Hi everyone. Welcome to this session on community-based monitoring, so just a brief introduction. CBM or community-based monitoring is not really a new methodology or process. Indigenous peoples in local communities have a long history of observing socioenvironmental changes and taking collective action accordingly. CBM has evolved into a tool to facilitate more inclusive decision-making on issues that are important to members of communities. That's social issues, economic, environmental, or other. There are many forms of collective monitoring. At the bottom there you'll see there's everything from community-led monitoring up until participatory science and citizen science, and each firm has let's say their own organizing bodies. In some cases, communities, civil society organizations, government programs, or research institutions. In our case today we focus on community-based monitoring from communities, civil society organizations and researchers. In this case, oftentimes it's communities, and CSOs that are most involved. Some potential risks for researchers that are worth mentioning. Researchers often dominate during the ideation, and the design, and evaluation of Data. Data collected can often be used by researchers and not by local communities, and research doesn't always involve communities beyond data collection. It's important to keep this in mind if you are doing this work from the standpoint of a research institution to avoid these risks at all costs. CBM in the context of climate change historically has been used for nationally emissions mitigations programs, so that includes projects like REDD due to their ability to manage and conserve these rich carbon forests yet a lot of these communities are often the least responsible for the global greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, generally most vulnerable to climate change impacts. What about these actual local climate change impacts and risks? There's been a shift from CBM in the context of climate change from CBM that is measuring or contributing to emissions mitigation to CBM that is now focusing on local impacts, resilience, and adaptation planning for indigenous peoples and local communities. This shift is really important and timely. In addition to monitoring impacts, this shift has the potential to uphold rights and sustain livelihoods and traditional knowledge of IPLC in the fight against climate change. It is more inclusive towards non forest peoples therefore encompassing full diversity of IPLC and broader complexities of climate change across different bioregion. In this context also IPLC communities organizations are particularly essential which we'll be focusing on shortly. CBM as a form of agency can be used by communities and community organizations to a geolocalise territorial boundaries and important landmarks. It can be used to measure a stock of natural resources and develop baseline data such as timber carbons species and it can be used to monitor and record changes in the socioeconomic and natural systems. With these systems in place, the way that these communities have better agencies to build evidence-based policies and have a stronger collective voice. It also helps them to demonstrate management capacity for national programs or funding programs. It also helps to formularize land titles and territorial claims, mitigate or adapt to environmental or social changes proactively and not as passive standard or passive communities, and it also allows them to respond to foreign entity intrusions such as an extractive company, or even pollution, or a government program to transfer traditional knowledge, history, and cultural practices to younger generations and to reduce a technical gap by upholding traditional livelihoods with existing 21st century technology essentially. There are several examples of CBM for local climate change impacts and here or some of them. You will see a lot of them are based in North America with SIKU or the indigenous community based climate monitoring program hosted by the Canadian government or Snowchange Cooperative. In our case, we focus on the Local Indicators of Climate Change Impacts Observation Network. This observation network has essentially taken the LICCI project and apply to community-based approach to the LICCI project and specifically to OpenTek which you may have seen in previous slides. As a reminder, OpenTek is an open source technology to geolocalise observations and knowledge on local climate change impacts. Some of the steps that we've taken to align climate change, CBM with community organizations and local priorities in the context of LICCI is to build new partnerships with interested local organizations that have close relationships with interested communities and the three organizations on the right to redesign the tool and surveys according to community needs, cultural protocols, and local contexts, and to test and confirm usefulness, accessibility, and relevance of the new tool. Some of the preliminary results of this new monitoring application is at the focus is local and not global. It has a rights-based approach as well. They have context-specific surveys. There are surveys that are on traditional knowledge whereas other questions might be on specific gender-related impacts or adaptation solutions. There's a flexible format for data entry, so individuals or users can enter information via photos or videos even video links or texts, and the data output is flexible. You can take out information in form of PDF or an Excel. Also, the applications are being developed in different languages, so beyond English, and French, or Spanish as a standard for CBM. They're now being translated in Nepali, and Thai, Vietnamese, and hopefully more. In terms of data sovereignty in local protocols for knowledge sharing, we are trying to follow the CARE principles of indigenous data sovereignty, and traditional knowledge, and biocultural labels. In this case; ownership, we are aiming for more flexible ownership. Users can determine how their data is being used and who gets to own it whether it stays in a research institution or whether it stays with a local organization it s up to the user. Some other preliminary results for the application is that the communities are able to geolocalise information not just on a map, but in relation to landmarks that are relevant to them such as: the village, or the forest, or the river. These are context-specific survey questions, including, for example, consequences of impacts. So does the impact have potential to threaten livelihoods, or weaken the economy, or change traditional practices. Also questions on adaptation. Has a community adopted an adaptation strategy, or has the government, s or other agencies provided support? Also for traditional knowledge, who has traditional knowledge in the community? What type of traditional knowledge? Insects, wind, etc. Finally, in the next phase of this project, we hope to include a modularity feature, which would allow organizations to select which questions and themes are most useful to them and add or delete and edit questions in their own language within the app directly. We hope you've enjoyed and see you next time.
