Ignacio Jiménez - Effective Conservation: Parks, Rewilding, and Local Development

The book you have in your hands was first published in Spanish in 2018. It describes a practical and cohesive method for managing effective conservation programs, backed up and enriched by real-life examples taken from relevant conservation programs that I myself and other conservation practitioners have experienced on five continents.

Since its initial publication, the approach described in this book has guided and strengthened conservation programs in several countries. In December 2018, approval was granted for the 138,140-ha Iber National Park and in the following years my friends and former colleagues from Conservation Land Trust Argentina (renamed as Rewilding Argentina) witnessed the birth of the first green-winged macaws in Argentina originating from reintroduced individuals after over a century of absence. In 2021 they celebrated the release of the first jaguars into the park, a vital step in their pioneering reintroduction project. Overall, the story of Iber (which makes up large sections of this book) is one of the best examples worldwide of a virtuous circle whose constituent parts include the creation of a large park, its rewilding, and the establishment of a new cultural and economic regional identity based on a reevaluation of a previously unappreciated wilderness. This self-sustaining circle is termed Full Nature or Produccin de Naturaleza in its original Spanish. Since the book was first published, Rewilding Argentina/Tompkins Conservation has applied this approach in regions as diverse as the Dry Chaco, coastal and continental Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego. In 2019 Tompkins Conservation Chile handed control of the Pumalin and Patagonia national parks over to the Chilean government, thereby concluding the largest private land donation ever made anywhere in the world. In doing so, they established five new national parks and expanded three others, covering in total more than 4 million ha of new national parklands.

In 2017 the vision behind this book traveled from Argentina to Brazil to help the Brazilian organization SPVS design and apply an ambitious program aimed at presenting the largest remnant of Atlantic Forest (one of the worlds top biodiversity hotspots) in a new and more positive light. As a result of this program, the introductory story presented in of this book is now somewhat outdated as the situation in the Atlantic Forest has been changed by the very ideas included in these pages. Two years later the Produao de Natureza approach (as it is known in Portuguese) started to be used by Instituto Home Pantaneiro to promote the largest conservation landscape to have ever been set up in the Brazilian Pantanal.

In the second half of 2018 I moved to Spain to apply this method in my home country. The plan was to establish a conservation landscape that could promote another virtuous circle between larger protected areas, rewilding, and local development. After talking with conservation experts we chose the Three Kingdoms region in eastern Spain. This region is home to vast mountain landscapes, recovering wildlife populations, and beautiful historic towns and villages that lost much of their original population during the last century. After getting support from international donors and building an alliance with environmental officials, we started a communication campaign similar to those successfully carried out in Argentina and Brazil, using the tools and concepts described in this book. Things were going better than expected until the COVID pandemic forced a lockdown on us. This halted all face-to-face meetings and presentations with local authorities and interest groups. Conspiracy theories developed; a well-orchestrated hate campaign, started in the social networks, was picked up by the conventional media. To cut a long story short, in the end we had to cancel the whole program as we were unable to counteract the animosity and rejection that had built up in the region. Albeit at a high price, the Three Kingdoms experience underlined one of the main ideas behind this book: the context defines the application of any general conservation method or approach. Lessons were learned and, with organizational support from Fundacin Global Nature, we are applying theideas of this book in other regions of Spain. All these examples show how this book has had a life of its own and has been able to guide conservation programs in at least three countries in the years leading up to the publication of Effective Conservation in English.

Effective Conservation is a streamlined version of the original Spanish edition. We wanted to create an accessible text while maintaining the essence of the original. To achieve this we have created a parallel website that hosts all the original content not included in this version (www.islandpress.org/effective-conservation). These bonus tracks include the complete versions of most of the boxes written by conservation practitioners, plus many sections included in the original book but excluded from the English version. We believe that this dual presentation will make this book accessible to a wider public and will also provide more curious readers with access to a great range of information available on the web.