Sustained actions to support effective and timely conservation and sustainable development efforts must not only be underpinned by interventions that incorporate a wide range of local and traditional knowledge, skills, tools and abilities, but must also provide long-lasting impact to keep pace with increasing biodiversity challenges. Building robust, functional, and adaptive interventions requires long-term investment in research, education, and training that bolsters capacities to accelerate conservation outcomes.
Despite demands placed on biodiversity to meet current and future societal needs, capacity deficits in many places around the globe continue to be evident and include insufficient resources to sustain individual and organizational capacities, limiting the ability to build local conservation leadership. Efforts to foster and maintain conservation capacity have included the development of core competencies, provision of resources, support for education, research, and training and establishment of institutions. However, the complexity of balancing loss of biodiversity with development combined with widening inequalities in capacity continues to demonstrate that achieving inclusive conservation and sustainable development requires scaling up and across to deliver individual, institutional, and community capacities. At this critical moment in time, when biodiversity is faced with growing threats, we require support for individuals and systems to continuously meet the surge in capacity and close the gap between capacity needs and delivery.
Reflecting on nearly three decades of EFN work, the Cassagnol Fellowship creates an opportunity to deliver on the lesson that supporting conservation leaders at their home country universities, research centers, and conservation projects creates lasting opportunities for co-development and collaboration, and therefore ensures longevity of solutions while also sustaining the pipeline of conservation leaders.
