About
Founded in 2007, the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI) is a unique collaboration between the University of Cambridge and nine leading international biodiversity conservation organisations – Birdlife International, BTO, Cambridge Conservation Forum, Fauna & Flora International, IUCN, RSPB, TRAFFIC, Tropical Biology Association, and UN-WCMC. Together, these 10 partners combine and integrate their efforts on research, education, policy, and practice to leverage innovation and design solutions to foster conservation learning and leadership worldwide.
Challenge
With projects and programs spread all over the globe, understanding where collaboration opportunities best exist among the CCI partnership was important for strategizing how best to achieve their collective efforts, as well as to communicate the power of the partnership to external partners, donors, and decision-makers. Since each organization uses their own systems for tracking active projects and programs, pulling this information together presented a unique challenge requiring a combination of both data sleuthing and mapping expertise.
Solutions
To support CCI, Global Conservation Solutions donned their investigative hat and undertook a series of interviews with representatives from each of the partner organizations to identify the countries they had an active presence in. The information collected was then transferred to a custom-designed spatial database to allow CCI to track changes over time as mature projects are wrapped up and new projects are developed.
Results
Using the CCI partnership database, Global Conservation Solutions was able to create a “Global Collaboration Map” depicting the number of CCI partners with an active presence in every country on earth. The resulting map is being used to help communicate the incredible global reach of the CCI network, as well as to better inform where CCI can most effectively invest their collaborative efforts to achieve their vision of a diverse world in which nature and society thrive.
