ASB's Future

Rather than simply adding new benchmark sites, the ASB partnership presently is exploring alternative means (sites, regions, broader communication strategies) to leverage impact from its long-term engagement at benchmark sites spanning the humid tropical broadleaf forest biome.

A possibility for the future

Together with WWF, IUCN (the World Conservation Union), and CIFOR, ASB is a founding partner in the Rainforest Challenge Partnership (RCP). RCP adds a protected area component lacking in ASB and involves a broader range of conservation, development, and research partners to share and adapt concrete strategies for poverty reduction with conservation of unique tropical forest ecosystems.

It is envisioned that RCP will integrate ongoing ASB activities into a much broader network of ongoing conservation and development initiatives, taking advantage of complementarities among sites to tackle conservation and development issues of both local and global significance.

As a major component of this proposed global network of 'learning landscapes', ASB will be able to extend the impact of its decade of results, as well as to link the experience of comparable places and new (but established) partners with ASB benchmark sites, thereby accelerating the learning process.

Four ongoing ASB initiatives are central to this process:

• First, is the global synthesis of ASB results as a 'sub-global' component of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) (Tomich and Palm, 2005).
• Second, emphasizing site-based networking among 'learning landscapes', is development of the Rainforest Challenge partnership (IUCN, et al. 2002) and related initiatives in South-South exchange (for example involving sites in Madagascar and Vietnam).
• Third, regionalization of ASB activities is being explored to engage a broader set of contiguous countries. Examples include the Amazon Initiative and RUPES (Rewarding the Upland Poor for Environmental Services) in Southeast Asia.
• Fourth, based on strategic maps of ASB's global impact pathways, strategies are being developed to provide clearer focus for communication to reach broader groups of users.