The Cambridge Conservation Initiative, founded in 2007, brings together researchers, educators, strategists, policy-makers and practitioners to develop innovative collaborative programmes and resources to address major challenges in the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystems.
CCI has two broad areas of programme activities:
1. Research/Policy/Practice Interface
Under this area CCI partners draw together a wide range of practitioners, policy experts, researchers and other stakeholders to address major conservation issues, creating conservation solutions, highlighting new challenges and opportunities, and delivering new ways of integrating conservation research, policy and practical action for the benefit of biodiversity. Through the CCI Collaborative Fund for Conservation, resources are available to CCI partners and their collaborators to facilitate such activities along with a growing body of CCI tools and models for collaborative working. Over the period of this Strategy, CCI partners are committed to developing and implementing a small number of major CCI collaborations at this interface in addition to facilitating and catalysing a wide range of smaller projects.
2. Capacity Building and Leadership
CCI is committed to providing world-class learning and leadership opportunities for those who want to understand biodiversity and ecosystems and the central role they play in the planet’s life support systems. As a key CCI collaboration, a Masters Programme in Conservation Leadership has been established to train future conservation professionals and draws on the rich and diverse skills, knowledge and expertise available across CCI partners. CCI is also building a range of capacity building activities to encompass leadership development, research training, and business and policy forums, for a wide variety of audiences.
Cambridge Conservation Initiative also builds on and supports established collaborative activities including:
- The Student Conference on Conservation Science (SCCS) in Cambridge, which each year attracts around 170 delegates from more than 60 countries for a three-day meeting at the University of Cambridge. This has spurred a growing network of student conferences in conservation science which now take place every year in Bangalore, India; New York, USA and Brisbane, Australia.
- The Cambridge Conservation Forum (CCF) network, which aims to strengthen links and develop new synergies across the diverse community of conservation practitioners and researchers based in and around Cambridge, working at local, national and international levels.