As the sector and the department, we aim to radically transform our approach to environmental protection, while also balancing it with socio-economic development – crucial pillars on which sustainable development rests. As a nation we adopted the National Development Plan, which maps out the vision of the country for the years ahead. In the environment sector, we will implement related aspects of the priority areas that deal with environmental protection and sustainable development.

The NDP serves as an action plan for securing the future of South Africans as charted in the Constitution. The Constitution requires that  “we must build a united and democratic South Africa, able to take its rightful place as a sovereign state in the family of nations”.  The Constitution requires that the NDP is founded on 6 pillars that represent the broad objectives of the plan to eliminate poverty and reduce inequality.

Operation Phakisa is a fast results delivery programme that was launched in July 2014 to help implement the National Development Plan, with the ultimate goal of boosting economic growth and creating jobs. Operation Phakisa is a cross-sector programme where various stakeholders engage to implement initiatives and concrete actions to address constraints to delivery in a prioritised focused area for public accountability and transparency.

South African National Biodiversity Institute's (SANBI) mandate, when it was established in 2004, required it to extend the focus of the precursor National Botanical Institute from just plants to include all aspects of biodiversity. SANBI plays a leadership role in generating, co-ordinating and interpreting the knowledge and evidence required to support policies and decisions relating to all aspects of biodiversity.

BIOFIN was initiated in response to the urgent global need to divert more finance from all possible sources towards global and national biodiversity goals, as highlighted during the 2010 CBD COP 10 in Nagoya.