Burundi has adopted a New National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan 2013-2020 (SNPAB). It is built around a National vision set out as follows: “By 2030, biological diversity is restored, conserved and rationally used by all actors, ensuring the maintenance of ecosystem services and guaranteeing essential benefits for current and future generations”.

In this Strategy, the Ministry of the Interior (MININTER) was targeted as an indispensable stakeholder for its operationalization. Indeed, this ministry with territorial administration in its remit must have an overview of everything that takes place on the national territory by focusing on everything that disrupts the life of a Human Person and the living world that surrounds him. The destroyers and conservators of Biodiversity are located on the Territory which he administers. The involvement of the population in the protection of biodiversity must depend on the effective and manifest will of the Ministry of the Interior in general and of the local administrative authorities in particular.

The SNPAB shows several causes of the loss of biodiversity with a part coming from the territorial and local administration and communities, in particular:

• The uncontrolled and illegal distribution of land and land in natural ecosystems and vulnerable areas;
• The levying of communal taxes on degrading activities such as illegal fishing;
• An anarchic villagization and settlement of returnees on marginal and vulnerable lands.

It is therefore obvious that MININTER must play an important role in mobilizing all stakeholders, particularly territorial and local authorities and communities, in action to conserve biodiversity and the sustainable use of biological resources. This can only be possible if this ministry integrates issues related to biodiversity into its sectoral policy, strategies, plans and programmes into its sectoral policy, strategies, plans and programmes. It is for this reason that this Plan for the Integration of Biodiversity at MININTER was formulated.

This MININTER Sectoral Biodiversity Integration Plan was developed as part of the project to Revise the National Strategy and Action Plan on Biodiversity and Development of the 5th Country Report to the Convention on Biological Diversity under the funding of GEF/UNEP.

Developed by a resource person from the same ministry, this Sectoral Integration Plan is also the result of a sectoral consultation workshop that took place from February 28 to March 1 , 2013, which brought together representatives of the same ministry to give their contributions.

It is built around the following main points:

• Overview of biodiversity in relation to MININTER;
• The role of MININTER in the degradation of biodiversity;
• Constraints to the preservation of biodiversity;
• Strategic plan for the integration of biodiversity.