National Environment Policy

The NEP approach to conservation strategy emphasises giving primacy to economic instruments and facilitating economic valuation of environmental resources and services. However, it falls short of the ideal in several key areas, including its lack of attention to the preservation of biodiversity. The NEP needs to be amended to proclaim unambiguously the national commitment to conserve invaluable biodiversity and to enshrine stakeholder-based biodiversity conservation as the principal concern of environmental policy.