Conservation Audit Guidelines AND Tool

Overview

What are these guidelines and tool for? To assess how well conservation projects are demonstrating best practice in design and adaptive management, as laid out in the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation (CS). 

Who are they for? Anyone involved in a conservation effort, including project managers, senior management, evaluators, strategic planners, coaches, and funders. 

When do you use them? Conservation audits can be conducted at any time in the project cycle and it is recommended that a project undergoes a conservation audit at least every other year and/or as part of any process to review or reframe a project's strategic plan. Ideally, organizations adopt conservation auditing as a central practice within its due diligence policies.

How are audits done? You can do it, a team can do it, peers can do it and hired external agents can do it! Audits can be done as a desk study, a face-to-face exercise, virtually or as a combination of approaches. 

How do I get started? Begin by reading the Instructions and then download the Audit Tool.

Can I adapt these to my project's or organization's specific terminology or needs? This CMP product has been developed and shared as an 'Open Source' product under a Creative Commons License (see below). This material can thus be shared, repurposed, remixed and modified as needed, provided that you provide attribution to CMP as the source product and release any derivative products with a similar open source license.

How do I cite these guidelines and tool? This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Please cite this document as: O'Neill, E. and O'Connor, S. 2020. Conservation Audit Guidelines and Tool, v. 3.0. Conservation Measures Partnership.