Summary
Join the Ireland Section as we chat to Emma Verling about the power of learning from the bottom up: working towards a blueprint for community-led biodiversity protection and restoration.
Description
Communities have the capacity to play a key role and increase the success of multi-stakeholder nature restoration projects through their dedication, sense of ownership and long-term focus. However, examples of successful community-led projects, in which communities are the architects of the action - as opposed to the recipients of it – are not well documented. Therefore, the possibility of upscaling and replicating innovative and transformative approaches is reduced. This study used a Participatory Evaluation Research approach to explore a multi-stakeholder, community-led restoration project at Harper’s Island Wetlands, Co. Cork, Ireland, in order to understand the elements of success and extract key learnings for other communities. In order to rapidly upscale nature restoration and biodiversity protection globally, there is an urgent need to gain speed and momentum, identifying innovative approaches and disseminating them appropriately. The insights from this case study highlight four key components to be considered by groups at the beginning of community-led projects: setting up a core committee, assigning clear roles within the committee, creating a short-, medium- and long-term strategy and beginning practical tasks as soon as possible. This research and associated reflective learning brief serve as step towards preparing blueprints to inform research, policy and practice in this space to enable stakeholders to respond collectively.
Emma is a research fellow at the MaREI Centre at University College Cork, Ireland and is currently coordinating Marine SABRES a four-year, Horizon Europe funded project, which will co-design and test a Simple Social Ecological Systems approach (the Simple SES) to rapidly enable and upscale Ecosystem Based Management across Europe and beyond. Emma’s background is in Marine Ecology and she holds a BSc and a PhD from University College Cork. Prior to joining MaREI, she spent three years working on the transfer of marine Non-Indigenous Species at the Smithsonian Institute in the USA before spending ten years at the Joint Nature Conservation Committee as a scientific advisor to UK Government.
