Gobernanza para la adaptación en la cuenca compartida del Río Goascorán

This is the first volume in the WCPA Good Practice Guidelines that is predominantly by rangers, for rangers. The editors worked with partners to collect good practices and stories from rangers worldwide, reflecting global experience and lessons learned. The text focuses on actions that rangers, and to a lesser extent managers, can do themselves. It does not address institutional changes that would need intervention at government level. Whilst the latter are often necessary, decisions are out of the hands of individual rangers. Nor is the guide the last word on the state of play, another global ranger survey is being carried out simultaneously with the production of these guidelines and we will continue to learn about ranger needs, strengths and challenges in the future.

Watershed management is, at its root, a human behavior challenge. But where humans are often the source of such problems, they are also the solution. Rare trains local leaders to implement behavior change campaigns that inspire communities to adopt new norms for how they interact with nature. Rare empowers communities in Colombia’s most water dependent geographies to participate in the management of their watershed ecosystems so that they benefit from higher water quality and flow and reduce the risk of droughts and floods due to extreme weather changes.

Since 2013, Rare has built the capacity of 14 officials of one of the largest regional environmental authorities of Colombia, Corporación Valle del Cauca, to engage local stakeholders in protecting riparian areas and improving land use practices using the Pride for ARA approach. These farmers are inspired by the Pride campaigns and the offer of technical assistance to protect critical ecosystems for watershed resilience.

The solution aims at sustainable development in coastal areas of the East Asian Seas region by reducing and preventing impacts of natural disasters, climate change and sea level rise. It provides references and capacity building for national and local authorities in coastal and marine spatial planning. National adaptation activities and best practices for capacity building and field application tailored to needs and priorities of each country are provided.

The development and use of protected area competences at different levels have taken place in local and Regional scales with good results in all continents. The ASEAN Regional Centre for Biodiversity Conservation competences published in 2003 by Appleton et al. ‘Competence Standards for Protected Area Jobs in Southeast Asia’ has been used in various ways to develop local competence based approaches in more than 20 countries.

The project used a participatory decision-making process to develop a transboundary bear management plan for a nature park in Italy (Prealpi Giulie) and an adjacent national park in Slovenia (Triglav). The project led to a joint agreement for the allocation of resources (money and staff time) toward satisfying all stakeholders concerned about brown bears in the Transboundary Julian Alps Ecoregion. Some of the actions will be implemented through jointly funded park projects from 2017-2026.

Despite their great potential and strategic importance the watersheds of the Tacaná volcano are vulnerable both ecologically and politically. IUCN (through the Water and Nature Initiative, WANI) and partners therefore set up a demonstration project in these watersheds, which combined pilot livelihood projects (water, soil and environmental conservation) and bottom-up integrated governance of water resources management (freshwater ecosystem management).