Context-specific exploration of action situations for NBCAs in focus areas in the Global South
Work Package 2 complements the global analysis with deep-dive studies that engage stakeholders and communities in four countries: Rwanda (Virunga region) and Kenya (Lake Victoria region) in East Africa, Costa Rica (Brunca region) and Guatemala (Trifinio Region) in Central America. The vulnerable groups for BioCAM4 are communities surrounding conservation and restoration sites in the above regional focus areas. We understand vulnerability in terms of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. The communities in the focus areas are among the most affected by climate impacts, least responsible for it, and have reduced adaptive capacity due to social-economic fragility. We will explore existing and potential NBCAs in focus areas, identifying facilitating and hindering factors, to understand their outputs, outcomes, and impacts. Participatory design with practitioners, social scientists, vulnerable populations, and local and regional research end-users in our focus areas will engage local actors to implement effective and inclusive NBCAs, while providing bottom-up insights for improving indicators for tracking outcomes and impacts for the global database. Ethicists and biologists will support integration of justice principles and sound conservation science and social science perspectives with attention to local relevance.
Leadership in the Global South through carefully selected focus areas in Africa and Central America: Focus areas were selected through consultations within our team and network. In African regions, the convergence of climate change, biodiversity loss, and global issues create challenges intersecting with heightened poverty, institutional gaps, historical inequalities, and societal complexities. Current multilateral efforts have serious implementation shortfalls due to failures to synergize interventions for climate change, biodiversity loss, and other shocks, combined with limited grasp of complex socio-economic systems shaping the contextual backdrop of interventions. For example, in the Greater Virunga Region located in the Albertine rift, the Greater Virunga Landscape is a transborder region between Rwanda, Uganda, and Democratic Republic of Congo. One of the most biodiverse regions in the world, it holds nearly 50% of bird species and 40% of mammals in Africa, including the emblematic mountain gorilla. Local populations face critical issues: climate impacts, infrastructure, poverty and security, and human–wildlife conflict. Tourism, which sustains local communities, fuels competition with protected areas as wildlife protection goals may conflict with surrounding communities’ needs and interests. In Central American regions, social and ecological challenges are intertwined. For example, the transboundary region of Trifinio on the Central American Dry Corridor encompasses 7,500 m2 across El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, hosting a highly biodiverse ecosystem and three watersheds. It is home to 1M people across, about 60% of which live in rural areas contributing to 50% of economic activities in the region. This arid region is prone to climate impacts such as water scarcity with mid-summer drought starting earlier, lasting longer with more intensity, impacting local communities. About 70% of people live in extreme poverty, amplifying vulnerability to impacts on health and livelihoods. The selection of focus areas will facilitate comparative case studies within and between the two world regions, and will provide a proof of concept for future research.