At its seventh meeting, the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity requested the Executive Secretary, with the support of members of the Global Partnership for Plant Conservation, to elaborate proposals for a toolkit for the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation, including a checklist to assist Parties in integrating the targets into their strategies, plans and programmes (paragraph 7 of decision VII/10). This request was reiterated in paragraph 6 of decision IX/3. The fourteenth meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice considered the outline for a toolkit developed by the third meeting of the GSPC Liaison Group contained in document UNEP/CBD/LG-GSPC/3/4.

In decision X/17 the Conference of the Parties requested that the GSPC toolkit should be developed as online version by 2012 in all United Nations official languages if possible and that it should draw on a workshop to define the purpose, context, producers, users and evaluation of implementation, taking into account the earlier work.

An initial consultation workshop on the format and priority contents of the toolkit was held at the Linnean Society, London on 27 September 2010. This was followed up with an online survey to identify user needs and existing available resources to include in the toolkit. A draft toolkit was then reviewed by the fourth meeting of the Liaison Group for the GSPC (St. Louis, Missouri, USA, 8 - 9 July 2011) and the recommendations were incorporated accordingly. The sixteenth meeting of the Convention's Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (May 2012) reviewed the online toolkit and gave additional guidance on its finalization. SBSTTA also urged that the toolkit be made available in the six official languages of the United Nations.

The toolkit for the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation has been developed under the leadership of Botanic Gardens Conservation International. You are invited to use it, provide feedback, and recommend material to be added.