1.Front section - IUCN

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Friends for Life: New partners in support of protected areas
According to the parks’ General Superintendent
Brian O’Neill and the conservancy’s Executive
Director Greg Moore, the key to the conservancy’s
success is community awareness. It “has worked to
make the parks as well-known and well-loved as other
cherished public assets.” Its goal is to “elevate parks to
the same level of community importance as other
civic assets: as basic as schools; as essential as
libraries; as necessary as hospitals; as valuable as
clean air and water; as culturally important as
symphony halls, opera houses, and museums. The
conservancy has achieved this goal with a welldeveloped
strategy of research, opinion sampling,
marketing, branding, and public opinion-making”
(O’Neill and Moore, 2005).
Metropolitan umbrella organizations
A good example of an umbrella organization that
promotes cooperation systematically in an urban
region is Chicago Wilderness, a consortium of over
170 organizations in greater Chicago (population 9.4
million). Members include local, state, and national
agencies; museums and botanic gardens; colleges and
universities; and NGOs ranging from branches of
major national associations to small neighbourhood
groups. Four teams develop and carry out
collaborative activities in science, land management,
education and communication, and sustainability. The
“wilderness” is a mosaic of natural areas covering
some 100,000 hectares of protected lands and waters,
as well as many that are unprotected. These areas have
a high concentration of globally significant natural
communities, including tallgrass prairie and oak
savannah.
The ingredients for the consortium’s success are a
critical mass of people eager to make it succeed;
sharing of expertise and resources across
organizational boundaries; and early and highly
visible accomplishments. A year after the consortium
was formally launched in 1996, it published an
attractive atlas of biodiversity in the region; more than
50,000 copies have been distributed. Another early
accomplishment was agreement on a regional
biodiversity recovery plan that still serves as the guide
for the work of Chicago Wilderness. A further reason
for the consortium’s success is a “conscious decision
to define it not as an entity unto itself, but rather as a
Park van Woluwe, Brussels, Belgium
loose network of partners.” Its sole purpose is to
facilitate collaboration among its members. Its small
staff is housed within member organizations, rather
than centrally located (Hutcherson, 2005).
Urban biosphere reserves
Yet another approach to partnerships is the urban
biosphere reserve. Biosphere reserves are areas that
are internationally recognised within the framework
of UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere programme.
They consist of a core protected area, or cluster of
such areas, a buffer zone, and an outer transition area.
Groups in several countries are taking the biosphere
reserve concept, typically used in rural areas, and
applying it to urban settings. Under UNESCO
guidelines, each biosphere reserve is intended to
fulfill three complementary functions: (1)
conservation of landscapes, ecosystems, species, and
genetic variation; (2) local economic development
that is culturally, socially, and ecologically sustainable;
and (3) research, monitoring, education, and
information exchange related to local, national, and
global issues of conservation and development.
Biosphere reserves bring together stakeholders
ranging from conservation agencies and scientists to
economic interests and local authorities. In addition,
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