Community Conservation Horizon Scan
The Future of Community Conservation
Community Conservation empowers local communities to benefit from and protect wild species. The approach recognizes the inter-relationship between social, economic, and ecological needs, and seeks win-win scenarios that help both nature and people. Ideally, community conservation builds on local or traditional ecological knowledge which is reinforced by science-based practice, capacity-building and revenue opportunities in order to create linkages between conservation of endangered species and improved livelihoods for surrounding human communities.
What is a Horizon Scan?
The Community Conservation Horizon Scan is a collaborative effort to look forward to the future of community conservation. The goal is to identify emerging opportunities and risks to support the strategic development of effective community conservation programs over the next 15 years. For example, these insights can be shared with policy-makers and grass-roots initiatives to ensure community conservation initiatives can successfully adapt to a changing world and continue improving both livelihood and conservation outcomes.
We envision a world in which community-based conservation is a widespread and effective approach integral to achieving local and global goals in biodiversity conservation, community empowerment, and poverty alleviation. Learn more about the Horizon Scan, by visiting the website here.
The Survey
To gain an understanding of upcoming threats and opportunities, we conducted a global online survey in multiple languages to solicit community conservation ideas from a diverse set of stakeholders. The results are being vetted and prioritized by a smaller expert group of collaborators. Meet the experts here.
More than 1,000 responses were received to the online survey from 109 nations, with 2,527 suggestions of threats and opportunities to community conservation. These suggestions were grouped into 261 topics and from that, 15 were distilled as a priority for attention by policy-makers, funders, grassroots management and conservation leaders. These 15 priority topics represent emerging or transforming issues, likely to substantially impact the effectiveness with which community conservation can advance its dual goal of supporting people and biodiversity. Read the Briefing Document here which presents the outcomes and systematic approach of the first horizon scan on community conservation.
What’s on the horizon for community-based conservation?
Researchers at the Wilder Institute coordinated an international collaboration comprised of members from 24 nations to conduct a horizon scan of community-based conservation, identifying its risks and opportunities over the next 15 years. The Horizon Scan collaboration included conservation scientists and practitioners from around the world. The full list of collaborators, as well as the 15 topics, can be found in the full paper below.
Informing future priorities and decision-making
The Community Conservation Horizon Scan survey invited over a thousand people to help shape the future of community conservation. Read through the Briefing Document to learn more about the outcomes from this survey.