There is a growing demand from society to cover the
costs for nature conservation in more efficient and sustainable ways.
Meanwhile, there is also a demand for new jobs in the often depopulating
agricultural regions in Europe. To meet these demands, new education is
needed to help develop a new breed of entrepreneurs who can start up
and run new businesses based around wildlife, nature reserves and other
wild or natural areas.
Matthew
McLuckie, Enterprise Development Manager at Rewilding Europe at the
final symposium of the project ‘KIGO European Nature Entrepreneur’
Daan van der Linde
Conservation enterprises
Matthew McLuckie, Enterprise Development Manager at Rewilding Europe
spoke about the development of ‘conservation enterprises’ and the use of
‘conservation covenants’ in Europe, during his keynote speech at the
final symposium of the project ‘KIGO European Nature Entrepreneur’ at
Knowledge Estate Larenstein in June in Velp, the Netherlands. McLuckie
defined ‘conservation enterprises’ as commercial activities generating
economic and social benefits in ways that help meet conservation
objectives. McLuckie shared his insights on nature entrepreneurship in
Africa and Europe based on his experiences at Conservation Capital and
Rewilding Europe and underlined the opportunities in Europe for
eco-tourism and wildlife watching in particular. “People are prepared to
pay a lot of money to watch wildlife in Europe.” McLuckie explicates:
“at the isle of Mull white-tailed eagle watching attracts every year up
to £5 million of tourist spend on Mull”.
Educating nature entrepreneurs
The KIGO-project (Knowledge and Innovation in Green education) funded by
the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and was a collaboration between
Rewilding Europe and a number of educational institutes in The
Netherlands (Helicon Opleidingen, Van Hall Larenstein University of
Applied Sciences, and Wageningen University). During the final
symposium, several ideas from (potential) nature entrepreneurs were
showcased and several of them received mini-business consultancy from
Matthew McLuckie and Steven de Bie (the latter from Conservation
Consultancy).
The ATN stand at the networking market
Judith Jobse
Educational activities in Western Iberia
The Western Iberia rewilding area
on the border of Western Spain and North-Eastern Portugal was chosen as
the project’s focus area to experiment with educational activities like
the
Erasmus Intensive Programme on European Wilderness Entrepreneurship and
research on the topic of nature entrepreneurship. Collaboration with
the local partners of Rewilding Europe in Western Iberia – Fundación
Naturaleza y Hombre (FNYH) in Spain and Associação Transumância en
Natureza (ATN) in Portugal – was vital to carry out these educational
activities and research projects. The local NGO’s hosted bachelor and
master students to carry out thesis work and internship projects about
mapping the landownership around the Portuguese nature reserve Faia
Brava, the negotiation of space and the involvement of locals with Faia
Brava and ATN, and stakeholder involvement in FNYH. Western Iberia was
also featured in an
educational documentary film
produced in an additional WURKS project NatureToGo, in which a
diversity of stakeholders talk about how they see the future for Western
Iberia. At the start of the project, Diego Benito from FNYH was a
speaker at a KIGO ENE co-hosted symposium in 2012 entitled “The Business
of Nature Conservation. What Europe can learn from Africa”. The
Wageningen University reported on this symposium in their
student and staff magazine Resource on
April 5, 2012 and ATN was represented at the final symposium by a Dutch
board member and volunteers at the network marketplace.
Further ambitions
During these three years of the KIGO-project, many educational
activities have been developed to help provide this new breed of
conservationists with a set of entrepreneurial skills. There are still
many challenges to overcome, but one thing is clear; there is a demand
for this kind of entrepreneur. Even though the project has almost ended,
the curricula that have been developed at VHL University of Applied
Sciences, Wageningen University and Helicon Opleidingen will continue.
The partners of the KIGO-project European Nature Entrepreneur have the
ambition to seek European funds to further internationalise the
curricula and collaborative research on European nature
entrepreneurship.
More links and outputs of the project European Nature Entrepreneur can be found at
the website of the final symposium which will be updated with symposium pictures and a report soon.
See thw original post at the
blog of Rewilding Europe.
