SGC 2024 Day 2 - Morning Plenary: Opening Comments from SMART Leadership and Plenary Speaker

Opening Remarks: A tool that Rangers want
Speaker: Rohit Singh
The talk focuses on the need of tools that is developed with Rangers for Rangers and how this helps in boasting ranger morale.
Plenary: Opportunities and challenges in scaling ambition for effective and equitable systems of protected and conserved areas
Speaker: Madhu Rao
Direct and indirect drivers of change have accelerated during the past 50 years resulting in a deterioration worldwide of nature and its vital contributions to human well-being. Protected and Conserved areas lie at the heart of the imperative to protect, manage and restore nature, and thus critical to the successful implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework and its 2050 Vision of Living in Harmony with Nature. Achieving conservation at scale will need a shift toward large, connected networks of Protected and Conserved Areas, integrating across diverse governance and management regimes, with an emphasis on effective and equitable conservation outcomes. In parallel, there is a critical need to scale up human capacity and workforce needs to address the challenge of achieving the effective protection of a third of the earth’s surface. This keynote will outline the global policy context, bringing to focus the opportunities and challenges in scaling up nature conservation to achieve global biodiversity and climate targets.