Communities must be involved in planning and implementation when net positive impact activities might affect their daily lives or livelihoods. Land tenure aspects need to be addressed from the start, satisfying different stakeholder expectations and ensuring long-term sustainability.
The wider landscape and community needs and aspirations, along with national and regional conservation priorities must all be addressed within a company’s biodiversity management plan.
A communication and engagement strategy will help ensure that all land users, landowners and government authorities understand the biodiversity management plan and have the opportunity to air concerns and contribute to its development.
Approaches should be developed collaboratively, including input from communities, planning and operational teams, to ensure that plans are practical and properly resourced. NGOs must fully understand the operating environment of a business to identify strategies that have the best chance of success.
New biodiversity net gain approaches need to be trialled and lessons communicated before rolling-out to other units within a company or promoted publicly. Establishing a community of practice to share lessons and address common challenges across the business or sector should facilitate wider implementation.
Testing the approach at several sites allows potential challenges to be addressed and the approach adapted early in the development of the programme. Once a project is implemented, regular ‘health checks’ should be carried out on sites to check progress and maintain momentum.
Although it is not desirable that a programme relies on a single champion to succeed, it may be necessary to identify one person or group who can persuade their company to follow the BNG course and provide the stimulus until the approach is more firmly embedded.
Allow for adaptation to special circumstances: Site-level challenges must be properly considered, especially given the vastly different natural, social and policy environments in which companies operate.
Biodiversity net gain efforts often rely on a champion. This may be a company’s chief executive committed to using the approach. But if that person moves on, such commitment can be lost or superseded by other priorities. Therefore, biodiversity net gain must be embedded into a company’s mindset at all levels. Corporate implementation, communications and resourcing are critical and need to be framed within existing management, budgeting and reporting systems. An integrated approach to risk management is needed, meaning the environmental, community and social teams should work with core business staff to share expertise and understanding to help develop action plans that are holistic and resilient.
Providing adequate finance, personnel and guidance is critical to biodiversity net gain initiatives. It is important to develop tools for easy implementation that embed such an approach into corporate recording and long-term planning.
When part of a regulatory and/or lender requirement, initiatives are more sustainable especially when embedded into wider plans and the arrangements are negotiated with local communities and regulatory authorities. Regulations and lender conditions are often strong motivators for maintaining the BNG approach.
Building trust and developing relationships between the company, NGOs, government and communities takes time but is critical to success.
Evidence of the ‘business case’ for biodiversity net gain needs to be clear – whether it is driven by public demand, regulation or stakeholder expectations. A strong business case will help lock-in long-term commitment to the cost of implementing an initiative.
As a strategy of connection and contribution of the citizenship, because in the first edition (2013) We were able to finance all expenses, a conservation fund was generated from the collection of the cost of the registration of the event, the fund was delivered to the Promoter Group CPY and it was invested in conservation actions and sustainable use of the territory, with the fund was bought trap cameras for monitoring biodiversity.
This proposal was not sustainable for following editions, due to the considerable increase of the participation and the associated costs, currently we use the fee of the registrations to complete the event financing.
Have an emblematic conservation project in the region.
Having achieved the total financing of the initiative in its first year.
To have a permanent governance space (Cooperation System and CPY promoter group)
It is necessary to devote greater effort to the raising of economic resources to maintain the conservation fund.
To allocate the money raised in local projects, helps to strengthen the relationship between the promoter group and the community.
Having an external institution that helps finance 100% of the event, allows the creation of the conservation fund.
Through a participatory multi-stakeholder regional planning process that includes government and civil society, the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative will develop and publicly present a compelling plan backed with rigorous analysis for protecting the region's unparalleled biological and cultural wealth as a pathway for Ecuador and Peru to meet their countries’ development needs while also leading the inevitable economic transition beyond dependence on fossil fuels and towards an ecological civilization.
- The national governments of Ecuador and Peru, as well as local provincial, departmental and municipal governments, will be key stakeholders in the process of moving this vision forward and will need to be engaged accordingly.
- High level dialogues and global advocacy
The process will look to lessons from other similar examples of successful multi-stakeholder processes and challenge the meta-narrative that more resource extraction alleviates poverty.
We will build upon the 2016 resolution adopted by the IUCN, calling for the protection of sacred natural areas free from industrial extraction as a way to advance protection for the Sacred Headwaters. We will be working with the IUCN to advance the implementation of this resolution in the lead up to the next World Conservation Congress in China in 2019-2020
The purpose of the communications group is to make the Initiative favorably viewed in public opinion polls in Ecuador and Peru; to have opinion leaders, scientists, ministers and key political leaders in both countries publicly declare their support for the Initiative and their opposition to expanding mining and oil activities; to obtain significant stories in both countries’ mainstream media and on social media; and to achieve international visibility in social media and conservation/environmental publications and networks, and among private and public conservation foundations and funding institutions.
- Develop a communications plan to popularize the global importance of the bioregion – producing compelling, interactive maps based on scientific information, and visual content, and use storytelling and media campaigns to build public support for the Initiative.
- Organize and mobilize opinion leaders, journalists, influencer networks, celebrities, scientists, and academics in support of the Initiative.
- Expand capacity building in media skills training for indigenous leaders to support their own storytelling and advocacy.
It would be crucial to generate debate and amplify the importance of indigenous climate solutions; biodiversity of the region; ecological functions of the Amazon; protection of sacred areas; development models not based on extracting fossil fuels and minerals; clean energy; and mitigating climate change.
We are heavily using social media to share the findings of our project. Overall the response has been very good. Due to work and family commitments, we have had to take on a social media co-ordinator to further our cause. Currently, I am funding this project by myself but we are hoping that our online presence might later lead to some outside funding.
Due to the following we have, we need to be very sure of what we are putting into the public eye. I want our project to be as transparent as possible to our followers so we have to be mindful that we have a vast array of followers from career conservationists to everyday people who are passionate about saving nature.
-Finding a balance to suit the audience was very important and it was a learning curve to adjust to that.
-Dealing with negativity (which has only happened on one occasion). It is difficult when somebody is negative about something you are passionate about but a cool head and a professional approach lead to a de-escalation of the comments.
-As a result of our passion and transparency, we have a global following and a far reach.
Crowdfunding is a relatively new way of funding projects, the goal being to inspire individuals to want to help you achieve the project goals by donating to the project budget. There are several online crowdfunding platforms that work in different ways, some of which require a fee whilst others are free. We used a site that requires us to meet a set amount of our budget before funds were extracted from donors, if we didn’t reach that amount then the project would not go ahead. The crowdfunding site was easy to set up but requires you to write project details into sections. This should be easy because of already writing the project proposals and pitch packs. We were also able to embed the campaign video into this site. Once the site was set-up we shared it on all our social media sites and through our personal networks.
It is extremely straightforward to achieve this step, once the necessary research and preparations are in place. It is a matter of 'just do it'. Once the crowdfunding begins, and gains momentum, it creeaetes a sense of excitement and energy among project team members and contributors alike, as we watch targets being met and the portfolio of supporters grow. Access to the totals and ability to track contributions is an important enabling factor.
The important lesson we learnt during the crowdfunding stage is that it is better to set up the crowdfunding page for a smaller portion of your project budget and therefore better to wait to see if your receive any cooperate sponsors before initiating this phase. It was also useful that SIF had committed £20,000 pounds to the project. This encouraged public and corporate sponsorship as it was used to match the first £20,000 that was raised. People are also more likely to sponsor a project target that looks achievable especially bearing in mind these will be smaller donations. The crowdfunding page must also portray the project clearly and appeal to a wide variety of people. It is therefore important to set up the reward system for donations, ranging from small rewards to substantial rewards for large donations. For example, we rewarded small donations with a high quality digital photograph by a wildlife photographer who spent time on Aldabra and large donations with an invitation to the post-expedition events, hosted in Queen’s College.
