Brainstorming and discussing options for conservation

Con­ser­va­tion man­age­ment and restora­tion options were devel­oped to meet the fol­low­ing two out­comes for Noosa Estu­ary, Aus­tralia. (This exam­ple was con­duct­ed before the min­i­mum goal approach was intro­duced, so these tar­get out­comes are more vague than those we would ele­vate through the CbD 2.0 process):

1. Increase fish abundance
2. Increase diver­si­ty of aquat­ic species

A group of experts (delib­er­ate­ly drawn from diverse pro­fes­sion­al back­ground and cur­rent roles) were asked to think broad­ly and freely about restora­tion and man­age­ment options, ini­tial­ly as indi­vid­u­als then as a group dur­ing a work­shop. To lim­it the risk that experts would pre­ma­ture­ly dis­card poten­tial options because of per­ceived socio-polit­i­cal fea­si­bil­i­ty issues, the experts were explic­it­ly instruct­ed not to con­sid­er the socio-polit­i­cal fea­si­bil­i­ty or desir­abil­i­ty of poten­tial options. Instead, experts were asked only to con­sid­er tech­ni­cal fea­si­bil­i­ty when propos­ing options. A total of 14 options were devel­oped (Table 3), and in some cas­es were accom­pa­nied by maps that illus­trat­ed the loca­tion of the pro­posed actions. These options span a diverse, and some­times unortho­dox, set of actions. Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the most promis­ing options was accom­plished through a for­mal assess­ment of the pre­dict­ed con­se­quence of each option for the two fun­da­men­tal outcomes.