Archive for: Conservation

Supporting Community & Ecosystem Health: A guide on why, and how, to include community health and rights based family planning in conservation programmes

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The aim of this guide is to outline the unmet need for family planning that exists in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, highlight the barriers to accessing and using family planning that exist for many girls and women, explain why conservation organizations are uniquely placed to introduce such activities to the communities they work with, and provide guidance for any organization that wishes to start a program to tackle this issue. It is based on CHASE Africa’s experience over the past ten years of supporting local partners to run, and in several cases set-up, community health and family planning programs in Kenya and Uganda. While some of the guidance is context specific, the guide highlights how programs could be adapted to other situations and circumstances.

Year: 2021

Source: CHASE Africa

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Community Health

Conservation

Family Planning

Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

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Thriving Together Campaign

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A hugely diverse alliance of over 150 organisations working in 170 countries support the Thriving Together statement. Whether their work has a focus on conserving endangered species, providing family planning services, restoring habitats, promoting sexual and reproductive health and rights or a range of other human and environmental health issues, they all agree with the Thriving Together statement. At the heart of the statement is the widespread agreement, for the first time, that removal of barriers to family planning is critically important not only for women and girls, but also for environmental conservation and biodiversity. The Trust’s paper “Removing Barriers to Family Planning, Empowering Sustainable Environmental Conservation: A Background Paper and Call for Action” summarises why removing barriers to family planning is critical for women’s and girls’ health and empowerment, and sustainable environmental conservation.

Source: Margaret Pyke Trust

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    Biodiversity

    Conservation

    Family Planning

    Women's Empowerment

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    The Population, Health and Environment (PHE) Pathway to Livelihoods Improvement: Lessons and Best Practices from Nepal

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    This report describes the accomplishments and lessons learned by the Environmental Health Project (CDM) as part of the design and implementation of a pilot project to address community health and conservation issues, as requested by USAID/Nepal. The project was devised to build the self-help capacity of CFUGs to implement and sustain integrated approaches to population, health and environment (PHE) that also contribute to sustainable livelihood development. The pilot engaged 114 CFUGs in a variety of PHE advocacy, awareness-raising and service delivery activities during 2006-2008. RIMS-Nepal, WWF-Nepal, and ADRA-Nepal collaborated with CDM on this initiative. The livelihood, health and conservation accomplishments detailed here provide insights and best practices for PHE practitioners.

    Year: 2009

    Source: United States Agency for International Development | CDM International

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      Advocacy

      Community Health

      Conservation

      Implementation

      Integration

      Project Design

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      The History of PHE in Madagascar: Looking Back Over the Last 25 Years and Forward to the Next Chapter

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      Madagascar has a rich history of integrated conservation and development initiatives. This report provides an overview of the evolution of the integrated PHE approach in Madagascar from the late 1980s through until the present day, along with a summary of opportunities and challenges relating to the scale up of this approach moving forward. It draws heavily on several excellent reports published during the mid-late 2000s, supplemented by grey literature and personal communications. This report is organised chronologically, with overlapping phases reflecting key developments in policy and practice. Major projects and players are highlighted at each stage, in addition to important approaches and lessons learned.

      Year: 2014

      Source: Blue Ventures | The Madagascar PHE Network

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        Conservation

        Economic Development

        Integration

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        The Environment as a Strategic Healthcare Partner

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        The purpose of this review is to describe the growing consensus regarding the contribution of natural processes – ‘nature’ – to human health. Globally, natural environments are becoming smaller and critically degraded because of various human-related factors. Consequently, some of the ‘free’ health benefits nature confers are being lost. This is especially problematic for people in rural areas with limited access to clinical services whose lives depend closely upon nature. The “Millennium Ecosystem Assessment” explored ecosystem changes and their subsequent effects on human well-being, including health. Global Burden of Disease studies have also revealed the importance of environmental factors to health. Not coincidentally, geographic areas in the two research efforts overlap, but convincing research describing how conserving healthy environments may positively affect human health remains lacking. Establishing ecosystem-human health causal linkages via traditional epidemiological approaches is challenging. Innovative research initiatives are increasing our understanding and appreciation of nature’s role as a provider of health, rendering conservation potentially a healthcare strategy. Transdisciplinary university teaching is also playing a role in broadening the awareness of these important linkages and developing research skills to meet the challenge.

        Year: 2013

        Source: Current Opinion in Obstetrics & Gynecology

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          Community Health

          Conservation

          Environment

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          Resource Management and Fertility in Mexico’s Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve: Campos, Cash, and Contraception in the Lobster Fishing Village of Punta Allen

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          This case study examines the link between marine resource management and the contraceptive use among married couples in the lobster-fishing village of Punta Allen, located in the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve, Quintana Roo, Mexico. Several reasons appear to contribute to small desired and actual family sizes, including a medical clinic staff effective in promoting family planning, cooperative and private resource ownership, changing cultural attitudes, geographical limitations to population and economic growth, and a desire to conserve the environment for aesthetic and economic motives.

          Year: 2008

          Source: Population and Environment

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            Coastal

            Conservation

            Economic Development

            Family Planning

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            Providing Family Planning Services to Remote Communities in Areas of High Biodiversity Through a Population-Health-Environment Programme in Madagascar

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            Population-Health-Environment (PHE) is an interdisciplinary model of programme design which recognises the complex interconnections between people, their health and their environment. PHE responds holistically to the challenges faced by ecosystems and the communities dependent on them, with thematically distinct but interconnected work strands sharing the same infrastructure, resources and goals. This has been shown to achieve better outcomes than tackling health and environmental issues in isolation. This paper shows how PHE programme design has been used by Blue Ventures for providing family planning services in a remote, biodiverse coastal region in southwest Madagascar. The PHE programme has integrated family planning services into a pre-existing, community-based conservation programme, aided by the established infrastructure and good community relations developed by the conservation workers. Implementation of the programme has led to a strong uptake of family planning services, and couples in the region are now able to make their own family planning choices. Successes and challenges of the programme are discussed.

            Year: 2014

            Source: Reproductive Health Matters

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              Community Outreach

              Conservation

              Family Planning

              Integration

              Project Design

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              Poverty and Biodiversity: Measuring the Overlap of Human Poverty and Biodiversity Hotspots

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              In an effort to prioritize conservation efforts, scientists developed the concept of biodiversity hotspots. Since most hotspots are located in countries where poverty is widespread, the success of conservation efforts depends in part upon a recognition that poverty can be a significant constraint on conservation, and at the same time conservation could be an important component of alleviating long-term poverty. This paper presents five key socioeconomic poverty indicators (access to water, undernourishment, potential population pressure, number living below poverty line and debt service) and integrates them with an ecologically based hotspots analysis in order to illustrate the magnitude of the overlap between biological conservation and poverty. The analysis here suggests that the overlap between severe, multifaceted poverty and key areas of global biodiversity is great and needs to be acknowledged. Understanding the magnitude of overlap and interactions among poverty, conservation and macroeconomic processes is crucial for identifying illusive, yet possible, win–win solutions.

              Year: 2007

              Source: Ecological Economics

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                Biodiversity

                Conservation

                Population

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                Population, Sexual and Reproductive Health, Rights and Sustainable Development: Forging a Common Agenda

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                This article suggests that sexual and reproductive health and rights activists seeking to influence the post-2015 international development paradigm must work with sustainable development advocates concerned with a range of issues, including climate change, environmental issues, and food and water security, and that a way of building bridges with these communities is to demonstrate how sexual and reproductive health and rights are relevant for these issues. An understanding of population dynamics, including urbanization and migration, as well as population growth, can help to clarify these links. This article therefore suggests that whether or not sexual and reproductive health and rights activists can overcome resistance to discussing “population”, become more knowledgeable about other sustainable development issues, and work with others in those fields to advance the global sustainable development agenda are crucial questions for the coming months. The article also contends that it is possible to care about population dynamics (including ageing and problems faced by countries with a high proportion of young people) and care about human rights at the same time. It expresses concern that, if sexual and reproductive health and rights advocates do not participate in the population dynamics discourse, the field will be left free for those for whom respecting and protecting rights may be less of a priority.

                Year: 2014

                Source: Reproductive Health Matters

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                  Climate Change

                  Conservation

                  Environment

                  Integration

                  Population

                  Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

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                  Population, Health and Environment in Africa and Asia: An Evaluation of WWF’s USAID and Johnson & Johnson-Supported Projects

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                  This report describes the results of a 2007 evaluation of WWF (World Wildlife Fund) PHE (Population, Health and Environment) projects sponsored by Johnson & Johnson and USAID (the U.S. Agency for International Development). The PHE sites were located in Africa and Asia, where human-environment interactions are in constant flux, human populations are growing rapidly, and they depend most directly on and affect most profoundly some of the richest forest and marine ecosystems on Earth. The PHE projects facilitated basic health care and RH (reproductive health) provision with the working thesis that improving human health and environmental conservation jointly adds value to each independently. The report also recommends future actions on sustainability and scale up of PHE approaches, improved data collection and monitoring and technical support.

                  Year: 2008

                  Source: World Wildlife Fund

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                    Community Health

                    Conservation

                    Integration

                    Monitoring & Evaluation

                    Scale-up

                    Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

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