CNHP Director’s Adventures in India - Part 3

by David Anderson, CNHP Director

Are you familiar with the “Open Standards for Conservation”? You might have heard of them as Conservation Action Planning, or “CAP,” as referred to by The Nature Conservancy.

The Conservation Measures Partnership (CMP) has worked over the past decade to combine principles and best practices in adaptive and results-based management to create the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation. It is a simple, powerful, and effective approach for planning, implementing, and measuring success for conservation projects. It has been tested and deployed successfully by hundreds of teams working to conserve species, sites, ecosystems, landscapes, watersheds and seascapes across the globe. It is an adaptive management framework that uses a 10-step process to build a comprehensive conservation plan for a given area from the ground up. I really like how this method can be used to bring people with disparate values together to find a path forward that everyone can agree on. These methods guide groups through the process of developing a plan, but also incorporate monitoring to measure progress towards goals and modify activities if necessary to meet those goals. CNHP, with The Nature Conservancy and other partners, has used these methods for many years, as part of the Rare Plant Conservation Initiative and in the San Juan Basin.

On July 21 and 22, the Wildlife Institute of India hosted an Open Standards Seminar and Workshop, which was attended over 30 faculty and students.

Dr. Sathyakumar welcoming the participants to the
Open Standards Seminar and Workshop.

The story of this workshop actually starts three years ago when I, along with Michael Menefee, CNHP Environmental Review Coordinator, attended a training in Conservation Action Planning led by Terri Schulz with The Nature Conservancy. At that time I had just started working on becoming a Fulbright Specialist, and talking with Terri about this we realized that there was a huge opportunity to explore these methods with the WII. We discussed this with Dr. Vinod Mathur, Director of the WII, who agreed that this was of great potential value for conservation in India, so it was included in the WII’s proposal to Fulbright for this project.

Terri is part of the Conservation Coaches Network (CCNet), a group of 300 trained professionals represented by 82 organizations in 52 countries around the world who help support conservationists throughout the world to learn about and apply the Open Standards. It was through her connections that we began talking with Adam Barlow, Christina Greenwood Barlow, and Lucy Boddam-Whetham, who are Coaches with a UK-based non-profit called WildTeam. WildTeam has worked for many years in Bangladesh and is very interested in expanding their work into India, so coming to the WII to meet everyone and lead an Open Standards seminar and workshop was a wonderful opportunity for them. It also worked out for Terri to join us, so we had an amazing group of both workshop participants, representing India’s leading thinkers in wildlife management and conservation, and coaches.

First, WildTeam led a seminar to introduce the Open Standards methodology, using some great examples from their work to conserve tigers in the Sundarbans area of Bangladesh. Then for the workshop we focused on an area within the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve called the Khiron Valley, which contains many conservation targets and important wildlife habitat. While this area is part of the Biosphere Reserve, it is not managed as a protected area- it suffers now from overgrazing and faces many threats. We divided into four groups and each group worked on a particular target. My group’s target was high elevation grasslands and meadows. Within this target we identified several subtargets including the rare plants that you read about in my previous blog. Then we identified and ranked threats, and mapped behaviors that drive them.

Getting started with the seminar.

Adam Barlow from WildTeam teaching us about Open Standards.

Lucy Boddam-Whetham from WildTeam introducing the Open Standards Workshop.

Christina Greenwood Barlow with WildTeam (writing) and
Terri Schulz with TNC (at right) leading my group through the
Open Standards process for alpine grasslands and meadows.

This event was successful in several ways. In the seminar, many of the faculty and students were exposed to these methods and learned about how they can use them in their projects and careers. And in the workshop we created the foundation for an in-depth conservation plan for the Khiron Valley that WII Faculty, along with other partners, will continue to work on. We discussed the possibility of hosting future Open Standards trainings and workshops at the WII, and how the WII could become a lead institution in India for training and dissemination of these methods. Dr. Mathur would like to adopt these methods and would like an interested subset of the faculty be become part of CCNet. Here are a few of the comments from the participants:

"This method really helps to break down the questions" - Dr. Bilal Habib
"This helps us identify what we actually need to do" - Preeti Sharma
"Organization is an important part of planning" - Prangyar A. Lama
"I will use these methods for grant writing" - Dr. Gopi G.V. (who also expressed the desire to become a coach)
"These methods have great importance for the Himalayan region" - Dr. Ishwari Rai

These two days were phenomenally successful and rewarding in many ways. This was due to the skill of the coaches, the knowledge of the all the experts in the room, the generosity of the WII in hosting this and providing wonderful hospitality, and above all the spirit of exploration and enthusiasm of all of the participants.

If you are not familiar with the Open Standards methodology you can learn more about it here.

The participants at the end of the workshop, happy with a sense of accomplishment!