the close involvement these critical partners often determines the success of a biodiversity mainstreaming initiative as the objective of biodiversity mainstreaming is to embed biodiversity considerations directly into the planning and operations of such production sectors through a strong community of practice in biodiversity planning a number of biodiversity priority areas have been identified for terrestrial freshwater and marine ecosystems at various scales spatial biodiversity planning is conducted at national provincial and municipal scale and is based on best available biodiversity science including species distributions climate change adaptation ecosystem services and more avoided lossdegradation by ensuring that biodiversity is properly considered during development planning and decisionmaking loss of biodiversity priority areas can be prevented