Collaborative Fund
The CCI Collaborative Fund for Conservation exists to support innovative, collaborative conservation projects undertaken by CCI partners.
Every Collaborative Fund project addresses a high priority biodiversity conservation issue and includes some combination of research, education, policy and practice.
In 2005, a study of the Cambridge conservation community supported by Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, identified the lack of funding opportunities as a key barrier to novel collaborations between academic researchers and conservation practitioners and policy makers. The CCI Collaborative Fund responds to this need.
The Fund’s purpose is to catalyse the delivery of innovative conservation solutions to reduce global biodiversity loss.
How it works
The Collaborative Fund provides grants, on a competitive basis, for high-quality collaborative projects that integrate research and analysis with conservation practice, policy and capacity building – projects that would not attract funding from traditional sources because of their interdisciplinary nature. Each project addresses a high priority global biodiversity conservation issue.
CCI partners are invited to apply for funding on an annual basis. Each application requires a minimum of three CCI partners to be involved, including at least one University Department and one conservation organisation. Applicants are encouraged to build the most appropriate project team for the issue they are addressing, and projects therefore often involve additional expertise from beyond the ‘core’ CCI partnership. An independent selection panel then determines which projects receive funding.
Collaborative Fund Projects
Search the full list of over 60 collaborative fund projects
Collaborative Fund project listCase Studies
Global Swimways- balancing conservation of migratory fishes and development
A swimway is a path used in fish migration, and they may be threatened by human activity such as dam building. The objective of the project was to undertake spatial analysis of dams and migratory fishes
Outputs:
Mapping the worlds migratory freshwater fish
* To showcase the value of a Global Swimways map, an online explorer has been created based on multiple metrics highlighting rivers that support migratory fish
* A linked map explorer demonstrates more detailed spatial presentation for selected Swimways, including marine migration routes.
Tool for policy makers and river managers
* The Freshwater Report Tool in IBAT www.ibat-alliance.org been enhanced to identify migratory freshwater species upstream/downstream of sites being screened for infrastructure development.
Raising awareness of the values of migratory fishes and vulnerability to future infrastructure developments
* A 24-hour Global Swimways webinar involving 57 speakers from 6 continents and 100 countries was attended by 2,000 participants.
* Following this, the Global Swimways webpage was created including story map; global map explorer; case study map explorer, and policy brief.
Quantifying global-level synergies and trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and nature-based climate solutions
This project set out to inform intergovernmental negotiations by combining CCI and wider expertise to quantify the emissions-reduction potential of biodiversity restoration actions, and the biodiversity consequences of contrasting nature-based climate solutions.
The overarching aim of this work is to provide timely data on the respective carbon and biodiversity consequences of conservation and climate change mitigation intervention strategies under discussion at Conferences of the Parties (COPs) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and forthcoming meetings of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. In doing so the team also aim to develop a wide network of collaborators to provide datarich assessments of the biodiversity benefits and limitations of nature-based climate solutions.
Outputs:
The team have developed a functioning pipeline to calculate Area of suitable habitat (AOH) for all mammal, bird and amphibian species using Google Earth Engine (GEE).
One of the planned outputs of this project will be code availability for AOH calculation using GEE with associated metadata and documentation to allow others to make use of the pipeline easily. The team have therefore been working to annotate the code used for this work and to and make it available on GitHub.
The team have secured preliminary results on the benefit to biodiversity (change in persistence) and to climate change mitigation (change in carbon sequestration) of these scenarios.
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