In the last two decades, conservation organizations in Africa have experimented with conservation enterprises; commercial activities designed to create benefit flows that support a biodiversity conservation objective. The combination of commercially driven investments, business development and biodiversity conservation, might be a viable solution not only for Africa, but also for European conservation issues. Especially now governmental subsidies in EU countries for nature conservation are decreasing rapidly due to the economic crisis.
Rewilding Europe - a nature conservation organisation initiated in 2011 by WWF Netherlands, Conservation Capital, ARK Nature and Wild Wonders of Europe – focuses on providing viable business cases for wild nature on Europe’s huge areas of abandoned land . Rewilding Europe wants to make Europe a wilder place, with much more space for wildlife, wilderness and natural processes. The organisation has set ambitious goals to rewild one million hectares of land by 2020, creating 10 magnificent wildlife and wilderness areas of international quality.
Traditionally nature conservationists are not trained in business development and entrepreneurship. When switching from subsidized or donor based nature conservation to creating viable business cases that pay for nature conservation in small and large areas, new curricula needs to be developed to educate future nature entrepreneurs. To develop this curricula Rewilding Europe collaborates in the project ‘European Nature Entrepreneur’ with three Dutch educational institutes, Helicon Opleidingen (professional/vocation level), Van Hall Larenstein University of Applied Sciences (BSc and professional masters level) and Wageningen University (BSc, MSc and PhD levels) . In this collaborative project we aim to develop innovative curricula to teach students about nature entrepreneurship and make students of different educational levels collaborate with each other and professionals in Rewilding Europe's pilot area’s.
Results/Conclusions
In the project ‘European Nature Entrepreneur’ we are developing curricula based on a collaborative developed research agenda. Helicon Opleidingen and Van Hall Larenstein University of Applied Sciences-part of Wageningen UR use competence-based learning in all their curricula. With competence-based learning, we simulate professional situations which require students to learn and use the relevant knowledge, skills and attitude, while acting in different professional roles. This implies teaching and coaching our students to develop not only their subject-specific knowledge but also interpersonal, self-management and communication skills. In this project we are developing ways to teach the competence (nature) entrepreneurship to students of various levels with an interest in forestry and nature conservation, wildlife management, applied animal sciences, rural development, sustainable tourism, outdoor and recreation.