Blog: piece by piece - the building blocks of conservation planning

Zoo conservation comes in many forms. In this week's blog, Paul Bamford (Chester Zoo) and Jamie Copsey (CPSG) write in from Colombia on elevating conservation planning and stabilising the 'Biodiversity Jenga'... 

How can zoos make meaningful contributions to in situ conservation across international boundaries? This question is central to my work and that of my colleagues in Chester Zoo’s Field Programmes Department. As the Regional Field Programme Manager for Latin America, my role is to oversee and coordinate our collaboration and support for conservation projects in Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia and Chile.

Over the years, Chester Zoo’s approach has evolved from being primarily a grant-giving organisation, to building closer relationships with our partners by seeking opportunities to apply our expertise in areas of strategic benefit to their conservation goals. However, this opens a series of questions: how do we identify relevant and impactful needs for each project? How do we ensure that our support has real value? And how do we plan for meaningful and impact-driven collaboration?

In 2019, I participated in a four-day training course on Facilitating Species Conservation Planning Processes, delivered by Jamie Copsey, Director of Training and Capacity for The IUCN SSC Conservation Planning Specialist Group (CPSG). CPSG was founded to bridge the gap between ex situ and in situ conservation practitioners, eventually expanding to integrate risk assessment and species conservation planning tools and processes. The CPSG approach draws on a series of principles and steps that seek to ensure that conservation initiatives are built on a robust evidence-based understanding of the situation, an inclusive approach to integrating relevant voices into the planning and implementation process, and that common sense narratives build a path from a plan’s vision, through to its goal, actions and eventual impacts. The role of neutral facilitation is central to enabling this process.

In 2021, I called on CPSG to support me in bringing together an online multistakeholder planning workshop for the conservation of Copiapoa, a highly threatened genus of cacti from Chile’s Atacama Desert. My interest in developing this workshop was to provide guidance for Chester Zoo’s work with this genus. As the workshop progressed, I was able to observe how Fabiana Lopes Rocha and Eugenia Cordero Schmidt from CPSG’s Brazilian office brought in a much wider network of stakeholders than I had anticipated These included the IUCN’s Cactus and Succulent Plants Specialist Group, the Chilean Ministry of the Environment and National Parks Authority, researchers and the international botanical garden community, thus building a conservation community with a shared purpose of protecting Copiapoa and their habitats.

Another outcome of the workshop was my decision to further develop my own capacity in planning and facilitation by enrolling on CPSG’s Development Path: an 18-month mentorship programme supported me in developing my skills and experience in facilitating conservation planning processes. With mentor guidance, I facilitated planning workshops for Mexico’s goodeid fishes and the Beale’s eyed turtle in Hong Kong, and supported the facilitation of a multi-species action plan for endemic trees in Chile. I have also applied these skills in guiding Chester Zoo’s work with the projects we support in Latin America, enabling us to find a clearer purpose and relevance within those relationships.

As I write this, I am in Cali, Colombia, at the 2025 CPSG Annual Meeting, having spent the last few days with the global CPSG family. At this year’s Annual Meeting, for the first time, a planning workshop was embedded within the programme, to create a national action plan for the conservation of Colombia’s harlequin toads. I was part of a team that worked with Colombian stakeholders to adapt the international harlequin toad action plan’s objectives to the national context, and to develop a series of strategy lines and actions for working toward these.

During the Meeting, we visited Cali’s Botanical Gardens, where we saw a sculpture commemorating last year’s CBD COP 16, which took place in Cali: a giant ‘Biodiversity Jenga’, symbolising how the systems that support life on Earth become increasingly unstable as the pieces are removed. The mission of conservation is to prevent this Jenga from collapsing by restoring those missing pieces and protecting the ones that are still intact. But how do we decide which pieces to put back in? Where, when, and in which order? How to do this without knocking out the remaining pieces? The facilitator’s role is to ask these questions, and to support the global conservation community in their quest to find the answers. Herein lies an opportunity for zoos to respond to this challenge, by building their in-house capacity to act as hubs for collaborative planning that will guide effective collaboration for conservation worldwide.

CPSG training addendum

CPSG offers training both in-person and online in collaborative species conservation planning and facilitation, including training in the ex situ conservation assessment process. If your organisation would be interested in hosting an in-person training course, or you would like to know more about the training and mentoring support we provide then please visit www.cpsg.org or email [email protected]

- Paul Bamford, Regional Field Programme Senior Manager, Chester Zoo

- Jamie Copsey, Director of Training at the IUCN SSC Conservation Planning Specialist Group

All blogs reflect the views of their author and are not necessarily a reflection of BIAZA's position