimate the cost’, or ‘not feasible to estimate’, after which the BIOFIN team decided how to proceed. The actions that could not be costed included political will, to which is difficult to assign a quantitative value. This process was validated with country stakeholders through validation workshops and expert consultations. Other actions were not costable because they required drafting a plan before implementation, but the plan was yet to be drafted. In that case, only the drafting could be costed.
