SEED Madagascar has coordinated community-focused conservation projects in south-eastern Madagascar for 20 years. As a result, the organisation has seen many conservation successes, and has learnt many lessons along the way. Such successes include the increase in numbers of the threatened bat species Pteropus rufus, the protection and restoration of important littoral forest fragments and their associated species, and strong relationships built with local community members to facilitate community-level conservation efforts.
With the biodiversity decline of Madagascar often portrayed as a crisis in both the media and the scientific literature, SEED recognises the ever-increasing importance to communicate where conservation action has made a positive impact on species recovery. In addition, it is equally important to highlight the local individuals going out of their way to contribute to these efforts. We feel that joining the ConservationNOW network would provide the best first step in achieving this. With over 14,000 followers across our social media accounts, we hope to continue to increase awareness of our successes and inspire others with very clear examples of how conservation has worked in Madagascar.
The ConservationNOW network would provide SEED with a new opportunity to share these stories with the wider conservation community and ensure that the organisation’s conservation efforts continue to be driven towards solution-focused initiatives. We welcome the chance to build relationships with other organisations through the network, to allow for new opportunities to share lessons learnt from our conservation projects, and to learn from others. In addition, we hope to look internally at how our conservation projects are perceived by our staff and build the idea of conservation optimism into our day-to-day project work.