Fwd: COMBIOSERVE Final Newsletter - Viva community conservation in Latin America!

[Nicolas Kosoy, Prof.]

We may want to consider reaching out to them for potential partners for our proposal

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Dr. Nicolas Kosoy
Assistant Professor
Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences

McGill School of Environment

Tel: (514) 398-7944

Fax: (514) 398-7990

Co-Director
McGill-United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Collaborating Centre on Environmental Assessment

Macdonald Stewart Building, MS3-037
Macdonald Campus, McGill University
Ste. Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec
H9X 3V9, Canada 

nicola...@mcgill.ca

Begin forwarded message:

Subject: COMBIOSERVE Final Newsletter - Viva community conservation in Latin America!

From: "Gary Martin (Global Diversity Foundation)" <ga...@global-diversity.org>

Reply-To: <ga...@global-diversity.org>

To: <nicola...@mcgill.ca>

Date: April 22, 2015 at 4:02:24 PM GMT-4

COMBIOSERVE NEWSLETTER Assessing the effectiveness of community-based management strategies for biocultural diversity conservation Viva community conservation in Latin America! The three-year EU-funded project COMBIOSERVE concluded on 14 January 2015 having generated significant evidence regarding the challenges and opportunities of community-based conservation in Latin America. Through multi-disciplinary research carried out in selected fieldsites in Mexico, Brazil and Bolivia, the project sought to assess the effectiveness of community-based strategies for biocultural diversity conservation. A consortium of ten institutions composed of European and Latin American research institutions and civil society organisations (CSOs) led the research. Results indicate that community wellbeing, recognition of rights and biodiversity conservation intersect under given conditions. The first COMBIOSERVE Field Workshop was held in Calakmul, Mexico in September 2012. COMBIOSERVE established an explicit ‘co-enquiry’ approach: as far as possible, research activities were implemented in direct collaboration between locally elected community researchers, the local CSO and the research institutions, and communities established themes of research that were of particular interest to them for the collection of baseline data, such as agricultural pests, biodiversity monitoring and traditional stories and myths. The project collected ethnographic and survey data on people’s changing relationships with the environment, established participatory biodiversity monitoring programmes, and assessed past and present land use change in areas under community conservation and, in conjunction, households’ changing capacity to adapt to multiple stressors. A participatory process of future scenario-building engaged partner communities in an exploration of their future conservation and development options. COMBIOSERVE also explored the impact of institutional and governance contexts on community conservation and, through natural resource extraction games and choice experiments, the enabling factors for successful community-based management. Community researchers in Brazil examine their participatory maps Community researcher presenting her team's work on orchid monitoring in Mexico Medicinal bark samples collected by a community research team in Bolivia COMBIOSERVE found that the social-ecological changes and external interventions desired by communities are intimately related to their current socio-economic and vulnerability conditions, and particularly to those conditions limiting people's wellbeing. This is the case when indigenous peoples’ or rural communities’ territories suffer colonisation, pressure to convert to alternative land uses and increases in population densities, which also intensifies pressure on biodiversity. The project concludes that community composition, specifically group heterogeneity, the perceived legitimacy of nature conservation and incentives for self-enforcement are key factors for effective community-based conservation. Participatory mapping and co-enquiry were highlighted as key elements in leveraging improved community-based management, given that when communities are in control of the research process, local interest in conservation efforts can significantly increase. These approaches also permit collaborative visualisation, analysis and discussion of social and ecological issues of community territories. Ecotourism is essential for maintaining livelihoods and community conservation in Southern Bahia, Brazil Calakmul, Mexico has an incredible diversity of orchids, which also constitute a source of livelihoods Territorial conflicts impact the legitimacy of formal conservation and the outcomes of community conservation in Pilon Lajas, Bolivia Project outcomes include targeted policy briefs, scientific publications and reports, methods manuals on co-enquiry, participatory mapping and community rapid biodiversity assessments, a paradidactic brochure, and field identification guides for community-based biodiversity monitoring. The project also produced a series of videos, including participatory videos on project activities and community issues, video letters for communications between field site communities, videos for sharing basic project aims, methods and community perspectives, and important events such as the final conference and longer video-documents to report on research results, such as on the link between land use change and community conservation and future scenarios of global change. The proceedings from the international COMBIOSERVE conference Community Conservation in Latin America: innovations in research and practice are under peer review for publication at the end of 2015. All of these outcomes are available online at www.combioserve.org. COMBIOSERVE consortium members and community researchers at a panel at the COMBIOSERVE International Conference in Xalapa, Mexico, 6-9 November 2014. If you are interested in learning more about COMBIOSERVE and its results, or contacting a member of the consortium for further information, please contact project coordinator Christian Vogl on christi...@boku.ac.at   Thank you for reading our newsletters! COMBIOSERVE was a consortium of ten institutions – European and Latin American research institutions and Latin American Civil Society Organisations – working together to assess the effectiveness of community-based management strategies for biocultural diversity. The project ran from 15 January 2012 to 14 January 2015.  <read more>  For enquiries about this enewsletter, please contact emily caruso (em...@global-diversity.org)

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