DbD (Development by Design)

Increasing economic development that utilizes lands and natural resources plays an important role in improving people’s living standards. However, without thorough planning, land-based economic development on high value carbon and biodiversity can generate GHG emission and biodiversity losses.

YKAN integrated conservation planning with development forecasting in an approach called Development by Design (DbD) to improve land uses decision-making among various objectives of stakeholders in a landscape. Specifically, the DbD approach combines landscape-level planning with mitigation hierarchy: avoid, minimize, restore, and offset. This approach is applied to support good land usage planning, help decision-makers prevent and mitigate conflicts between development impacts and conservation priorities, and give a set of guidance for conservation compensation action (or offset), if needed, to achieve better results for people and nature.

The DbD approach can be applied at two levels: landscape and site. At the landscape level, DbD focuses on evaluating conservation priorities, assessing cumulative impacts, identifying potential conflict between development and conservation objectives, and making spatial recommendations for mitigation hierarchy applications so that decisions regarding land use for development and conservation interests will be optimized. At the site level (e.g., concession), DbD is applied to review possible impacts, give recommendations if the impact could potentially conflict with the landscape objectives, and, if necessary, support offset strategy planning to mitigate impacts.