The Secretariat of the Convention on Migratory Species is pleased to announce the release of the third draft of the Indicator Factsheets for the Strategic Plan for Migratory Species 2015-2023.

The draft was prepared by the CMS Strategic Plan Working Group, based on the comments received through the consultation of the first draft in 2016 and relevant discussions held at the 4^th Meeting of the Group (SPWG-4, November 2016). 

The proposed structure aims to capture an approach to develop a small set of indicators, for each of the 16 Targets of the Strategic Plan,that should tell a coherent story about progress in the implementation of the Strategic Plan while taking into account real constraints regarding human, technical and financial resources to minimize the burden on Parties and/or the Secretariat. 

The Factsheets are designed to be a working tool for practitioners, and to be maintained as living reference documents.  They should therefore continue to evolve in future as operational details develop and gaps are filled.  Given this evolving state and the relatively extensive nature of the information, it may not be opportune for the COP to discuss all these details. Based on discussion at the SPWG meeting in November 2016, the suggestion is therefore to limit the discussion at COP to the description of the “expected result” for each target and the definition of the indicator(s) proposed in each case (part 2 of the current Factsheet). This would provide the COP with an overview of the proposed way forward for monitoring and evaluation of the SPMS targets and allow it to decide on a set of proposed indicators. COP could then also take note of the Factsheets as a useful way to pursue those indicators but without deciding on all its details thus maintaining its evolving character.

Views and contributions are requested by 31 May 2017, and should be emailed to [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]  and [email protected] .  The draft factsheets are available here.

(This is a repeat of CMS Notification 2017/002 sent 8 March 2017)