WWF Ecoregions

Climate Camp 2006: Designing defence strategies against climate change

In April 2006, WWF organised its first ever Climate Camp for ecoregion defence strategies against climate change. The training workshop received over 130 visitors, mainly managers of ecoregions and protected areas, all of whom are developing conservation defence strategies in the fight against the impacts of climate change.

“Climate change is one of the greatest challenges conservation practitioners have ever faced,” says Lara Hansen, Chief Scientist of WWF’s global climate change programme.

“While virtually every ecoregion currently recognizes it as a key threat, we often feel at a loss as to what we can do about it or where we will find the capacity to work on it. But we are running out of time; climate change is not a threat we can ignore or wait to work on later.”

WWF hosted the week-long course with 4 clear objectives:

1. Provide a solid understanding of climate science and the implications for conservation.
   
   
2. Create networks of individuals working on similar habitat types to enable information exchange.
   
   
3. Develop a climate change project for each ecoregion, comprising an adaptation strategy or support for efforts on mitigation of climate change, or both.
   
   
4. Provide an opportunity to present these projects to external partners, who will also be in attendance at climate camp and may be interested in funding such endeavours.

The underlying goal of Climate Camp is to strengthen each ecoregion’s ability to respond to climate change and promote communication across the conservation community on this important issue.


Climate Camp was organised in cooperation with Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy.