Red Lists, curries, traffic jams – IUCN Red List assessor training workshop in Bangladesh

Posted on Dec 9, 2014 Guest blogs, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Red Lists, curries, traffic jams – IUCN Red List assessor training workshop in Bangladesh

 

You have never really been stuck in a traffic jam until you get to Dhaka – and then the whole word takes on a new dimension. It’s a sea of cars, trucks, buses, rickshaws (400,000 of them!), CNGs (tuk tuks), hand drawn carriages, horse drawn carriages – oh yes, and goats. It is also one of the best places to people watch. Or to reflect on the previous days of work. I had arrived in Dhaka three days earlier with my co-facilitator, Catherine Sayer from the IUCN Red List Unit. We had arrived in the early hours of Saturday morning, and had so far been living a very sheltered existence. Our task: to run an IUCN Red List assessor training workshop at the request of IUCN Bangladesh, our lovely, caring and welcoming hosts.

It’s probably fair to say that on the day of our arrival, all we had to do was sleep and eat. Our hosts had organised a detailed schedule of room service for us, so all we had to do was open the doors of our respective hotel rooms to receive the next load of food every once in a while. All a bit confusing when you are overtired after a long plane journey, but then food is overall a relatively easy concept to grasp. So we ate and slept. And eventually checked out the workshop location at the Spectra Convention Centre right across the road. Everything was in place, so the next day we could kick off the workshop bright (yet jetlagged) and early (yet late, if you consider we were still on UK time).

Day 1 and thirty eager faces welcomed us to the workshop, in addition to the Project Manager for IUCN Bangladesh Shahad Mahabub Chowdhury, the Country Representative of IUCN Bangladesh Mr. Ishtiaq Uddin Ahmad, Md. Akbar Hossain from the Bangladesh Forest Department – and the very helpful and absolutely vital IUCN Bangladesh support staff! After general introductions and expectations for the next four days, we got straight into business. Early topics covered what the IUCN Red List actually is, and how the assessment process works. Then we moved straight on to the theory behind Red List assessments: the terms and concepts used by the IUCN within the Categories and Criteria. This was no doubt going to be the most confusing part of the day/workshop (I suspect it always is), as participants have to grapple with the concepts of “generation length”, ”locations” (my personal favourite, but I fear I may be quite alone in this; NB this is not about where a species is found, but depends on the area which can be affected by a single threat event; there you have it!)  and “extreme fluctuations”. The confusion was not going to go away though as the day pretty much ended by looking at the different types of data quality which can feed into Red List assessments. Can you tell your “observed” from your “suspected” and “inferred”? No? Well, Catherine Sayer will stop at nothing to make sure you do.

Understandably then that, despite our best efforts, the IUCN Red List Happiness Index (HI) fell just short of complete happiness at the end of day 1 (though only just, see photo). This was to be expected. After all, we had only just ventured into the magnificent world of Red Listing.

Days 2 and 3 got everybody properly into Red Listing. Having learned about all five criteria of the IUCN Red List and about how to apply the Red List Categories and Criteria at the national level, we tried our hand at assessing species from Bangladesh. This really forms the heart and soul of the training workshop, and carrying out assessments of Bangladeshi species became a recurring theme over the next couple of days. From quiet beginnings, our working groups morphed into proper discussion groups, making this a very interactive part of the workshop. And when the groups started discussing “locations” within and between each other, I really couldn’t stop smiling from ear to ear! It is always great to see the enthusiasm people bring with them to these workshops – specifically if this enthusiasm is aimed at my favourite Red List concept!

And so on Day 2 and 3 we learned about the Asian elephant, river dolphins, Gomphostemma salarkhaniana (a species of flowering plant with only 40 mature individuals left in Bangladesh), the black soft-shell turtle, the Bengal fox, the ruddy kingfisher and the Malayan sun bear – to name only a few of the species we covered. Which is why this is also the most interesting part of the workshop for the trainers – this gives us a chance to learn about the country’s flora and fauna (until then we were only really familiar with the inside of our hotel, the convention centre where the workshop was held, the yumminess of Bengali food, and were soon to learn about the joys of eating with our hands and chewing paan)!

The reason why we can see a pronounced dip in the HI on Day 3 is no doubt the fact that there was also a one-hour knowledge test scheduled for this day. Understandably, all participants seemed a bit nervous about this – though ultimately this is a test of how good the trainers are at explaining things! We all got through it though and the great thing is that the test gives us as trainers a chance to identify those areas which are not yet entirely clear. So Day 4 started with another feedback session on test results and explanations of various issues which had arisen as part of the test – and a final lengthy discussion of “locations”, so I was happy. Seemingly, we did our job well enough this time round, as the HI reached maximum happiness by the end of Day 4!

And why wouldn’t it – after all, this means another 30 Red List assessors were trained for the Bangladesh National Red List assessment. This is a truly ambitious project, focussing on a number of species groups from vertebrates to invertebrates, with a likely future extension to also include plants. Before this workshop, 90 assessors had already been trained. Now the number stands at over 100 – which means that this is also a very ambitious and highly successful project in terms of capacity building and training.

Best of all, this is also a very friendly and welcoming project. I think it is fair to say that both Catherine and I were very sad when we eventually had to say goodbye to our new found Bangladeshi IUCN family and all our new friends. And so, on my way to the airport while stuck in another – if lesser – traffic jam, I contemplated how Bangladesh surely must be one of the most welcoming countries in the world. How grateful I am to our IUCN Bangladesh friends for literally looking after us 24-7. How easy it is to make new friends in Bangladesh. How much I will miss everybody – particularly everybody’s smiling faces in the cold doom and gloom of London in winter. And how much I need to come back to visit again in the not so far future.