Over the past 10 years, we have focused on assessing the conservation status of endemic species and their rehabilitation in the wild. We have made a great effort to preserve it and plan for its sustainability. The most important thing that my team and I reached is that the surrounding community, users of resources, researchers, and decision-makers, whether in the site or in the government away from the place, the private sector, and students even the public can destroy everything we built during the previous years as a result of their ignorance of what we work and its importance to us and them. Dissemination of information is an external protection shield to ensure the sustainability of activities on the site. Continuous training and awareness activities should be in the target area and throughout the country in order to avoid destruction due to ignorance. Also, not documenting the traditional knowledge inherited by the local community is extremely dangerous and its loss is a waste of wealth that will cost the state and the world huge sums to discover again.

Education, awareness, and documentation, could reduce the current and future pressures and reduce the impact and the cost of recovery.

The local communities that are located inside Protected Area suffer from some restrictions on the use of natural resources, which they believe are their property and right, and that they are the people of the place before the establishment of the PA. Usually, restrictions on the use of natural resources are for the purpose of protection and reducing pressures, which may affect the livelihood of some members of the local community, which they consider a process of denial of their rights. The local community owns cultural wealth that has been passed down from generation to generation on the optimal use of resources, their protection, and their propagation in simple ways. Involving that community in planning processes to protect natural resources will remove many of the penalties, whether for the management of the PA or for the community itself. Traditional knowledge is a hidden treasure that can be used to improve the state of natural resources and enhance the local community's sense of ownership and importance in protecting its resources, which will support the sustainability process and reduce disturbances

The aim of this building block was to promote diversification of families´income and their sources of food through the reforestation of riparian zones using fruit trees and other species of economic importance. People from participating communities were trained on nursing and looking after young plants. In particular, women´s groups were the ones who were trained to carry out delicate activities of caring for seedlings and planting them.

"Without a good water flow, no mangrove system can sustain itself" - said a local NGO field expert. Hence it is important not only to open channels to restore water flows, but also of keeping alive the dynamics of these flows in the long term. One of the activities that most affects wetlands is livestock. The farmers, seeking to provide firm ground for their cows, cover the channels and drain water bodies. In doing so, cattle farming has been affecting marshes and mangroves directly or indirectly. On way to reduce the impact of this activity is to combine the productive interests of the multiple farmers in the area, with the protection of water flows, by building three elevated bridges in piles for the passage of livestock in strategic sites. Also, "living fences" were established around the reforestation areas to keep the area safe. For these fences, plants and trees of economic use were used for the benefit of the communities.

Taking advantage of project funds, and the existence of two government schemes to support sustainable management and protection:

i) Private Protection Areas (APC, for its acronym in Spanish), and

ii) Environmental Management Units (UMA, for its acronym in Spanish).

In Veracruz, the APCs represent a scheme of voluntary conservation, in which the local population joins the efforts of the state to strengthen the protected natural spaces of the region. At the APC "El Pajaro", INECC together with the local grassroots organizations initiated a series of actions to manage 25 ha of mangroves. The strategy involved participatory work with the people of the communities to increase awareness of what it means to have a healthy mangrove, and continued with capacity development activities on how to manage it.

The management plans for the UMA of the mangrove ecosystem owned by the Tarachi ejido (local government unit) included the provision of equipment and infrastructure, and training to carry out the following activities:

i) reforestation with native species;

ii) establishment of a conservation protocol and standards to be followed by local communities; iii) establishment of guidance on economic activities that could be developed without affecting the ecosystem.

By making an alliance with a local civil association with a permanent presence in the area, INECC was able to better focus human and economic resources on the reforestation of 25 hectares of mangroves and the 3km clearing of channels for the restitution of the water flows of the wetland.

Mangrove reforestation was carried out using the "chinampas" technique (1 x 1m floating mud mounds) which served as a platform for the optimum growth of mangrove seedlings.

This technique, previously used in other neighboring areas, includes an ecological monitoring phase as well as geo-referenced photographic monitoring points to identify the evolution of the monthly growth of the seedlings in each of the almost six thousand established chinampas.

In addition, the direct participation of the communities in the activities provided empirical knowledge about the particularities of the land, and essential labor to dig open, by hand, the channels. The combination of technical and empirical knowledge has created evidence for the ecological modification of the landscape: the establishment of the chinampas has elevated the topography of the site, and the hydrological flows have brought nutrients and oxygen, creating ecological niches that the species occupy to restore the trophic chain.

CityAdapt’s various implementation activities are carried out with demonstration sites to showcase benefits to surrounding populations and inspire replication. This includes demonstration sites for edible mushroom cultivation, urban gardens, roof rainwater harvesting systems, beekeeping, water infiltration systems, agroforestry, and other activities.

CityAdapt also emphasizes learning from project activities, especially for planning officials and communities to take ownership and help them continue after project end. It has therefore produced or is producing an array of knowledge products, including manuals, policy briefs, case studies, technical guidelines, and education material for children. A key aspect of this work has been highlighting NbS’ cost-effectiveness in comparison to conventional solutions (see story maps).

One key is a virtual class with 45 students that work on adaptation-related issues in their respective 17 countries. All the students reported an across-the-board improvement in their knowledge of NbS for urban adaptation. This class model will now be expanded to other regions. These learning components help to build the case for further NbS integration in urban planning and policy while spreading CityAdapt’s lessons to other actors interested in using NbS for their respective cities.

These three decision-making tools were crucial to address power dynamics and promote stakeholders' participation and engagement in collective action in the National Park:

• An analytical tool to characterize types of governance arrangements in the protected area. Formal and informal governance arrangements were classified in terms of stakeholders’ responsibility (shared vs. concentrated) and influence (equal vs. unequal) into four types: prescriptive, informative, consultative, and cooperative. By applying this tool in the National Park we identified challenges for more socially inclusive conservation while enhancing existing participatory mechanisms and delineating new ones;
• Theatre-based facilitation techniques to address power dynamics between stakeholders. By using them in a virtual workshop, participants deliberated on their roles and power relations around conservation governance and how these may be reconciled to improve collaboration;
• A context-specific boundary object to facilitate collective action for conservation governance. Using this graphical tool in a workshop, participants assessed their level of willingness to put several strategies into practice. The tool visualized the results graphically as a proxy of the potential willingness to move from theory to practice.

These three tools help to identify visions and elaborate future scenarios, in a participatory way, for protected areas management:

• Participatory mapping (PGIS), a tool to visualize information in a particular geographical context focusing on a certain issue of interest. This tool was used in surveys to elicit the residents’ visions based on perceptions of landscape values and local knowledge;
• Streamline, an open-source narrative synthesis tool that integrates graphics in the form of canvases and tiles, facilitating interviews and discussion groups in a creative and stimulating way. Streamline was used with stakeholders’ expressing their values and preferences for management actions, and sharing their knowledge of changes in the landscape;
• Participatory scenario planning exercise, a deliberative process that was facilitated about plausible and desired futures through a two-day online workshop (due to the Covid-19 pandemic) with stakeholders. Based on the current socio-ecological conditions and the factors driving change, participants weighed up what could happen in the coming 20 years, discussed implications for biodiversity conservation and the quality of life of those who currently enjoy the ecosystem services it provides, whilst identifying the strategies to address them.

To facilitate place-based processes that foster inclusive conservation it is necessary to collect local/traditional knowledge, views, and values from multiple stakeholders. Some methods to gather such information were used in the Sierra de Guadarrama National Park:

• Oral histories and historical datasets review to reconstruct how past visions and drivers of environmental impact have changed over the last 50 years and inform current and future conservation goals;
• Interviews with local stakeholders on 1) how participation works in the protected area and potential barriers/opportunities for more social engagement, and 2) their visions for park management, the values and knowledge that underpin the visions, and their perceptions of landscape changes and the underlying drivers;
• Face-to-face surveys with residents, including participatory mapping tools (i.e. Maptionnaire) about landscape values and ecological knowledge. Online surveys with local stakeholders to identify changes in their visions, values and perceptions of the landscape after the COVID-19 pandemic; and
• Deliberative processes embedded in a participatory scenario planning exercise that used cognitive and emotional maps to collect collective knowledge of the protected area while capturing intertwined affective relationships.