
It was a big week for Rare in Latin America.
On Thursday Jan. 28, in Puerta Vallarta, Mexico, Rare opened its board meeting by celebrating the launch of its first thematic cohort, 12 Pride conservation campaigns implemented simultaneously across South America that will seek to save cloud forest and endemic species by inspiring communities and incentivizing farmers to protect local watersheds. Rare’s Board of Directors personally met each of the campaign managers from Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru.
These are important campaigns on several levels. Each of the sites at which we’re working is considered globally critical for the preservation of at least one and often more than one limited range endemic species. Some are so rare that they get press coverage just for a sighting.
Few projects address the global extinction crisis more directly than this one.
Humans also directly benefit. These endangered endemics happen to all reside in Andean cloud forests — the “water towers” of South America. Water for millions of farmers, rural villages and even small cities originates in these forests.
I like to think of this cohort as a two-for-one deal.
Running parallel campaigns to achieve the same goal is a big switch for Rare. Rare’s partners are all committed to building public support for Andean cloud forest protection (and of course the species and water conservation that comes with it). Each will be striking deals with upstream farmers to set aside forest in exchange for technical assistance and alternative incomes that compensate them for any associated loss of income.
Rare calls these “reciprocal agreements,” and with financing from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), Rare is even going to implement the approach. At twelve sites, Rare and its partners will run Pride conservation campaigns to build general support for site conservation and the concept of reciprocal agreements.
Over time, Rare aims to see the added value of the awareness-raising campaigns. Using an experimental design including control sites is relatively unprecedented in the conservation field. GEF spends $1 billion a year on conservation projects, and this will be one of the first experimental projects they’ve ever seen.
These new campaigns represent an exciting new construct for Rare: a thematic cohort focusing on endangered endemics with an experimental design.
On Friday, our board meeting offered an opportunity to explore next year’s potential Latin America cohort theme: overfishing in the Gulf of California, with at least two potential solutions being considered. Rare has a long history working with local conservation partners in Mexico. This potential 2011 cohort is based in part off of the learning of Rare’s Fisheries Fellows program, a collaborative pilot project implemented by Rare from 2005 to 2009 with multiple partners in the region.
Due to the island bio-geography, the abundance of endemic species, and wealth of marine mammals, many liken the Gulf of California region to the Galapagos Islands. The question is: how can Rare best help local conservationists in their efforts to reduce overfishing? More to the point, what might a thematic cohort for the Gulf look like?
To help answer this question, we heard from several key practitioners, who joined the meeting to help Rare think through how it could best add value to broader efforts in the region to save threatened fisheries:
- Tegan Hoffman, a California-based consultant from T.C. Hoffmann & Associates, shared the results of her independent analysis of opportunities to merge the Fisheries Fellows program with Pride campaigns at multiple sites. This is one way to think about a cohort.
- Jorge Torre, Executive Director of COBI, a well-regarded local NGO that specializes in community managed marine protected areas (MPAs). He is interested in exploring ways of partnering with Rare, perhaps to create a series of community MPAs, much like our plan for the Philippines.
- Laura Rodriguez, who recently joined the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) participated in this discussion as well. EDF has developed a model for incentivizing fishermen to manage their own fisheries, CatchShares, and they believe Rare could play a role developing community support and capacity on the ground for these initiatives – sort of like “reciprocal agreements” but for fishermen.
- Ana Luisa Figueroa, Director, San Pedro Martir Island Biosphere Reserve
- Peggy Turk Boyer from CEDO
- Amy Hudson Weaver from Niparaja
- Lorenzo Rosenzweig, Executive Director of the Mexican Fund for the Conservation of Nature.
It’s far too early to make a decision, but by the end of the morning, board members had a better understanding of how Rare staff develops thematic cohorts as well as getting an update on the progress of Rare’s other regional thematic cohorts in the Coral Triangle, the Philippines, and China.
Friday afternoon was the more perfunctory side of the board meeting: committee meetings, committee reports, the official launch of RarePlanet 2.0, and a special tribute to Rare’s Mexican trustee Barbara Hernandez who recently made a significant investment to Rare’s Latin America Pride Alumni Network.