Community Based Education to Promote Nature Conservation

Without the real cooperation of local communities and landowners, conservation efforts cannot be significantly successful. Local people manage natural resources on a day to day basis and can preserve or overexploit the resources for their livelihoods. Therefore, educating local communities and raising their awareness need to be in the priority agenda of conservation. This paper focuses on indigenous and local communities who live in rural areas of high natural resources and biological diversity and their important role in nature conservation. Such communities are mostly poor and consume natural resources as a means of maintaining their daily livelihoods. This paper presents arguments for using education as a tool to promote conservation among local communities. Effective natural resource management techniques and traditional knowledge of managing resources sustainably could be brought back to local people through practical educational programmes. Subsequently, the paper recommends some methods for educating local communities. Community-based natural resource management and using bottom up approach in policy development have been proposed as an effective ways to educate local communities and to promote conservation efforts.

Author(s): Samim Hoshmand*

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