Each year the Blue Mountains World Heritage Institute, in partnership with the Protected Areas Learning & Research Collaboration (PALRC), offers a five-day intensive training program on tools for adaptive management, based on the internationally recognised Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation.
Our Adaptive Management for Conservation course provides an immersive, week-long learning experience for participants, helping them to gain an understanding of the theory and practice of adaptive management, particularly of protected areas, with approaches that can be applied to a wide range of situations.
Our recent September 2019 course (see photo gallery below) was hosted at the Jemby Rinjah Eco Lodge in Blackheath, NSW and included protected area managers and students from across Australia and around the world.
Course Facilitators Stuart Cowell and Philippa Walsh took participants, working in small teams, through an adaptive planning, monitoring and management loop. This learning framework enables management issues to be explored in a way that can help to reveal underlying problems and to find ways of working with complex issues.
Field trips included a guided walk through a management hotspot in the Blackheath national park with ecologist and former Discovery Ranger Wyn Jones, showcasing bushfire, erosion, upland swamp and urban interface management challenges for local area land managers. There was also an interactive session with Blue Mountains Bushcare officers Alan Lane and Paul Vale, walking through a successful wetland restoration project in Popes Glen, Blackheath (see video).
There were 25 participants including from Tribal Councils, Aboriginal Corporations, NGOs and park agencies across Australia, and international participants came from Hong Kong, Myanmar, Palau, Nepal and PNG. The rich diversity of participants provided valuable learning opportunities and meaningful social interactions.
Feedback from September 2019 course participants included:
“Excellent course – very relevant to my work. Great opportunity to connect with people from diverse backgrounds and experience.”
“This training provides method and hope. Essential for any land manager in any context.”
“I found the course takes you on a journey outside of your comfort zone, but the challenge is all part of adaptive management! Be brave, its worth it.”
“The training provides you with a pragmatic, logical approach to planning for conservation and adaptive management. It is very hands on and also a great way to meet conservation practitioners from around the world.”
“Going through the full cycle of open standard forced me to really focus on the most important factors/threat in a conservation project. It was also great to see our group gradually forming a feasible strategy for the most challenging target.”
“This model and approach is applicable to contexts beyond conservation. The presenters excel at presenting, demystifying and coaching participants through a pragmatic and highly effective process of building a flexible and lean management planning tool. I encourage participants from across knowledge systems to learn this methodology.”
The training is widely applicable to people working in protected areas and any area of conservation, be it natural or cultural heritage. The training is valuable for professional development and tertiary study.
This is an annual course that will be offered again by BMWHI in September 2020.
Scholarships are available through PALRC. The current round of scholarship applications closes Oct 31, 2019.