BECOME - Biosphere Reserves as Effective COnservation MEasures

The era of the Anthropocene is characterized by multiple interconnected crisis which threaten the integrity of the biosphere and humanity’s capacity to meet our basic needs. Diverse and pluralistic approaches to conservation, which go beyond Protected Areas and combine various land-uses and sustainable resource-use, are essential to bending the curve of biodiversity loss, as well as preserving the rich interconnections between nature and human wellbeing. There is an urgent need to understand and monitor effectiveness for biodiversity conservation of these types of approaches, and their contributions to local, regional, and national commitments to reversing biodiversity decline. This will allow us to maximise opportunities available to conservation in the long run whilst ensuring equitable approaches that enhance wellbeing amongst inhabitants and stewards of areas of biodiversity importance. BECOME will use UNESCO Biosphere Reserves (BRs) as model systems to understand how to manage synergies and trade-offs between conservation objectives and human development through pluralistic and inclusive landscape-scale approaches to conservation. BECOME will combine diverse methodologies from natural and social science to evaluate effectiveness of BR management, harnessing existing data, including long-term governance and biodiversity data, to analyze BR effectiveness across temporal and spatial scales. BECOME will also work with local BR stakeholders and rightsholders to capture and develop context-dependent but generalizable metrics which are adapted to BR objectives, facilitate the collaborative adaptive management learning feedback loop, and reflect synergies between conservation and development objectives.

BECOME will use UNESCO Biosphere Reserves (BRs) as model systems to understand how to manage synergies and trade-offs between conservation objectives and human development, through pluralistic and inclusive landscape-scale approaches to conservation. BECOME will take an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach, combining diverse methodologies for evaluating effectiveness of BR management in supporting conservation and biocultural diversity. BECOME will harness existing data resources and infrastructure, including longitudinal governance and biodiversity data, to analyze BR effectiveness across temporal and spatial scales. The project will contribute to the implementation of global and national policy frameworks towards the conservation of biological diversity by generating actionable knowledge. BECOME is uniquely positioned to perform much-needed longitudinal research on BR effectiveness across different metrics. BECOME will go beyond evaluating BR effectiveness through actors' self-evaluations, to help reduce bias and develop common methods to facilitate both compliance monitoring and adaptive management learning outcomes. BECOME will use existing data infrastructure to analyze changing trends in over 100 BRs worldwide whose management approaches have been followed for over 10 years, to understand changes in effectiveness. We will then harness big-data approaches to understand changes in land-use and modeled biodiversity change. The long-term monitoring of ecological and social variables performed in BECOME will help provide rare longitudinal trends related to social-ecological change and effectiveness of BRs. In addition to longitudinal studies supported by governance and big-data infrastructure, we will use case studies to take a mixed-methods approach to evaluate management and context-dependent meanings and measures of BR success, both present and future.