Mission & vision

Vision & mission

The vision of the CEBioS programme is that:

• our planet should remain green, resilient, safe and biologically diverse,
• biodiversity in Belgium and in developing countries is high on the political agenda,
• every citizen should  be aware of the crucial need to maintain biodiversity and ecosystem services,
• biodiversity conservation contributes to poverty eradication and vice versa through the sustainable use and management of its ecosystem services.

The mission of the CEBioS programme is to strengthen the capacities of our institutional partners and professionals from developing countries in their endeavour to study, disseminate information, raise awareness, conserve, use and manage their biodiversity in order to promote biodiversity, sustainable development and poverty eradication. Conservation of biodiversity is of utmost importance for the adaptation and mitigation to climate change.

Our principles

The CEBioS programme is about working with people and for people and nature, exchanging ideas, best practices, skills, instruments and knowledge in the area of biodiversity and sustainable development. We aim at maximal impact by continuous learning, professionalization of our own modalities and instruments, train the trainer, pilot initiatives, seed money and multiplicator effects. Therefore, CEBioS situates itself at the interface between policy and practice, between governance, extension and conservation in the field, involvement of local communities, and valorisation of local and indigenous knowledge. The available funds cater for specific interventions with personal commitment and involvement by the partners, optimizing the best match-making between our own expertise and the demands and needs from our partners.

CEBioS adheres for aid efficiency to the principles of the Declaration of Paris, the Accra agenda and the Busan outcome. Especially ownership, South demand, transparency, mutual accountability, alignment, harmonisation and South-South cooperation are high on our agenda.

At national level, CEBioS contributes to the environmental strategy of the Directorate-General for Development Cooperation (DGD). In an integrated country approach, it seeks synergies and aligns as much as possible with the Belgian diplomacy (mixed commissions, embassies), other DGD programmes such as ACROPOLIS (KLIMOS), VLIR-UOS, ARES, BTC-CTB and Belgian NGOs, BELSPO and other institutions such as the Royal Museum for Central Africa and the Botanic Garden Meise.

The way we carry out capacity building

CEBioS organizes competitive calls for short study grants (Global Taxonomy Initiative) in Belgium, local workshops in the South, projects for strengthening information and awareness raising strategies and CHM network reinforcement (via dedicated national websites), as well as projects on indicators, Aichi targets, Measuring, Reporting and Verification (MRV). Moreover, CEBioS trains CHM webmasters in Belgium, and facilitates national and regional CHM workshops in close cooperation with the CBD Secretariat. Finally, we cooperate with official institutional partners in 5 countries: Benin, Burundi, D.R. Congo (conservation and habitat monitoring of terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems, production of lexica, policy briefs etc...), Peru and Vietnam (marine modelling). Our partners are research institutes, universities, conservation agencies and ministries. CEBioS produces Abc Taxa, a series of high quality manuals dedicated to capacity building, collection management and good practices in zoological and botanical taxonomy in developing countries.

CEBioS follows a results-based management and uses the principles of Project Cycle Management and the Logical Framework for its institutional partnerships. 

Policy work

CEBioS hosts the Belgian national focal points for the Clearing-House Mechanism (CHM) and the Global Taxonomy Initiative (GTI) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). CEBioS is actively involved in policy work through participation with the Belgian delegation to e.g. SBSTTA and COP, particularly regarding CHM, GTI, Nagoya Protocol, and more generally capacity building and sustainable development. In these activities CEBioS works with the Belgian national focal point to the CBD, the Belgian Biodiversity Platform, the Belgian Federal Public Service Health, Food Chain Safety and Environment and the EU commission (DG DEVCO, DG ENV).

CEBioS is, as part of the RBINS, a member of SDSN and actively contributes to the global dialogue (on i.e. capacity building, the development and implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals) at the level of OECD-DAC, CBD and IPBES. CEBioS contributed to the development of the CBD Dehradun/Chennai recommendations on ‘biodiversity and poverty eradication’.