CCI’s Collaborative Fund for Conservation plays a critical role in fostering new collaborations across the CCI community and beyond. At the heart of the Fund is its focus on bringing together academic and practitioner communities to work together on projects that will have a significant impact on biodiversity conservation. With an emphasis on encouraging novel and innovative projects, the Collaborative Fund offers CCI partners the opportunity to develop projects that engage beyond the borders of their own organisations and disciplines.

Two categories were available for the 2022 selection process. The A. G. Leventis Foundation category was aimed at work in the high diversity tropics that advances the application of nature-based solutions and forms an important contribution to the UN Decade for Ecological Restoration; while testing conservation planning tools developed by CCI partners. The Rothschild Foundation category is intended for application of nature-based approaches to landscape conservation in the UK including conservation projects in mosaic landscapes.

The CCI Executive Director’s Office is delighted to announce the results of the latest round of the CCI Collaborative Fund for Conservation, and offers its congratulations to the successful project teams. The latest two projects to join the Collaborative Fund portfolio are as follows:

Scaling up agroforestry as a forest landscape conservation and sustainable livelihood strategy in West Africa through innovative supply chain tools

(A. G. Leventis Foundation category)

Project Lead: Rachael Garrett

Agroforestry has been identified as a powerful nature-based solution to climate mitigation, adaptation, biodiversity, and rural livelihood challenges. Despite the lack of rigorous causal evidence on its impact, numerous interventions have recently launched in West Africa to scale up agroforestry adoption. The proposed work has the potential to provide new and important evidence to inform those policy interventions to protect and connect tropical forests across West Africa by advancing the research and activities pursued by the project collaborators.

Collaborators: Department of Geography, Department of Zoology, RSPB, UNEP-WCMC, Traffic, University of Oxford, The University of Queensland, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology

Where will new woodlands yield the greatest benefits for bird conservation?

(Rothschild Foundation category)

Project Lead: Mark Wilson

The project team will produce opportunity maps that show how woodland bird species benefit from different woodland creation scenarios, in particular showing how these benefits are affected by woodland location and management. The project outputs will be used in conjunction with other resources to enable balanced assessments of the opportunities and constraints for birds associated with planned and proposed woodland creation. The resulting tool will enable a more strategic approach to woodland creation, its management, and wider decisions about land use.

Collaborators: British Trust for Ornithology, Cambridge University Department of Plant Sciences, Natural England, RSPB, Forestry Commission

In due course each of these projects will have its own dedicated page on the CCI website where you will be able to read more about what the project intends to do and how, and keep up to date with project progress.

CCI is hugely grateful for the support of the donors which make the Collaborative Fund possible.