Brett Jenks, Rare’s CEO, blogs about his trip to Asia, where he visited Pride campaigns taking place in China and Indonesia. Follow Brett’s adventures as he witnesses local conservation efforts to protect endangered species in Asia and shares how the Pride campaign model can support lasting conservation impact in this part of the world.
On the 6th we met with Rare’s China Advisory Committee to update them on Rare’s strategy and to get their feedback on conservation priorities that we should be addressing.
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Huang Gang, Rare Pride campaign manager from Meili Snow Mountain Nature Reserve presents conservation challenges and proposed solutions at his site.
The committee is co-chaired by Rare’s VP for Asia, Nigel Sizer and Shaomin Zhang, the Secretary General of the China Environmental Culture and Promotion Association (CECPA), which is affiliated with China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP).
Thanks to the work of our China team, Rare’s partnerships have come a long way in the past two years. We know making an impact here will take collaborating with a diverse mix of people, which I think we have on the committee. The advisory committee is an impressive group with deep experience in conservation, academia, US-China relations, and business management. Hats off to Nigel and company for putting this group together, as well as the generosity of the following members who agreed to support Rare’s efforts to expand environmental education in China:
- Ligang Jin, Chairman of Stonebridge China, a government affairs consultancy, who negotiated on behalf of China’s entry into the WTO.
- Edward Tian, chairman of China Broadband, a private equity firm. Tian has a PhD in natural resource management and serves on The Nature Conservancy’s Asia Pacific Council.
- Shawn Zhang is the China Director for The Nature Conservancy.
- Yuming Yang is the Vice President of Southwest Forestry College.
- Changua Wu is the Greater China Director for The Climate Group.
- Xuemin Shao is the chief representative in Asia for the Nordic Investment Bank.
- Jun Ma is Director of the Public and Environmental Affairs Research Center.
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Rare’s National Advisory Committee in China. From left: Professor Yuming Yang, Southwest Forestry College; Brett Jenks, CEO, Rare; TNC China director Shawn Zhang; Xuemin Shao, Nordic Investment Bank, Changua Wu, The Group China; Nigel Sizer, Vice President Rare Asia.
We spent much of our time together discussing Rare’s new emphasis on identifying local conservation solutions — energy efficient architecture, fuel efficient wood stoves, community managed fisheries and forests. We then discussed scaling them by training a network of local leaders to mobilize communities to adopt them. When we first started talking with CECPA and the Ministry of Environmental Protection we were only talking about environmental awareness, which is obviously a big issue in China.
But over time Rare has learned that raising awareness isn’t enough. Even if people want to make changes they need help overcoming the basic barriers to change. In rural China, there are cultural barriers, economic challenges and sometimes technical complexities to address. So, Rare wants to pick one new solution each year and roll out a dozen projects in a dozen sites to begin to disseminate what works. Fortunately, our advisory council fully agrees.
CECPA’s Secretary General is keen to build public awareness of environmental challenges in China and is outspoken in his support of Rare’s approach to doing so at the local level.
After an informal lunch with the Advisory Committee, we headed to the airport (once again, Beijing in a day!) for our trip to Kunming, Shangri La and then Meili Snow Mountain, one of the Tibetan Buddhists’ most sacred sites (not to mention the site of a Rare Pride campaign run in partnership with The Nature Conservancy, designed to inspire green building and reduce fuelwood consumption among the Tibetan people of Yunnan Province).
>>Rare CEO Visits Asia – Arrival in Beijing
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