Directories of green NGOs, by country/region
Books and articles
Organizations and Resources
| The online Biodiversity Economics Library is organized into six categories: biodiversity business, biodiversity finance, biodiversity incentives, biodiversity trade, biodiversity assessment, biodiversity valuation. |
The Biodiversity Support
Program operated from 1989-2001 as a consortium of WWF, TNC and WRI, with funding from
USAID. It supported conservation projects around the world as well as running an "Analysis and
Adaptive Management Program" aimed at "developing tools" to improve conservation practice. Their
website makes available their publications, including these:
|
| The Center for Conservation Finance of the World Wildife Fund is a very good source of information on the many options for public, private and joint public/private financing of conservation. |
| The Conservation Finance Alliance was created in 2002 as a "collaborative effort" among governments, public agencies and NGOs "to promote sufficient and sustainable funding for biodiversity conservation worldwide". It has formed an Interagency Planning Group on Environmental Funds; makes available a comprehensive Conservation Finance Guide; and maintains a bibiography of papers related to conservation finance. |
| The Conservation Measures Partnership brings together five large conservation NGOs and several other parties in a joint effort "to advance the practice of conservation by developing, testing and promoting tools to credibly assess and improve the practice of conservation actions". |
| ConserveOnline is a "meeting place for the conservation community" that facilitates discussion and sharing of information on conservation science and practice. Created and maintained by Conservation International. |
| The Conservation Practice Programme
of Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute has as its goal:
... to improve the
performance of conservation in practice. We aim to create an inter-face between academia and
conservation practitioners, to bridge the social-natural science divide and to offer an independent view
on the state and practice of international nature conservation.
The Programme hosted a lecture series in Feb.-March 2004, Green Power: Green Responsibility, which examined the challenges for green charities in today's more questioning public arena. The series' guest lecturers were the heads of six large NGOs. Interesting reading. |
| The Ecosystem Marketplace is a newish website that provides information on emerging markets and payment schemes for ecosystem services such as water quality, carbon sequestration and biodiversity. Excellent content. |
| A good information source on conservation is the Eldis
Biodiversity Resource Guide of the Eldis Programme at the Institute of Development Studies,
University of Sussex, England, which has reviews (synopses) of 655 publications (as of June 2005)
organized into these sub-topics: development vs. conservation;
conservation policy and the
Convention on Biological Diversity; climate change; protected areas; biodiversity and intellectual
property rights; biodiversity, agriculture and biotechnology; tourism and biodiversity; biodiversity
and forests.
|
| Environmental Grantmakers Association Membership organization to "help member organizations become more effective environmental grantmakers through information sharing, collaboration and networking". Includes an NGO directory that lists many small NGOs and a few larger ones. |
| Foundations of Success is a small U.S.-based NGO that works with conservation NGOs to help them develop "adaptive management systems" for conservation work and conduct monitoring and evaluation of their projects. It has carried on where the Biodiversity Conservation Network (now wrapped up) left off. |
| The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment. How bad is it? This 4-year study, completed in March 2005, was a thorough scientific review of the Earth's ecological health, problems and possible solutions, focussing particularly on ecosystem services and how their trends are affecting human well-being. Organized around four working groups, the assessment reports its findings on (1) conditions and trends; (2) plausible scenarios for the future; (3) response options; and (4) sub-global assessments of specific localities or regions. Sub-global assessments will continue and multi-scale assessments may be repeated every 5-10 years. Reports available now or in Sept. 2005 include Synthesis Reports on: the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment; Biodiversity; Desertification; Business & Industry; Wetlands; and Health. |
| NatureServe (formerly the Association for Biodiversity Information) provides information on species and ecosystems for use in conservation and land use planning, supporting the approximately 90 conservation data centres (CDCs) located in the Western Hemisphere. It also produces reports on "key topics related to biodiversity conservation" and technical reports. |
| The World Conservation Monitoring Center of the United Nations Environment Programme has information about protected areas, international policy and agreements, and species and habitats. It has its own publications, including a Biodiversity Series, and lists of other publications. |
Directories of green NGOs, by country/region
|
Asia Pacific countries
Central and Eastern Europe Canada India Malaysia Metiterranean Philippines former Soviet Union countries Russia, Ukraine, Belarlus, Armenia, Azerbijan, Georgia, Kazakstan, Krgystan, Moldava, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, & Uzbekistan Sri Lanka UK |
Books and articles
This is a incipient selection of literature relating to green NGOs. Listed in reverse chronological order.- Cleary, D. 2006. The questionable effectiveness of science spending by
international conservation organizations in the tropics. Conservation Biology 20:733-738.
The author, who directs TNC's Amazon Basin program, argues, using the Amazon for
illustration, that in the face of stagnant funding for conservation and intensifying threats, conservation
organizations should:
- spend less on biological research (notably ecoregional analysis) so that more can be spent on conservation action;
- engage in less site-specific monitoring and more monitoring at the level of national and regional protected areas systems;
- pay more attention to ongoing large-scale commercial threats, particularly agribusiness, and economic and political factors; and
- employ cost-benefit analysis in allocating their resources.
Seven other TNC scientists refute Cleary's essay two issues later (Conservation Biology 20:1567-1568), stressing the importance of science and monitoring and arguing that science generates more funding than it uses, to which Cleary responds by pointing out that he was only talking about science and monitoring done by conservation organizations in the tropics and in the circumstance of inadequate funding. - Nature's Keepers: The Remarkable Story of How The Nature Conservancy Became the Largest Environmental Organization in the World by Bill Birchard (Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2005 ). A freelance journalist's behind-the-scences account of TNC's extraordinary half-century development into a huge and successful (problems and weaknesses notwithstanding) NGO. 252 pp.
- Lambert, A.B. 2005. Potential for greater private spending on conservation. Oral presentation at the Ecological Society of America annual meeting, Montreal, 2005. full text
- Chapin, Mac. 2004. A Challenge to Conservationists. World Watch magazine, Nov./Dec. 2004 issue. World Watch Institute. View article as pdf file View Conservation International's response
- Adams, W.M. et al. 2004. Biodiversity Conservation and
the Eradication of Poverty.
Science 306: 1146-1149. View paper as pdf file This
review paper examines the interactions between biodiversity conservation and programs aimed
at poverty reduction, including conflicts (as with economic costs to local people from protected areas)
and commonalities. The diversity of interactions is reflected in the varying views that prevail on this
subject, of which the authors identify four distinct broad views:
- Poverty and conservation are separate policy realms.
- Poverty is a critical constraint on conservation.
- Conservation should not compromise poverty reduction.
- Poverty reduction depends on living resource conservation.
- Getting Biodiversity Projects to Work: Towards More Effective Conservation and Development. Edited by Thomas O. McShane and Michael P. Wells (Columbia University Press, 2004). The sixteen included articles by various authors recount the short history of integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) and illuminate many of the problems that have beset them. In a concluding chapter, the editors (with three others) remark that "many ICDPs were based on naive assumptions" and that "too much was being expected in too short a time with inadequate tools". They summarize "what went wrong" and make suggestions for improving future ICDPs. Full synopsis
- Christensen, J. 2003. Auditing conservation in an age of accountability. Conservation in Practice 4(3):12-19.
- Conservancy: The Land Trust Movement in America, by Richard Brewer (Dartmouth College, 2003). 348 pp.
- A series of articles that ran 4-6 May 2003 in The Washington Post critiqued aspects of The Nature Conservancy and is available for a fee through The Post's archives. We give our synopsis of the series and its aftermath.
- A newspaper series that appeared in the Sacramento Bee in April 2001 took a critical look at American ENGOs, examining "the high-powered fund raising, the litigation and the public relations machine that has come to characterize much of the [environmental] movement today". The series was based on 16 months of research by Tom Knudson, The Bee's Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental writer. These web pages include feedback to the series
- Conservation Science and Action (1998, William J. Sutherland, ed., Blackwell) This text book covers the key topics in conservation science and includes chapters on the economics of nature conservation; conservation policy and politics; and conservation and development.
- Ngos and Environmental Policies by David Potter (Frank Cass & Co., 1996). Publisher's statement: "Covering the work of non-governmental organizations in trying to change the environmental policies of governments and businesses, this study looks at field research in Asia and Africa, and relates it to theoretical issues in the academic field. " [Has anyone read this book? We'd welcome a mini-review.]
