Blogs
In this blog (and science paper) that I published in 2014, I assessed how to design biodiversity offsets from a more systems approach: from winners and losers point of view, from causal loops and effects among different factors and scales. In the case of the Rio Tinto mining project in Madagascar, ultimately the mental models of scientists and miners around these issues , were underpinned by the assumptions they made over the landscape and the value they held, which clearly affected the design behind the offsets.
The blog by my collaborator published on Mongabay shows how in three days, the game MineSet, a game about regional landscape change in tropical forest landscapes in Central Africa, helped Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) participants deciding on high conservation forests, move from gridlock to a joint declaration on five points, four of them accepted through unanimous votes and the last one pending the discussions of the FSC General Assembly that took place in Vancouver later on.
This blog by CIFOR, in a project that I was earlier involved, shows how the game CoPalCam designed to look at the palm oil supply chain system has been helping stakeholders in Cameroon explore possible future scenarios for oil palm production, and to better understand different parties’ decision-making and behavior, using role-play games. “If you’re an official and you’re always in the office, it’s really hard to understand the struggles that smallholders encounter in the field,” Micresse Kamto, one of the Cameroon-based game facilitators.