Select an area of the above diagram to learn more about our approach to conservation.
Example from the Field
Learn how The Nature Conservancy developed conservation strategies for the Yunnan Great Rivers Project.
Developing Strategies
The Nature Conservancy is a leading international, nonprofit organization with the mission of preserving the plants, animals and natural communities that represent the diversity of life on Earth by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive.
Learn more about The Nature Conservancy’s conservation process.
To address ecoregional priorities and meet ecoregional goals, The Nature Conservancy develops and implements conservation strategies at two basic geographic scales.
Single-Area Strategies
For all priority conservation areas in which the Conservancy invests resources directly or through partnerships, we employ the 5-S Framework for Conservation Project Management. This methodology provides local Conservancy programs and partners with a well-tested, science-based process for developing and evaluating the effectiveness of conservation strategies that achieve tangible results.
The 5-S planning approach focuses on the following components:
- Systems
The focal conservation targets and their key ecological attributes.
- Stresses
The most serious types of destruction or degradation affecting the conservation targets or key ecological attributes.
- Sources of stress
The causes or agents of destruction or degradation.
- Strategies
The full array of actions necessary to abate the threats or enhance the viability of the conservation targets.
- Success measures
The monitoring process for assessing progress in abating threats and improving the biodiversity health of a conservation area.
Many Conservancy programs also conduct a comprehensive situation analysis of local economic, political and social conditions and stakeholder interests as part of the 5-S planning approach. These analyses create a plan for taking action that can then be tracked and adjusted as we gain experience so as to enable adaptive management.
Multi-Area Strategies
Every ecoregional assessment also identifies priorities that affect multiple conservation areas. These priorities include wide-ranging targets, pervasive critical threats, and institutions and mechanisms that affect multiple conservation areas within a given portfolio, among several portfolios or across geopolitical boundaries. Single-area strategies are typically insufficient to address such multi-area priorities. Thus, to complement single-area strategies, the Conservancy designs conservation strategies of sufficient scope and scale to address these multi-area priorities. For these strategies, we employ the same 5-S Framework for Conservation Project Management and employ policy-based approaches that support site-level activities.
Learn about how we use our conservation tools to take action.
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