Identify Challenges and Goals

Ulti­mate­ly, plan­ning should iden­ti­fy the most impact­ful poten­tial solu­tions to sig­nif­i­cant con­ser­va­tion prob­lems. This first phase of CbD 2.0 sets the scope and direc­tion for plan­ning by iden­ti­fy­ing chal­lenges and defin­ing suc­cess at a high lev­el. At the end of this phase, you will have defined the rel­e­vant challenge(s), geo­gra­phies, con­ser­va­tion tar­gets, and human well-being com­po­nents to be addressed by the plan. This phase will also pro­duce a sit­u­a­tion analy­sis that eval­u­ates key socio-eco­log­i­cal dri­vers and informs oppor­tu­ni­ties for affect­ing change. Final­ly, min­i­mum goals that strate­gies should seek to meet will be identified.

The entry point for con­ser­va­tion plan­ning in the pre­vi­ous ver­sion of Con­ser­va­tion by Design was typ­i­cal­ly a geog­ra­phy, such as an ecore­gion, with strate­gies that focused on con­serv­ing pri­or­i­ty areas, or places, with­in the ecore­gion. CbD 2.0 uses a socio-eco­log­i­cal sys­tem as the entry point, and these types of sys­tems are often defined dif­fer­ent­ly than an ecore­gion, which is defined exclu­sive­ly by eco­log­i­cal attributes.

The globe, a food pro­duc­tion sys­tem for a coun­try or region, and a riv­er basin are all exam­ples of socio-eco­log­i­cal sys­tems. In addi­tion, our strate­gies aim for sys­temic change as we know that con­ser­va­tion work does not end with pro­tec­tion of a par­tic­u­lar place. Our broad con­ser­va­tion goal, there­fore, is to address the most sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges fac­ing peo­ple and nature.

Ide­al­ly, select­ed chal­lenges are iden­ti­fied based on a glob­al or region­al sit­u­a­tion analy­sis to ensure that the challenge/strategy that is being focused on is an impor­tant one for bio­di­ver­si­ty as well as peo­ple. For exam­ple, the Con­ser­van­cy has devel­oped a glob­al-to-region­al sit­u­a­tion analy­sis to iden­ti­fy the most sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges to nature and peo­ple at these scales. Small­er whole-sys­tem scale efforts can then be informed by these larg­er scale analy­ses, and oppor­tu­ni­ties for these efforts to con­tribute to region­al and glob­al-scale sys­temic change can be explored using the approach described in this Guid­ance (please see Appen­dix H for more details about the Con­ser­van­cy’s glob­al-to-region­al sit­u­a­tion analy­sis approach).