Webinar: From Participatory Biodiversity and Climate Monitoring to Modelling – Assessing Bio-Indicators for Nature-based Solutions
The Swiss NGO DRR Platform invites you to a webinar on “Assessing Biodiversity and other Bio-Indicators for Nature-based Solutions”.
The challenges in M&E systems for projects in the field of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are manifold – hard accessibility of remote project regions, slow and complex changes in ecosystems with adaptation measures that may take years to reach maturity, as well as uncertainties regarding likely climate changes and impacts. In addition, scientific evidence on how our technical interventions will affect the ecosystem and socio-economic parameters may be scarce.
Given these uncertainties, it is crucial to define the right indicators to establish an M&E system that provides the necessary information to understand the extent to which the design or the implementation of NbS measures needs to be adjusted. A sound M&E system not only enables iterative and adaptive management that can prevent maladaptation, but also provides the opportunity to expand the evidence base for NbS, supporting efforts to scale NbS across all regions and sectors.
The Swiss NGO DRR Platform has invited 3 speakers to talk about their experiences on how to make M&E systems for NbS projects practical and efficient given limited resources:
Assessing Ecosystem Services and Health in Space and Time:
Dr. Stefan Strohmeier (BOKU University) is an expert on all things related to soil erosion and surface hydrology and will explore with us different indicators and methods to measure ecosystem changes that occur due to our interventions. Stefan will share his experience on how to combine civil society observations, hands on data collection (e.g. through soil sampling or vegetation cover assessment) and then how to use this data to run surface runoff and erosion models, which allow us make forecasts about our project impact in the future, beyond our short project period.
How can civil society observations help reconstruct the ecological balance for our baseline scenario? What are the different parameters of soil health that can
be measured? And how can we use these data to tell us more about our ultimate goal, to increase the resilience of our beneficiaries to climate and disaster risks? Using a case study from Ethiopia and other contexts, Stefan will introduce us to his practical research and help us answer these questions.
Climate and Biodiversity Monitoring in Central America:
Samuel Secaira (Project Coordinator Asociacion Vivamos Mejor Guatemala) and Fabio Cresto (consultant climate change adaptation) will present the participatory climate and biodiversity monitoring approach Vivamos Mejor and their project partners in Central America have been developing in recent years. While project participants have been involved in the collection and analysis of climate data such as precipitation data for over three years, the monitoring system for biodiversity indicators has just been launched. We will learn first-hand about the challenges and opportunities of developing the approach and putting it into practice.
CONTACT AND FURTHER INFORMATION
Further information: aphilipona(at)caritas.ch
