The BIOPAMA (Biodiversity and Protected Areas Management) Programme started at a global inception workshop held at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)’s headquarters in Gland, Switzerland. Over fifty programme partners and experts participated in the workshop to better understand the project’s aims and contribute to programme planning. The programme will be implemented in two components, one focused on Protected Areas and the other on Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS). The Protect Areas component will be managed jointly by IUCN and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre while the ABS component will be managed by GIZ’s ABS Capacity Development Initiative. 

The project will establish regional observatories to adapt the project to regional contexts and facilitate dialogue between local, national, regional and international stakeholders. According to IUCN’s press release, the project will make better use of data on biodiversity and socio-economic issues to “enhance the understanding of the ecological and human factors that influence the management of protected areas. Regional capacity building programmes will be developed in partnerships with existing institutions, such as regional training centres and universities. These programmes will involve updating and expanding curricula on conservation and protected areas, developing tool kits to solve priority regional issues, training of decision makers, protected area staff, and others. The observatories will build on global efforts for collecting data, directly from the ground, from national services, and from international institutions holding relevant information on biodiversity, pressures and threats. They will have the general mandate of ensuring the awareness and effective buy-in to the necessity to maintain efforts on biodiversity conservation of political institutions of the three regions.” 

Read more the BIOPAMA Programme and the inception workshop here.