Emily Barbo

Symposium 2023 Cross-cutting Theme: Fostering Relationships

The Salazar Center’s fifth International Symposium on Conservation Impact focused on how to achieve a nature-positive future together, to catapult our communities towards durable, high-impact outcomes for climate, biodiversity, and human well-being.

We brought together diverse thought leaders to share ideas and best practices for moving beyond individual pilot projects to build lasting systems change for nature and communities across North America. Our two-day dialogue elevated the interconnectedness of biodiversity loss and climate change, both in terms of their impacts and solutions, while highlighting how a nature-based approach can enhance the resilience of both our planet and society. By design, we assembled speakers with varied expertise and backgrounds to showcase the breadth of differing, and sometimes contrarian, opinions and ideas related to our theme. Our intent with this approach was to facilitate our attendees’ ability to deepen their understanding of the issues and perhaps challenge their perspectives.

The 2023 Symposium Synthesis Report summarizes five cross-cutting themes that emerged from the Symposium, as well as key takeaways from each session. The themes reflect ideas, needs, and opportunities raised multiple times by speakers or attendees. Like the interconnectedness of biodiversity and climate, each theme is also connected to the next. Together, they help illuminate potential shared pathways to enrich biodiversity and build long-term, stable societies and healthy economies across North America. 

Don’t have time to read the full report? No problem! We’ve broken it down so you can focus on what resonates the most right now.

Cross-cutting Theme: Fostering Relationships

“Progress moves at the speed of trust.” – James Rattling Leaf 

The value of rooting our climate and biodiversity work in relationship-building reverberated powerfully throughout the Symposium. Despite the urgency of the climate and biodiversity crises, speakers encouraged the conservation community to slow down and intentionally build meaningful relationships with partners and leaders from across sectors and organizations, and particularly with the frontline and Indigenous communities who are central to this work. Creating an effective and truly inclusive NBS community necessitates a deeper understanding of and ability to communicate with all those touched by the biodiversity and climate crises to develop shared values and a common language. For North America to reach a nature-positive future, we must lead with community and create solutions built on a foundation of trust.

The knowledge and understanding of frontline communities and Indigenous peoples are foundational to building successful strategies for addressing climate and biodiversity risks and implementing effective nature-based solutions. Community-driven data is as important as the data derived from conventional Western science, and achieving a nature-positive future will be difficult without fully incorporating these diverse sources of expertise.

As we work towards building better relationships within and across the conservation field, several speakers highlighted the value of leaning into discomfort. Accommodating difficult conversations will help us reimagine the systems driving the climate and biodiversity crises. Globally, Indigenous peoples manage 80% of the remaining intact biodiversity. This is both a challenge and an opportunity to build bridges that connect Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and practices with the culture and systems of the dominant society. Perhaps we should reframe thinking about NBS as thinking about Indigenous-based solutions. However, if we are to do that, we must first resolve the roots of conflict between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples through a process of reconciliation.

Ethical Space is a key mechanism to enable successful reconciliation, which provides the means for respectful government-to-government dialogue and to deeply “understand what is important to be understood… and create something new.”

 

Download the full 2023 Symposium Synthesis Report