Unpacking the perceived benefits and costs of integrating gender into conservation projects: voices of conservation field practitioners

Many in the conservation sphere have noted that robust and gender-equitable stakeholder engagement is crucial in achieving conservation outcomes, ensuring project sustainability and supporting human well-being. However, despite policies, international agreements and increasing requirements of donors, gender is still often viewed as an add-on rather than as a fundamental element of effective conservation. In an effort to overcome this, Conservation International has invested in nearly 20 project sites since 2014 to support targeted gender integration into existing conservation projects. We conducted a survey with practitioners across these sites to examine the barriers to and enablers of gender integration, and practitioners’ perceptions of the benefits and challenges involved in this. Our findings demonstrate the importance of both external drivers (funding requirements) and a supportive environment (capacity building, technical and financial support) in incentivising a focus on gender. Respondents also reported a suite of benefits (e.g. increased participation, higher quality of the project) and costs (mainly financial) related to gender integration. In documenting these efforts to build gender-related capacity, and the associated benefits and challenges, we highlight the importance of gender-responsive conservation initiatives, and evaluate a method of achieving this. As conservation practitioners may be more inclined to listen to each other (given their shared objectives) rather than to gender specialists, this research can help to shift practitioner dialogue and conservation practice to be more open and responsive to gender.

Research on River Water Environmental Capacity Based on Triangular Fuzzy Technology

Based on the randomness and ambiguity characteristics of the river water environment system, as well as the lack and inaccuracy of data information, the water environment system parameters are defined as triangular fuzzy numbers. On this basis, by fuzzing the parameters of the conventional deterministic model, a fuzzy model for calculating river water environmental capacity is established. According to this model, the river water environment capacity in the form of triangular fuzzy numbers can be calculated. According to the requirements of a given level of credibility, the water environment capacity can be further converted from triangular fuzzy numbers to interval values. Research shows that compared with conventional deterministic methods, the results obtained are more scientific and reasonable