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.

Meet the experts

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. 

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