Phase 3: Application

Biosphere reserves are nominated by national governments and remain under the sovereign jurisdiction of the states where they are located. Their status is internationally recognized. Biosphere reserves are designated under the intergovernmental MAB Programme by the Director-General of UNESCO following the decisions of the MAB International Coordinating Council (MAB ICC) Source: https://en.unesco.org/biosphere/designation.

Following the decision, a nomination paper will be written. Example of nomination papers:

Source: https://www.biosphere.im/biosphere/unesco-nomination-papers

Designation procedure

Biosphere reserves are designated for inclusion in the Network by the International Co-ordinating Council (ICC) of the MAB Programme in accordance with the following procedure (Article 5):

States, through National MAB Committees where appropriate, forward nominations with supporting documentation to the secretariat after having reviewed potential sites, taking into account the criteria as defined in Article 4
the secretariat verifies the content and supported documentation: in the case of incomplete nomination, the secretariat requests the missing information from the nominating State
nominations will be considered by the Advisory Committee for Biosphere reserves for recommendation to ICC
ICC of the MAB Programme decides which nominations should be designated. The Director-General of UNESCO notifies the State concerned of the decision of ICC

An application must be submitted by the end of September, to (if successful) be approved the following year at the next session of the MAB-ICC.

Please reach out to existing biosphere reserves to learn from their experiences.

Periodic review

Finally, it must be noted that following a successful approval of an application to become a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, regular periodic reviews must be done in order to secure the quality of the work.

In other words, keep in mind that the work requires regular monitoring, which takes place every five years. To get an understanding of this task, it can be informative to look at some periodic reviews that have been done recently: