The overall challenge: environmental offices at the different government levels compete with other more pressing or financially stronger sectors' offices.
Root causes of the overall challenge: biodiversity conservation competes with other sectors and policy issues (migration, economic, financial); long-term time and geographic scales of biodiversity is opposite to short-term scale of political mandates; biodiversity decline is slow or goes behind the scenes and peoples' life are shorter term (biodiversity loss cannot always be experienced: no contact with nature / urban life, or no connection).
Specific goal: To strengthen the voice of the environmental office at the different government levels and within those institutions in charge of Switzerland’s foreign policy.

Specific Solution: Create a formal and informal transdisciplinary group of experts that help relevant office to mainstream biodiversity conservation in foreign policy. 

Description: The conservation of biodiversity cannot be seen in isolation from development (SDGs) or other environmental goals. If we do not address biodiversity conservation via climate change or disaster risk reduction (e.g., eco-DRR) and integrate all these into development, we are missing an opportunity to leverage the needed change. The evidence base on how measures that consider biodiversity conservation help on climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction (in addition to water and land conservation) is growing. Many peer-reviewed studies are showing how climate change affects biodiversity and how biodiversity conservation can help us reduce disaster risk (e.g., through healthy mangroves, wetlands...) and adaptation. Similar studies exist on migration and biodiversity. One way of strengthening biodiversity governance is to raise awareness within institutions that develop foreign policy and establish a "checks and balances" body (formed by diverse conservation organizations, academia, the private sector, etc. that work in a transdisciplinary way) that will support Switzerland institutions to integrate biodiversity conservation in climate change, disaster risk reduction, etc. in international policy. Also, the checks and balances body could support different Switzerland institutions to integrate biodiversity in measures, activities, finance, etc. One specific step may be to circulate a new foreign policy proposal among members of this body to ensure biodiversity conservation is considered. A transdisciplinary body could support the environment office and the foreign affairs office to mainstream biodiversity at the national and international level. One way to raise their awareness is by making the studies mentioned above available (open science and data), but also by providing concrete support by this transdisciplinary group in ways that all sectors of government have the opportunity to comment on new policies. We could have a citizen's forum and an expert panel forum as part of this transdisciplinary body. For example, through FORAUS, interested actors from different sectors could comment on draft policies. Some institutions share their draft policy documents to receive comments with the aim to strengthen the support to the administration.