Mission Statement

Biodiversity and landscape conservation should be considered on a global scale rather than within geopolitical boundaries. Conservation Beyond Borders (CBB) promotes collaborative transboundary research and education designed to benefit local communities and optimize ecosystem integrity. CBB is committed to doing so by sustainable and innovative conservation strategies, which consider the full spectrum of biological, ecological, social, political and economic trade-offs. These strategies will serve as tools to advance scientific knowledge and optimize both landscape and species management practices.
A unique example is capacity building. Regional capacity building increases the degree to which local communities can efficiently manage the following: (1) populations of endangered/keystone/rare species, (2) the complexity of ecosystems such as national parks, (3) health hazards, and (4) their livelihood. This is done by increasing awareness, through education programs. As a direct result, the long term need for interventions by the developed world is reduced. Hence, local communities become sustainable and traditional and unique life practices are preserved.

Objectives:

• Facilitate the interface between humans and their environment.
• Bridge the gap between ecosystem needs and management practices on local, regional, national and international scales.
• Interwove local social and economic trade-offs, which result from political boundaries, into the platform of planning for sustainable development and conservation.
• Building local capacity for wildlife management while preserving traditional lifestyles.
• Minimizing and eliminating predominant behaviors that induce the impact of life threatening hazards.
• Optimize national and international biodiversity related decision making by based on scientific knowledge.

Scope:

Conservation Beyond Borders is currently working in the USA, Central America, West Africa, South Africa, and across the middle east.

Examples of specific studies:

• Preserving a hidden traditional lifestyle while eradicating epidemics which are long forgotten in the developed world
• The role of science in biodiversity related decision making
• The impact of politically unstable regimes on national and international conservation funding
• Increasing national transparency, responsibility, defensibility, and accountability in times of everyday social violence
• Mathematical models predict the efficiency of species and ecosystem management.