Introducing Our New Community Protection Handbook
From the Editor:
Throughout my career, there are only so many times that I've been able to witness a tool for conservation that's truly transformational on a global scale. Take, for example, GPS tagging. I watched the invention of the GPS tag for wildlife enter the world of conservation and evolve rapidly, being able to accommodate different species in nearly every environment where biologists could set foot (or fin). All of a sudden, researchers could track rare and little-understood wildlife to the far corners of the planet. This meant that scientifically supported policy-making for the protection of wildlife and natural places could be strengthened in any nation. Of course, GPS tagging is a critical tool today and will be for future generations.
The same can be said here.
This page-by-page presentation shows how our Community Protection Strategy reinforces our Global Park Defense program on land and at sea, thereby creating large-scale changes to protect nature parks from poachers, cartels, syndicates, and the like. There have been more than a handful of conservation organizations that have tried to create or maintain wildlife protected areas without the cooperation of the local people. And in every known case, without the involvement of those local people, the protection of those areas inevitably fails. By and large, that design served as just another countless example of conservation becoming colonialism.
It stuns me to think that the so-called "conservationists" involved in those types of practices never considered involving the local people, and, in an alarming amount of said projects, local communities who've lived in those areas for generations, or even thousands of years, would be forcefully removed and they also don't end up profiting from their own lands.
Global Conservation set out with a goal to change all of that.
It, therefore, gives me the great pleasure to present this incredible new handbook, which was made for both the public and for similar organizations to draw ideas and examples from when engaging in conservation initiatives that protect wild areas anywhere on Earth within "developing" countries.
Dozens of staff, partners, and collaborators contributed to this Community Protection handbook, which was made with great care and consideration. This is the first version of the handbook, and we'll be updating it with new and improved data as we learn more.
I hope you enjoy,
Joshua Asel
