This guidance is intended to support practitioners undertaking conservation planning in the face of the uncertainties created by climate change. It builds on the already widely used Conservation Measures Partnership’s Conservation Standards by walking through each of the five steps and providing additional guidance on incorporating climate considerations. These additional tools and methodologies were developed and refined by experienced facilitators who have worked with a number of teams struggling to plan climate-smart conservation projects around the world.
By applying this guidance, conservation teams will be able to:
- document the observed and likely impacts of climate change on their ecosystems and species of interest
- examine the relationships between climate change and other, conventional threats
- identify the socioeconomic factors contributing to the conventional threats
- define climate-smart strategies, and clearly lay out how they believe these strategies will address both climate and conventional threats and contribute to conserving or restoring their focal ecosystems and species (i.e., define their “theory of change”)
- determine how to monitor and evaluate progress toward their goals and objectives, to ensure adaptive management and ongoing learning
Climate-Smart Conservation Practice consists of the 5 steps from the Conservation Standards, with several additional sub-steps. Not all steps need to be taken by a given project, depending on its purpose and context.
Citation: GIZ, CMP (2020) Climate-Smart Conservation Practice: Using the Conservation Standards to Address Climate Change. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, Bonn, Germany.
A PDF of “Climate-Smart Conservation Practice: Using the Conservation Standards to Address Climate Change” can be found (in English and Spanish) on the Climate Change Working Group’s CMP Workspace page.
