Blog post: Study praises community-led environmental monitoring efforts and calls for state level funding and protections
Dr.scient. Finn Danielsen, lead of the UArctic Thematic Network on Collaborative Resource Management, from the Nordic Foundation for Development and Ecology (NORDECO) and UNEP-WCMC Chief Scientist Prof Neil Burgess discuss the findings of their comprehensive new study into the power of community monitoring.
From the world’s tropics to the poles, community monitoring of the environment is rapidly increasing.
Community monitoring is monitoring where local community members, often environmentally interested fishermen, hunters, farmers, forest product collectors and other resource users, gather and use data on natural resource systems and the environment.
A new study published in Annual Review of Environment and Resources has collated the key academic learnings about local-level community monitoring of the environment from the past five years and calls for government decision-makers to step up efforts to provide policy support for this vital activity on the ground.
The study, led by NORDECO and co-authored by UNEP-WCMC, reviewed the advantages and shortcomings of community monitoring, suggested how the activity can be more effective and discusses how the field of community monitoring is likely to evolve.
Read the full blog post on the UNEP-WCMC website.