LogoLogo
Savimbo homepageBuy creditsSpanish
  • Executive summary
  • Front Material
    • Contents
    • Index of figures
    • Index of tables
    • Acronyms and abbreviations
    • Terms and definitions
  • Getting started
  • Introduction
    • The urgency of targeted biodiversity conservation
    • Simplicity, complexity theory, and biodiversity
    • Inclusion of Indigenous Peoples and local communities by design
    • Biodiversity methodology benefits
  • Overall description
    • Objectives
    • Scope
    • Limitations
  • Project description
    • Principles
      • Principles of working with IP
    • Eligibility criteria
      • Land ownership and law
    • Additionality
    • Project boundaries
      • Spatial limits of the BCP
      • Temporal limits of the BCP
      • Grouped projects
    • Implementation plan
      • Measurement approaches
      • Indicator species observations
      • Risks and uncertainty
    • Effective participation
      • Community involvement
      • Capacity for action
      • Financial transparency
      • Safeguards checklist
  • Calculation
    • Unit calculations
    • Area calculations
    • Time calculations
    • Integrity calculations
    • Value calculations
  • Baseline assessment
    • Baseline ecosystem categorization
    • Analysis of agents and drivers of biodiversity loss
    • Baseline biodiversity (optional)
    • Baseline risk of biodiversity loss
    • Indicator species selection
    • Indicator species integrity score
  • SDG contributions
  • Monitoring plan
    • Monitoring report
    • Additional monitoring requirements
  • Authors
  • References
  • Appendices
    • Appendix A: Biodiversity methodologies comparison table
    • Appendix B: Sample legal proof of land control
    • Appendix C: Sample baseline ecosystem categorization
    • Appendix D: Species categorization of richness
    • Appendix E: Sample selection of indicator species
    • Appendix F: Sample indicator-species observations
    • Appendix G: Sample open-source code and calculation
    • Appendix H: Indigenous authors
    • Appendix I: Letters of support
      • Fernando Ayerbe, Ornithology
      • Ned Hording, Biodiversity
      • Olber Llanos, Zoologist
      • Mike McColm, Ethnology
      • Peter Thomas, Anthropologist
      • Jesús Argente, Marine biology
      • Sara Andreotti, Marine Biologist
      • Carolina Romero, Lawyer.
      • Daniel Urbano, Herpetologist
      • Ramesh Boonratana PhD, Primatologist
      • Theodore Schmitt, Conservationists
      • Anja Hutschenreiter, Ecologist and Tropical Conservationist
      • Miguel Chindoy, Indigenous leader
    • Appendix J: Sample uses of biodiversity unit
    • Appendix K: How to do FPIC
    • Appendix L: Independent Expert Panel Checklist
    • Appendix M: How to calculate a biodiversity credit by hand
    • Appendix N: How to calculate home ranges
    • Appendix O: How to calculate integrity scores
  • Document history
  • Disclaimer
Powered by GitBook
LogoLogo

Follow us

  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • TikTok
  • LinkedIn

About Savimbo

  • Science
  • Buy credits
  • About us
  • Donate

Indigenous authors

  • Jhony Lopez
  • Fernando Lezama
  • Blog

© 2023 Savimbo Inc. All rights reserved.

On this page

Was this helpful?

  1. Appendices

Appendix H: Indigenous authors

How the indicator-species biodiversity methodology was co-designed with Indigenous Peoples and local communities

PreviousAppendix G: Sample open-source code and calculationNextAppendix I: Letters of support

Last updated 1 year ago

Was this helpful?

Like the Sherpas who , jaguar tracking is a highly technical, and respected activity within Indigenous groups. It relies on years of knowledge of animal behavior, strong kinesthetic knowledge, traditional hunting skills, a supranormal degree of fitness, and technical woodsmanship.

But for over twenty years, the resources associated with this activity have been transacted through the charitable industry, with high . Without judgment, this is not a good deal for the jaguar trackers. Organizations typically pay Indigenous and local trackers on a day wage, require them to supply their own equipment, and don't give ownership or credit for raw data (video and audio recordings) generated by tracking activities. Because it's a bad deal, these trackers have difficulty convincing their communities that these traditional conservation activities are sustainable in comparison to the modern alternatives; petroleum, mining, logging, urban work, or narco-trafficking.

This methodology was written to solve the economic problem of conserving biodiversity. To contribute an alternative, direct, climate market to Indigenous groups who conserve primary forests.

The ISBM is the translation of a successful 20-year IP and LC-led conservation program in an IUCN Red List ecosystem to financial markets. Translation occurred over the period of one year. Technology, biodiversity science, and market mechanisms were integrated to project activities with ongoing feedback. The intent was to scale activities, and fund associated livelihoods without disrupting IP or LC values or lifestyles.

The project began with unremunerated in-situ photo/video observations of jaguars and the endangered anteosos bear generated by Indigenous conservationist Jhony Lopez in the Columbian Amazo. The area was protected against narcotrafficking, petroleum, and mining interests by grassroots activism at the local, state, and national level by activism from Jhony, Fernando Lezama, and a committed group of local smallholders at a financial loss.

Figure 13: Jhony Lopez and students tracking biodiversity indicator species in the Putumayo Amazon

Figure 12: Jhony Lopez, conservationist and climate activist. Pasto Indigenous heritage. Students, colleagues, jaguar sign, and grassroots conserved areas.

They formed Savimbo with Drea Burbank, an MD-technologist in 2022 and began to extend and characterize their biodiversity work with satellite mapping, a program for local youth to learn jaguar tracking and game cameras, taxonomic classification, and geocoding.

In assessing the species for the region, the teams of scientists researching this methodology often spent as much as a week actively searching for one specimen of a rare species before finding one. After testing multiple video cameras, the team found that even the highest quality jungle cameras last up to three or four months before the rainforest destroys their functionality and they need to be replaced. The cost of this equipment and the physical labor required needs to be controlled in order to make biodiversity projects economically viable in these locations. Placing the cameras is highly technical work that can only be done only by those who frequent these locations and understand the lifecycles of these species. We discovered that most major biodiversity nonprofits in the region were hiring the same trackers—and that this was a highly technical skillset for IP and LC requiring years of training.

It is only by on-the-ground experience in functional ecosystems that the team was able to recognize and manage the challenges of creating a biodiversity methodology that is feasible given the physical challenges of working in these territories.

With one-year co-development and ongoing community feedback, the project was expanded to enroll neighboring farms, map the home range of Jhony’s jaguars, and generate ever-fresh data.

In 2013 non-certified biodiversity crediting was initiated with Savimbo’s payments system. Word-of-mouth spread among neighboring farms resulted in local control of hunting groups, and generated interest from several neighboring indigenous reserves, then IP and LC internationally in Suriname, Gabon, and the Ecuadorian Amazon.

The ISBM is unique, because it is IP and LC-first, science and markets second, standard. We are also hopeful that this will give it an advantage in terms of scale, implementation, and outcomes.

climb Mt. Everest
overhead margins