This post was written by Brett Jenks, CEO of Rare.

Terrestrial conservation has made incredible advances in the past few decades. More than 10 percent of land is now under some form of protection. The marine world, however, has a long way to go.

With less than 1 percent of the world’s oceans protected, and our marine resources facing threats that outweigh on many levels those affecting land, marine conservationists are going to have to work quickly and creatively to catch up. For the past two days, I sat in a room full of marine conservationists exploring how we might actually do that.

Sylvia Earle, Jane Lubchenco, and Carl Safina were among a long list of notable attendees at the kickoff meeting for “Mission Blue” – a global ocean conservation movement led by National Geographic, the Waitt Foundation, the SEAlliance, and a host of public and private sector partners. Representatives from Oceana, Ocean Conservancy, Pew, WWF, CI, TNC, WCS, EDF, Packard, Moore, Oak, Google, the Fondo Mexicano, Time magazine, and the EPA were on hand, as was Rare. It was quite a gathering.

Sylvia Earle – former Chief Scientist for NOAA and current Explorer-in-Residence for National Geographic — implored us to see fish as wildlife rather than food. Scientist Daniel Pauly said we’re using 30 percent of the ocean’s life just to eat seafood. Paul Greenberg, author of Four Fish, said we must find ways to tap into people’s emotions if we are going to radically change behaviors. Kristian Parker, Chair of Oak Foundation, suggested that donors like Oak collaborate more often in order to learn from each other, reduce their individual risks, and leverage resources more effectively.

Above Jane Lubchenco and Sylvia Earle at the kickoff meeting for Mission Blue. Earle’s TED Prize wish founded Mission Blue.

I had the opportunity to present Rare’s plan to replicate community-managed no-take zones at dozens of sites in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, and the Meso-American Reef. When I asked my fellow guests over dinner last night to identify the best proven marine conservation strategies, Jane Lubchenco, Sylvia Earle, and UCSB professor Steve Gaines all said, almost simultaneously, “no take zones.”

Rare’s goal is to take the most effective no-take zone models (the “bright spots” we’ve found across the globe) and replicate them on a broad scale. The idea of focusing on scaling solutions, rather than trying to solve problems, appealed to many groups. (Dan Heath, you’ll be happy to know at least eight of the 100 participants had read your book and are eagerly looking for bright spots in all areas of their lives.)

What resulted from this meeting is a general commitment to accelerating our efforts in four different work areas: marine protected areas large and small, fisheries reform, fisheries science, and public awareness raising. It’s exciting to consider what might actually happen if all these NGOs, scientists, and private sector folks mobilized around a big hairy audacious goal – like preserving 20 percent of the world’s oceans through no-take zones – and developed a business plan to get us there.

So that’s the next step…

For now, I’m proud to say Rare is indeed supporting Mission Blue.

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In early March 2010, Rare hosted a trip with our partner Manomet to San Antonio Oeste, Argentina.  There are three campaign sites in Argentina, each of which is focused on preserving the habitat of the migratory Red Knot shorebird: Costa Atlantica, Tierra del Fuego, Estuary Rio Gallegos, Santa Cruz and the site we visited, San Antonio Bay.

Above: As I departed from Miami for Argentina I took a photo of an Audubon print of the Red Knot on display in the airport.

The Red Knot has a wingspan of 20 inches and weighs between 4.5 and 7 ounces. This medium-sized sandpiper flies more than 8,000 miles each spring from as far south as Tierra del Fuego to its breeding grounds in the Arctic tundra, and then reverses the trip each autumn — making this bird one of the longest distance migrants in the animal kingdom. Along its route, the Red Knot relies on precious “staging areas” in South and North America to rest and refuel before continuing on the next leg of its journey. As it forages on various beaches and mudflats in Argentina for sea worms, mollusks, or insects, the Red Knot increases its weight by as much as 50 percent to fuel up for its journey northward.

Maintaining healthy coastal ecosystems throughout the Western Hemisphere is critical to ensuring the survival of the Red Knot and scores of other shorebird species.

Above: We stopped over in Buenos Aires on route to our final destination, taking in some bird watching in a local park.

Above: Rare trustee, Duncan McFarland.

Above: Joyce Coleman served as trustee of The Nature Conservancy‘s Maine Chapter.  International conservation is her passion and she is particularly interested in developing ways to inspire people to support conservation in the countries where they live.

From Buenos Aires we traveled south to Las Grutas, where we spent the remainder of the trip.

San Antonio Oeste is a port city situated on the San Matías Gulf in the Argentine province of Río Negro, and capital of the department (departments are analogous to counties in the U.S.) of San Antonio. The town is bordered by its sister communities of San Antonio Este and Las Grutas.

Above: Our group on the beach in Las Grutas.

Above: Helen Morrison from Washington D.C. is Deputy Benefits Tax Counsel at US Department of the Treasury.

Above: The San Antonio Bay area received more rain in two days than it had received in two years, which made driving quite an adventure.

Above:  Volunteers in action at the “Vuelo Latitud 40″ Nature Interpretation Center.  Within this community of 3,500, there are about 250 volunteers — extraordinary community participation.

Above: A volunteer at Veulo Latitud 40 provides a colorful interpretation of the 17,000 mile yearly journey of the Red Knot from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego.

Above: Dr. Charles Duncan, Director of the Shorebird Recovery Project at the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences and Patricia Gonzalez, a Red Knot Ornithologist.

Above: Dr R. I. Guy Morrison, a research scientist for the Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS), based in Ottawa.  Thirty years ago, Guy and his colleague, Ken Ross, faced a problem.  Many species of shorebirds breed in the Canadian Arctic but understanding and conserving their populations requires knowing where they winter.  This was largely unknown in those days.  To address this problem Morrison and Ross undertook the unthinkable (some would say foolhardy or even crazy) project of censusing virtually the entire coastline of South America in a small plane or helicopter.

From 1982-1986 they flew 17,000 miles at a height of just 130-180′ above the ground at an airspeed of 100-150 mph.  They counted almost three million shorebirds.  The results were published in the two volume “Atlas of Nearctic shorebirds on the coast of South America,” a CWS Special publication.  As if this weren’t enough flying, Guy and Ken have also produced Atlases for Panama and Mexico.  They continue to use these same techniques today to monitor shorebirds at several of the most important sites identified in the initial surveys.

Above: Volunteers monitor disturbances on the beach such as dogs, or more commonly, All Terrain Vehicles (ATVs).  This data is used in conjunction with research on Red Knot weight and population tracking.

Above: Wendy Paulson, Chairman of Rare Board of Trustees, leads the group of birders.

Above: Ellen McFarland discovers a bright green Tinamou egg on the beach.

Above: Mirta Carbajal, President, Inalafquen Foundation with the Red Knot mascot.  Mirta is a model partner for Rare, both supportive and involved directly in the campaign.

Above: View of the ATV course within the natural protected area, one strategy to preserve the Red Knot habitat while still providing for those who enjoy recreational riding.

Above: Group photo at Las Grutas.

Above: Wendy Paulson addressing the mayors of seven local municipalities on the importance of protecting the migratory bird habitats in the region.

Above: Hank Paulson leads a Red Knot congo-line on the beach.

Above: A Red Knot performance at a local community center attended by approximately 200 students.  The story follows a woman who awakes one morning as a Red Knot and begins her incredible journey to the top of the world and back again.

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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.

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I started off my day with a video Skype conference call with my kids, Ben and Emma.

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They took turns pulling each other off-screen and interrupting each other’s stories about homework, basketball and the weather. It’s amazing to sit in a hotel room in Kunming and have a video conference with 11- and 13-year-old children in Arlington, VA.

I couldn’t be more proud of the work the China team is doing. It was only about 11 months ago that Nigel finished hiring this team and they have already launched Rare’s globally accredited Master’s Degree in Communications for conservationists at Southwest Forestry College, built a network of hundreds of local government officials and conservation organizations and launched a first cohort of Pride campaigns addressing a range of complex and important issues.

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While the campaign in Meili Snow Mountain addresses energy consumption and green building, campaigns elsewhere are doing some pretty fascinating things:

• In Hunchun Nature Reserve, the local government and Wildlife Conservation Society are saving the last remaining Siberian tigers in China.
• In Baima Snow Mountain, local villagers are learning how to reduce the consumption of fuelwood by using solar water heaters.
• In Gaoligong Mountain Nature Reserve, the campaign manager is working to increase the use of energy-efficient stoves, electric stoves, and electric rice cookers in local households.

Not bad for a start up conservation program in China in year two!

There is a long list of what’s working, and it’s great to hear it directly from our field staff after a year of dramatic change at Rare:

• Rare’s partners appreciate the careful planning of each campaign and are surprised by the rigor of our new approach to “removing barriers to behavior change.”
• The mascots of the first China campaigns are getting rave reviews.
• Partnerships with NGOs, government officials and Southwest Forestry College are all very positive, which is not always the case in these complicated and interdependent arrangements we make.
• The new Master’s degree — which is accredited by University of Texas at El Paso but taught here in Kunming, China — is well received by partners all over the country. (We had been worried that the Chinese would thumb their noses at a foreign Master’s but quite the contrary.)
• The rollout of training has been better than expected. Hearing this from the China team is a big deal given that we gave them about four months to translate the new global Master’s curriculum and then learn to teach it, when some of our staff don’t even have Master’s degrees. This was a monumental task and they deserve huge kudos for getting it done.

Not surprisingly, there is an equally long list of what we are going to improve. One of the big ones is a sense of confidence that little old Rare can make an impact in China. Our staff has watched The Nature Conservancy relocate its China headquarters to Beijing from Kunming and reallocate staff to work more on national conservation strategies.

The message from some partners has been clear: China has 1.4 billion people. What are a handful of Pride campaigns going to do?

It’s a fair question, but I’d argue that most of China’s biodiversity lies in the southwest where high mountains, diverse climates and cultures and relatively low populations are not only conducive to Rare’s approach but, in fact, necessitate it . The Chinese have a saying:

“The mountains are high and the emperor is far, far away.”

The fact is, like many multinational companies, we are learning that you can’t succeed in China simply by having support in Beijing.

Many of the threats to nature in the most biologically diverse areas are local. Those threats are cultural and they have to do with local forestry, home construction, fishing, water usage, agriculture, etc. National reforms don’t make the desired impact unless municipal leaders act on and enforce them.

What does work in China is the scaling of locally-proven methods. The government, once it finds something that works, has no problem rolling out solutions far beyond the scope of any NGO I’ve ever seen. So if Rare can get a few models working in the coming years and train the local leadership needed to replicate them, the bet we’re making is that the municipal and even provincial governments will take them and run.
But confidence will only come in time.

Other things we’re going to fix:

• We need to improve the project management skills of our staff and campaign partners. These projects are increasingly complex. It’s not easy coordinating NGOs and government offices to provide new skills and financing while running social marketing programs to mobilize communities, especially when you expect results in just a few years. Some of what we’re doing is unprecedented and the management skills to make it work must be newly developed and then taught throughout our network.
• Priority-setting: As we consider what environmental threats to prioritize and what local conservation solutions we aim to roll out next year, our team is hearing an array of partner and expert voices, each with their own strong opinion about where we should focus. It’s great to be in demand, but we have some difficult decisions to make.
• Mastering a new way of working. The China team has a new curriculum, plus they’re rolling out a much-revised version of the traditional Pride campaign; and because Rare is growing and taking seriously global quality control, they have to grapple with new systems for reporting and the expectations of social media use and online storytelling. It’s a lot to manage for any team, much less a group of five in Kunming. While I know they’re going to do it, I am not sure they know it yet.

>>Brett’s Slideshow

Nov. 9th was literally the coldest night of my entire life.

It was 20 degrees in my room, and for 90 minutes before falling asleep, I was under the covers, wearing as many of my clothes as I could gather without actually getting out of bed to do so: wool socks, capilene long johns, wool undershirt, wool sweater, wool cap. And still I couldn’t get warm. We all laughed about it the next day, but it was cruel until everyone fell asleep.

We began hiking up to the waterfall on the 10th.

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the view of our hike route early in the morning. Nowhere to go but past the temple and up the mountain.

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while my party works laboriously to get up the final few kilometers to the sacred waterfall, stopping to take deep breaths and rest our legs, inexplicably, whole families of elderly Tibetan men and women, and some children, hike next to us, singing, chanting, smoking cigarettes as they breeze up the mountain.

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Lei under the sacred waterfall after what felt more like a “summit” than a hike. We’re now at 4100m.

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While Mr. Ma pays tribute to the waterfall, bathing in the mist falling from 1000 ft above, I pose for my birthday photo, complete with a lucky rainbow, Tibetan offering to future generations, and prayer flags. (photo by Nigel Sizer)

Mr. Ma assured us that this was a 45-minute hike to the top and that we’d be back for lunch at noon and ready to pack our bags for the trek to Lower Yebong Village, where we had meetings with local villagers. Mr. Ma has a “unique” sense of time.

Several times during our multi-hour hikes and drives he said, “Just 10 minutes more,” only for us to find that we had hours to go. In fact, we regularly turned his 10 minutes into 60 at a minimum, and Ken at one point decided to give Mr. Ma a nice watch he’d purchased in Singapore.

Maybe the next party Mr. Ma guides will benefit from Mr. Ma’s new timepiece.

Before dinner, Nigel and I sat down with Ruth to discuss her thoughts on supporting Rare’s Asia program. Overlooking the glacier-topped valley, Ruth talked of her Chinese heritage and a new desire to support Rare’s work there, in part to honor her grandfather, who started YTL, the Malaysian conglomerate her father now runs, and for which she is a chief investment officer.

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Our host, who doubles as the lodge’s chef, has just returned from New York City. He was the first community member to travel to the United States, where he was interviewed by The New York Times for his work on PhotoVoice, an indigenous photography contest in which local villagers photograph their surroundings for a traveling exhibit. He may be a good photographer, but he’s also a very good chef. And with the cold air and all the hiking, we savored every bit of stir fry, hot pot and our first cold beer in over a week.

>>A few notes on eating meals together in China I picked up on the internet

>>View more photos from this hike

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We reluctantly left Yongzhi Village early in the morning.

After the welcoming we received, the traditional dancing in the evening, and the fact that our campaign and the four pilot green homes are just getting started, it would have been nice to stick around a few months and chip in to make this project happen, but we have a four hour drive to the foothills of Mt. Kawagebo and then a five hour hike up the side of Mt. Kawagebo.

It was time to get going.

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Yak butter tea, a staple for the Tibetan people living at the base of Mt. Kawagebo, is an acquired taste for some outsiders.

Over breakfast, Mr. Ma told us that the Yongzhi community center where we sat for three hours the evening before is on the verge of being condemned. The roof is caving in and community members have pooled about $5,000 to rebuild it using green building methods, but they need another $3500 to finish the job. Together, our party commits to asking friends and family to contribute to help them finish the project.

This will be a great way to give something back to such a wonderful people and continue the process of building sustainable technologies into traditional Tibetan construction practices.

If you’d like to contribute, please click here. Rare will collect the funding and pass through 100% of the funds raised. Just make sure you specify that your funds are for the Yongzhi Green Community Center.

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Leaving Yongzhi. A road less traveled, but one I hope never gets paved.

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Nigel and Mr. Ma point the way for our hike up to Yubeng Village. You can see the route of our hike just by following the light blue trail to the top and then heading right all the way to the top of the treeline.

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At the top of the first peak, around 4000 feet, we met a Buddhist monk from Yebong Village, headed out of town as we prepared to finish the hike to town. (Photo by Nigel Sizer)

As it turned out, we started climbing the mountain too late in the day, and we had to spend the last hour hiking in darkness to Lower Yebong Village. This turned into a comedy of errors. Only a few of us had flashlights.

Mr. Ma barely knew the way, we were at about 3500 meters, it was below freezing, we had been hiking and sweating for four hours, and we were giddy and exhausted. At one point, Mr. Ma suggested we take a short cut across a pasture, and we all dutifully began climbing a fence in the dark.

Then Lei and Lingang noticed a traditional log ladder which we all used to climb onto an adjacent path. (The next day, we found that the one really tough looking bull in the whole village was standing alone in that pitch black pasture and would probably have had a less warm greeting for us than our Tibetan friends.)

>>Brett’s Slideshow

>>Rare Pride in Action at Meili Snow Mountain Nature Reserve!

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The Rare-TNC Pride Campaign in Meili Snow Mountain:

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The Meili Snow Mountains rise between the Salween River and the Mekong River, in the extreme edge of Northwest Yunnan Province on the Tibetan border. The region is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a good portion is largely still wilderness. Fir and spruce forests up the mountainsides are home to snow leopards, Asiatic black bears, red pandas, and thousands of species of plants. This is also the rhododendron epicenter of the world and supposedly even more beautiful in spring.

Rare is partnering with the Municipal government and TNC to develop and promote a model for home construction that uses less timber in construction and much less fuelwood to heat. TNC has been working on green energy here for years, and the Pride campaign is designed to accelerate adoption of green building practices over the next few years.

>>Read more about Rare’s campaign in Meili Snow Mountain

>>Brett’s Slideshow

>>Meili Snow Mountain – the Highest Mountain in Yunnan, China

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What a day.

I’m pretty speechless after all that we experienced today, and I’ve decided to just share the agenda and show you what I saw through photos. I had my first three cups of Yak butter tea, watched Tibet’s most sacred mountain appear out of the darkness at sunrise and visited one of the most humble and beautiful villages accessed carefully through what looks like a small crevasse in the side of a mountain.

Agenda for the day:

5:30 a.m. – Watch sunrise over Mount Kawagebo (Kawa Karpo), the sacred Tibetan and still-unclimbed mountain.

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Local Tibetan pilgrims, who aim to climb just below the snow line and drink from the holy glacier water, burn incense and pay homage to the mountain, which they believe protects them and provides for them.

The story of Kawagebo is a powerful one, best told by our new friend, Mr. Ma. Recording this video at sunrise was one of the highlights of my trip to Asia.

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A young Tibetan villager welcomes our party with a traditional water offering.

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The Tibetan women of Yongzhi welcome our party to their small village. Few foreigners visit this village, which just got a dirt road wide enough for a car a year ago.

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The Nature Conservancy’s Pride program manager, Huang Gang, who is currently studying community outreach techniques at Southwest Forestry College, Rare’s training center in Yunnan, is warmly welcomed into Yongzhi village.

2:00 p.m. – Visit demonstration households and meet community members.

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Huang Gang and Mr. Bai, the chief architect behind the Tibetan Traditional Green Building project.

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The proud builder of one of the Tibetan region’s first green homes.

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Rare trustee Ruth Yeoh, helping create the sustainable building blocks of Tibetan green homes.

7:00 p.m. – Traditional Tibetan village celebration.

During the celebration, I did something I never thought I’d ever do in front of 200 Tibetan villagers at 13,000 feet above sea level.  You’ll have to read Nigel’s blog to find out more.

>>Brett’s Slideshow

>>Rare CEO Visits Asia – Arrival in Beijing

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