Healthy Country Planning is an adaptation of the Open Standards developed for use in participative and cross-cultural situations – typically with Indigenous communities. To better enable this, the language of the OS has been translated into simpler terms, a colour coding system adopted and a flow chart of how all the steps fit together added for clarity. It has been developed and tested across Australia, and the most experienced coaches in its use are Australian, but it has been used very successfully in the Americas and Asia. It is suggested that only experienced coaches use HCP as it does require adaptation…

This series of 4 webinar recordings by Marcia Brown (FOS) and John Morrison (WWF) provides an overview of the Climate-Smart Open Standards.  Another good base resource is the National Wildlife Federation’s Climate-Smart Conservation. Briefly, several adjustments to the Open Standards make them climate-smart (as per table below): Initial steps  – project scope, vision and targets are defined as usual Viability of the targets is defined, but desired future state of the indicators for the key ecological attributes is left until after assessment of climate vulnerability Assess direct threats but leave rating them Develop climate scenarios and impacts (climate vulnerability) Add…

Updated to reflect Version 3.0 released in December 2020. Developed and maintained by the CMP Conservation Audits Working Group, the Conservation Audit Guidelines and Tool facilitate an efficient analysis of a project or program’s design and adaptive management practice. It generates summary reports and provides a template to develop a management response. The tool also supports up to 5 audits to help users arrive at a multi-project or organizational audit assessment. Use the Conservation Audit Guidelines and Tool to increase the likelihood of positive outcomes by: Assessing project design and adaptive management against the best practices in the Conservation Standards;…

The ongoing Integrated Conservation of Biodiversity and Forests project in Laos has been translating and tailoring OS materials for local use. Two key elements of this are Lao translations of: the Glossary of Terms the ‘Steps flowchart’ that has been developed for Healthy Country Planning.

The inspiring Road Traveled in Chile:Lessons and Challenges in Strengthening Adaptive Management in a National System of Protected Areas won the 2018 Case Study Competition handsomely.

The USAID initiative – Learning Group Explores the Effectiveness of Enterprises as a Conservation Strategy, received an Honorable Mention in the 2018 Case Study competition. The team working within USAID developed a Conservation Enterprise Learning Agenda that defines a theory of change and a set of learning questions to explore key assumptions. The work included: synthesis of evidence from existing documentation regarding the effectiveness of conservation enterprises; retrospective assessment of conservation enterprise approaches that have been in place for 20 years; prospective to help set up monitoring, evaluation, and learning so that evidence can be generated. The team found that…

From Great Conversation to Great Conservation, the Bat Conservation International entry gained an Honorable Mention in the 2018 Case Study Competition. Key lessons learned by Bat Conservation International were that they benefited from the OS by: Providing a rapid transition from training to actual work; Improving a shared understanding of their conservation situation; Increasing staff alignment and morale among cross-organizational teams, and; Leading the way for incorporating accountability and rigor. The judges thought that the approach Was an impressive effort for the whole organization Demonstrates that the OS can be deployed across an organization with sufficient management will and adequate…