Tehran, November 25, 2007- A "Local Participation and Natural Resources Management"workshop held here with the participation of all biodiversity conservation projects supported by UNDP in Iran, aimed to reach to a common understanding of local participation methods and techniques and create a community of practice for local participation and environmental management between selected projects and agencies.

The participants mainly represented the provincial project offices and active local NGOs at the project sites, in addition to representatives from the national project offices in the Department of Environment and Mike Ounstedt, an international consultant on local participation in biodiversity conservation.

The workshop was opened by UNDP Deputy Resident Representative Ms. Elzira Sagynbaeva who put emphasis on the need for the integration of participatory approaches into biodiversity protection schemes. Referring to the successful example of the Carbon Sequestration project, she noted that natural resource management had to take into account the needs and priorities at the local level and benefit from local community participation.

Mr. Ounstedt said at the workshop that the initiative could very well address internally the different approaches to biodiversity conservation, and to bring biodiversity projects in Iran together in one room. He noted that there was a need for discussion in order to find new ways to address environmental challenges in Iran. “For many years”, he said, “there has been a ‘purist’ approach to biodiversity conservation, where the solution have been to raise a fence around the threatened species, or establish a protected area with guards to keep hunters and human intervention out. In many countries this purist approach has been the norm, but Ounstedt said it had been a rather unrealistic approach to conservation and since the early nineties new ways had achieved prevalence, where the role of people as a part of the ecosystem is given preeminence and the participation of local communities is central to biodiversity conservation. This approach has also changed from emphasizing the conservation of one or a few selected species, to including a wider selection that can sustain a larger ecosystem.

However, although this way of biodiversity conservation has found its way into environment activities in large parts of the world, this has yet to be fully implemented in Iran. In cooperation with the Department of Environment, UNDP’s initiative supports this “lower level” approach through several biodiversity projects that are based upon the participation of local communities, where a series of factors are playing important roles in the symbiosis between local communities and the environment. UNDP also supports a “higher level” approach, where Governmental stakeholders are encouraged to engage in dialogue on the challenges, and to find common interest areas that can sustain the ecosystems and the biodiversity.