Phase 2 of the World Bank envi­ron­men­tal and social safe­guards review closed on 1 March, 2015. More than 2,500 pages of feed­back were received from the pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion on the first draft frame­work of the Bank’s social safe­guard poli­cies. Under the pro­posed struc­ture, Envi­ron­men­tal and Social Stan­dards (ESSs 1– 10), ESS6 focuses on “Bio­di­ver­sity Con­ser­va­tion and Sus­tain­able Man­age­ment of Liv­ing Nat­ural Resources”.

The pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion feed­back is now under review with the pur­pose of revis­ing the draft frame­work. An ini­tial review of com­ments on ESS6 indi­cates that a con­sis­tent mes­sage has been the need to clar­ify that off­sets are a last resort in the mit­i­ga­tion hier­ar­chy, as well as a strong pref­er­ence to pre­vent off­sets in Crit­i­cal Habi­tat. In addi­tion, respon­dents stated the need for log­ging and hydropower projects to adhere to the mit­i­ga­tion hier­ar­chy as well as projects in other sectors.

The review team plans to present a sec­ond draft of the Envi­ron­men­tal and Social Frame­work to the Com­mit­tee on Devel­op­ment Effec­tive­ness (CODE) of the World Bank’s Board of Exec­u­tive Direc­tors this sum­mer. A third round of con­sul­ta­tions will be ini­ti­ated after dis­cus­sions of the sec­ond draft with CODE. The Safe­guards Review web­site pro­vides addi­tional infor­ma­tion, such as a video and tran­script of the World Bank/IMF Spring Meet­ings’ dis­cus­sion on the pro­posed Envi­ron­men­tal and Social Frame­work; a World Bank pre­sen­ta­tion on the con­sul­ta­tions and con­sid­er­a­tions for mov­ing for­ward; and a study com­par­ing the safe­guard poli­cies of the World Bank and other Mul­ti­lat­eral Devel­op­ment Banks.

This infor­ma­tion was retrieved from the lat­est (May 2015) BBOP Newslet­ter.

Note that you find require­ments (for bor­row­ers) regard­ing off­sets (e.g. off­set man­age­ment plan) related to OP 4.01 Impact Assess­ment and 4.04 Nat­ural Habi­tats in the study men­tioned above.