Bottom up inclusive approaches such as Educational Managed Marine Area (EMMA) and Locally Managed Marine Area (LMMA) aim to enable and empower local communities in marine conservation and resource management.

This webinar will give the stage to EMMA and LMMA practitioners from the Pacific to present their solutions, share good practices and challenges, and discuss potential uptakes. This will offer a discussion between these practitioners on how they can learn from each other’s solutions and potentially replicate them in their own sites, as well as what the opportunities and barriers may be for such endeavours.

The COVID-19 crisis has brought into sharp focus the underlying financing and resourcing challenges facing protected and conserved areas around the world.

It is in this light that we launch Closing the Gap: Financing and resourcing of protected and conserved areas, a report which aims to provide an overview of the current status of protected area finance in the Southern and Eastern African region, covering 24 countries, to understand the extent of these challenges.

The launch of the Closing the Gap report will include a panel discussion with a diverse set of experts to discuss creative mechanisms for financial sustainability and to learn from innovative case studies from Eastern and Southern Africa.

As part of ensuring that seascapes and landscapes are managed effectively for nature and people, evaluation and adaptive management is essential.

This session will focus on presenting some of the successes and lessons learnt with a focus on transferring this learning to participants through exploration of common issues. It will also spotlight site-specific examples of best practices and how the assessments have been used towards adaptive management to achieve conservation objectives. Breakout panel sessions will be used to further explore thematic themes with participants able to contribute their own thoughts or experiences.

Evaluation of protected area management effectiveness (PAME) is recognised as a vital component of responsive, pro-active protected area management and is an essential component of adaptive management.

This session will introduce the IUCN WCPA Framework for assessing management effectiveness of protected areas and explore some of the main tools used to assess PAME by using site-specific examples. Through terrestrial and marine case studies from around the world and subsequent discussion, we will be able to start identifying which methodologies and approaches are most suitable for different protected areas.

This 2-hour webinar will introduce the IUCN Green List. The IUCN Green List is a voluntary sustainability standard and certification programme that improves the effectiveness of protected and conserved areas, worldwide. A ‘Green List’ area is one that delivers fair and effective conservation results for people and nature.

We will share stories from experts and practitioners who are working to achieve and evaluate their success. Experts from every continent will share their experiences. The global standard will be described in detail so we can all see and feel what it takes to achieve successful nature conservation.

The use of management effectiveness information for improving management and outcomes on the ground is most important at the site level. However, it can also be used to understand and improve performance at the level of the whole protected area system or regionally and globally to understand progress towards goals and targets for protected and conserved areas as part of global strategies. This session will span these scales from local to global to examine how management effectiveness information can be used to support these processes.