SEAMEO BIOTROP's Goals
SEAMEO BIOTROP has five strategic goals to carry out its missions, namely:
- Provide science-based information to enable communities and institutions to address critical biological problems and benefit from real values and sustainable use of the region’s tropical biological resources;
- Strengthen individual and institutional capacities on current knowledge and good practices in tropical biology;
- Synthesize, translate, and provide equal access to information in tropical biology to enhance knowledge, practices and policy;
- Facilitate effective development interventions and partnerships for sustainable and equitable sharing of benefits of the region’s tropical biological resources; and
- Enhance organizational management and efficiency toward maximized use of resources and effective service delivery to clients and partners.
Program Thrusts
SEAMEO BIOTROP believes that its new program thrusts are current
critical concerns confronting the Southeast Asian region in general. The
urgency to address these concerns, particularly through research, would
be significant for the sustainable development in the region. These
program thrusts are also envisioned to integrate the global and regional
concerns for climate change, poverty alleviation, food and nutrition
security, and gender which are core themes of the UN 2030 Agenda for
Sustainable Development (SDG 2030) and the ASEAN Vision 2020.
The program thrusts and their brief definition and scope are as follows:
1. Restoration and Conservation of Unique and Degraded Ecosystems;
Restoration of a degraded ecosystem is a process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed. This is indispensable to reverse the structure and function of a degraded ecosystem, habitat area, or site for species integrity and ecosystems that put the future’s welfare as the final purpose. This program thrust may include the following topics: understanding and minimizing the differences between natural and anthropogenic disturbances (e.g. deforestation, ore and mineral mining, the introduction of invasive alien plant and animal species, pollution, climate change, etc.) which interfere with the functioning of an ecosystem at spatial and temporal scales; determining the resilience of an ecosystem; use of emerging concepts in new and successful restoration technologies and performance standards; assessment of current ecology restoration practices; ways of initiating, assisting or accelerating ecological succession processes; improved understanding of the ecological, economic and socio-cultural role and importance of succession biology; investigating the role of soil physical, chemical, and microbiological processes (e.g. application of beneficial soil microorganism), genetics, resource mapping, taxonomy, and inventory, etc.
2. Sustainable Management and Wise Utilization of Biodiversity, Bioenergy, Biotechnology, and Food Security
This program thrust focuses on managing areas at various scales of
natural resources for productive and efficient long-term use. This may
involve applying appropriate natural resource management approaches on
existing ecological services and biological resources, while also
adopting appropriate utilization practices to address society's socio-economic and cultural needs toward a better quality of life. This
program thrust could cover the determination of appropriate land-use and
production options, the valuation of environmental services; food/ feed and
nutrition security; the use of biodiversity for enhanced and sustained
production; biotechnology approach to sustain productivity; the reduction of food loss; the payment for environmental services; agroforestry and novel
crops using native species; sustainable use of species, renewable
resource use/harvesting; policy development to support government and
NGO programs in sustainability, etc.
3. Strengthening Ecosystem Resilience to Global Climate Change
This program thrust could generally refer to measuring, protecting, and conserving elements of unique ecosystems and/or landscapes of high biodiversity from further degradation, enhancing the landscape and habitat connectivity, and building resilience to disturbance. This program thrust could cover resilience analysis and management; rapid methodology and approaches for identifying high biodiversity and unique ecosystems; adaptive resource management; ecosystem health assessment and monitoring; landscape connectivity analysis and restoration planning; mapping and inventory of residual native forests, biodiversity hotspots and other sensitive areas; environmental risk analysis and impact assessment; preservation of genetic diversity and genetic improvement; analysis of and compliance with current environmental protection and conservation policies; prevention and control of invasive species, mine-site rehabilitation pollution, forest fires, etc.