BMWHI Board Director and Education program leader, Dr. Rosalie Chapple, was invited to speak at the Capacity Building for Conservation Conference in London in July, 2019.
This conference was the fourth in a series of international meetings aimed at tackling difficult and pervasive global conservation issues and provided a unique opportunity for discussion and problem-solving amongst the international conservation community. Dr. Chapple’s participation in the conference placed BMWHI alongside global leaders in conservation capacity building. Numerous universities, NGOs and learning and research centres were represented, spanning professional development, public and academic education.
Dr. Chapple and BMWHI Executive Director Associate Professor John Merson made the most of the travel opportunity by stopping en route to London in Hong Kong and Geneva to visit conservation and world heritage colleagues in China and at the IUCN headquarters in Switzerland.
The first stop in Hong Kong was at the Kadoorie Farm & Conservation Centre, where Rosalie and John held meetings with Dr Bosco Chan (PALRC Steering Group member and Head of Kadoorie Conservation, China), Andy Brown (Executive Director), Gary Ades (Department Head, Fauna Conservation) and Michael Wong (Department Head, Partnerships).
Pictured: Rosalie and John with Dr Bosco Chan at the Kadoorie Farm in Hong Kong.
John and Rosalie delivered a 30 minute presentation to 25 Kadoorie Farm staff and the group discussed a potential collaboration to deliver conservation management capacity building training in China. They agreed to explore options further when Bosco and two other members of his team attended the BMWHI Adaptive Management for Conservation training course in the Blue Mountains in September 2019.
The second stop was at the IUCN in Geneva, Switzerland, where Rosalie and John met with Tim Badman (Head of nature-culture integration and the World Heritage Leadership Program) and Peter Shadie (Director, IUCN World Heritage programme and former CEO of BMWHI) to discuss a potential collaboration to deliver training on disaster risk management.
At the conference in London, Dr Chapple delivered a presentation in the session ‘Capacity building issues from around the world: solutions and the way forward’.
The presentation provided a regional perspective on the Oceania region and included key findings of the short course review Protected Area Short Courses in Australia, Asia and the Pacific: training issues, needs and recommendations.
Key distinctions highlighted for Oceania included the demand for two-way cultural knowledge exchange, the creation of Indigenous protected areas, and the extent of community-based conservation in the South Pacific. The issues outlined in the presentation prompted numerous conversations with the audience during the conference and facilitated many good connections.
The proceedings will be published as a special edition of the International Journal of Conservation (ORYX) and a series of guides will be published in relation to the core capacity building areas covered by the conference.