European Tropical Forest Research Network

Participatory assessment, monitoring and evaluation of biodiversity (PAMEB)

Internet workshop 7 - 25 January 2002, and policy seminar 21 May 2002
convened by the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford

Summary of Day 1, 7th January 2002

To get the workshop off to a strong start participants were prompted to begin at the beginning, and share information and opinions about the objectives we might have for undertaking participatory biodiversity assessments. Central questions to the theme were:

• Who is doing the assessment? Are they collecting the information for themselves, or are there 'intermediary' actors who are collecting information for use by others?
• Why? What are their objectives in doing so, and how is this information being used?
• Is the aim to survey all the biodiversity, or only certain components of biodiversity; to monitor change in biodiversity; or to evaluate the importance of biodiversity?
• Who is involved? Who plans; who collects data; who analyses and who uses the results?

Information from participants came from all four continents of the world, including some smaller island states, and covered a multiplicity of objectives and forms of collaborative research and action coalitions.

For some participants biodiversity has clearly been linked to issues of governance and indigenous economic self determination. In these cases the objectives of biodiversity are mediated by government departments or affiliated institutes, NGOs (not for profit organisations) or research institutions. Postings covered objectives that:

• linked issues of biodiversity quality and distribution in Jamaica to human rights and processes of good governance; in Bangalore, India sought to track the impacts of tourism on components of biodiversity as a means to finding economic development alternatives which increased benefits to local communities and habitats;
• worked with hunters in Cameroon to track impacts and increase understanding of faunal biodiversity;
• in Canada linked indigenous land and resource rights to biodiversity conservation in protected areas, where participatory assessments are one way of mapping cultural landscapes that incorporate indigenous biodiversity knowledge and values.

For other participants clear links were made between the need to either share the rights and responsibilities of biodiversity management between different parties, or to share the costs of undertaking biodiversity assessments. In some cases this was linked to community development issues and in others to citizen interest and the value placed on their local environments. For example:

• In Nepal, Lao PDR, Thailand and the Tibet region of China objectives of assessment were linked with researching, documenting and understanding changes in biodiversity as a consequence of using biodiversity resources;
• In Montana, USA a local NGO saw facilitating biodiversity assessments as an important mechanism for local communities to gain understanding and appreciation of their local ecosystems.

Using biodiversity assessment as part of Forest Certification procedures also figured in these initial postings. Of particular interest were:

• The Canadian Forest Service trying to meet economic imperatives and policy driven monitoring demands through the application of 'citizen science' as a means to scale down costs, engage local people, and ensure the integrity of forest certification schemes;
• Problems of resource constraints and managing assessment processes in remote forest areas were emphasised by a participant based in Papua New Guinea.

European contributions centred on the implementation of CBD commitments in the form of Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP) initiatives working at varying scales and involving various partners. Of note were:

• The BAP process in Guernsey (UK) where assessment takes place at the farm level and has been initiated in response to changes in agricultural policy that decouples subsidies from production targets and into the provision of, for example, conservation resources and services;
• Work from the European Centre for Nature Conservation who have concentrated on the formulation of appropriate biodiversity indicators;
• And an email from a participant in Poland, linked to the UK Darwin initiative whose interest is implementation of the Arhus agreement which seeks to find ways of increasing public participation in decision making and mechanisms for governments to disclose environmental information.

A number of these email postings mentioned an interest in finding ways for people involved in developing new techniques and methodologies to share their experiences and knowledge, the need for training in the design and management of assessments, and finding ways to track 'state of the art' advances in biodiversity assessment applicable at community level.

Keith Rennolls provided a very useful and interesting contribution (see theme 1 main page), where he recognised the diversity of approaches and objectives, and design based queries, reflected by the range of contributions made to the workshop today. He makes some very important points which we will surely return to as the workshop progresses, particularly in Themes 3 and 5.

Starting his contribution from the beginning, he stresses the need for those engaged in any kind of biodiversity monitoring or evaluation programme to clearly set out the definitions of biodiversity that they are using, and link this to the scale at which they are operating, so that other people using the information generated by the assessment are provided with a clear contextual base from which they can draw an analysis and understanding of the material.

Keith goes on to say that explicit definitions are not enough. A key issue for him is one of measurement, and he makes some very important remarks and observations about the requirement for units of measurement themselves to be defined and where possible standardised if useful and robust communication is to be made between stakeholders, and comparisons made about biodiversity value between different specific sites.

Keith also points to the importance of finding ways to characterise and measure the 'significant contributions' biodiversity makes to local livelihoods and valuations of biodiversity, which meet some commonly agreed 'utility currency' if local perceptions and values for biodiversity can be discussed at any scale other than the local.

Arguing from a statistical viewpoint he also reminds us all, that regardless of the objectives of assessment or the nature of the institution or groups of people undertaking the assessment, it is crucial that time and thought are given to sampling strategies, because sample bias will produce assessment effects that will become part of the definition of biodiversity produced by the assessment itself.