The Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and World Agroforestry (ICRAF) envision a more equitable world where trees in all landscapes, from drylands to the humid tropics, enhance the environment and well-being for all. CIFOR and ICRAF are non-profit science institutions that build and apply evidence to today’s most pressing challenges, including energy insecurity and the climate and biodiversity crises. Over a combined total of 65 years, we have built vast knowledge on forests and trees outside of forests in agricultural landscapes (agroforestry). Using a multidisciplinary approach, we seek to improve lives and to protect and restore ecosystems. Our work focuses on innovative research, partnering for impact, and engaging with stakeholders on policies and practices to benefit people and the planet. Founded in 1993 and 1978, CIFOR and ICRAF are members of CGIAR, a global research partnership for a food secure future dedicated to reducing poverty, enhancing food and nutrition security, and improving natural resources.

Overview

Wild meat represents a key source of protein, fat, and micronutrients for millions of rural and forest people. However, growing human populations, technological advances in hunting techniques, increasing access to once-remote habitats, and the emergence of a commercial wild meat trade – often to supply urban centres – have culminated in harvest rates that are unsustainable for many large and medium-bodied species, with knock-on impacts on ecosystems and local livelihoods.

Much of the research effort of the past few decades has focussed on understanding the levels of use of wild meat by rural and urban communities and the drivers of wild meat consumption. Moving forwards, research efforts must now focus on supporting the development of interventions and policies to create a more sustainable wild meat sector. Effective, SMART, wild meat indicators are needed to track changes in wild meat use and to measure the effectiveness of wild meat interventions, national policies, and international agreements.

At the local level, indicators are needed to track the outcomes of community, local or project-level management and interventions, and to understand how wild meat use and management impacts local community wellbeing and livelihoods. At the national level, indicators are needed to track national use of wild meat, its contribution to the nations’ health, wellbeing, and economy (increasing the visibility of wild meat use in national accounting and planning), and the impacts of national wild meat policies and legislation on wildlife and people over time. Globally, the development of clear targets and indicators to measure the progress around species and landscape conservation is a priority through the development of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. The GBF includes targets specifically focussed on measuring the extent to which harvest, use and trade in wild species (across all taxa) is sustainable, legal, and safe. This includes species harvested for their meat.

Duties and responsibilities

The objectives of the assignment are to lead a collaboration to create and pilot test suite of wild meat indicators and associated tools for use at the local, national, and international level, that can be used to a) Measure the effectiveness of interventions aiming to sustainably manage wild meat use; b) Track wild meat hunting, consumption, and sales at a national level, to increase the visibility of wild meat use and track the impacts of national wild meat policies; and c) Measure progress towards the delivery of Targets of the CBD GBF pertaining to wild meat.

This assignment is funded by the EU-SWM programme and the UKRI GCRF TRADE Hub Project, and will work with data collated in the WILDMEAT database.

• The UKRI GCRF TRADE Hub project is a five-year project bringing together over 50 organisations from 15 different countries to study all stages of various supply chains, revealing damaging links and potential ways to make lasting change. Work Package 1 of the TRADE Hub project focusses on wildlife and wild meat trade.
• The SWM Programme is designed to reduce hunting of wildlife to sustainable levels, protecting endangered wildlife species, conserving biodiversity, maintaining the essential ecological roles of wildlife within forested and savanna ecosystems, and securing stocks and flows of provisioning ecosystem services. The project works in 15 countries, developing innovative, collaborative and scalable new approaches to conserve wild animals and protect ecosystems, whilst at the same time improving the livelihoods of indigenous peoples and rural communities who depend on these resources. Monitoring and Evaluation is a key part of the project, which has collected baseline information on wild meat use in each of the project sites, as well as monitoring the impacts of project interventions on people and wildlife.
• The WILDMEAT project exists to provide an evidence-base and research toolkit for wild meat researchers, practitioners and policy makers. The WILDMEAT Database now holds data from over 400 sites on wild meat hunting offtakes, consumption and market sales, in standardized formats to allow analysis across sites and studies. This makes available a wealth of information that can be used to inform wild meat policy and practice in Central Africa.

The consultant will:

1. Conduct a literature review and survey of relevant experts to build a database of potential socio-economic and contextual indicators, and associated methods and tools for populating these indicators, to track wild meat use and impacts at the local, national and regional level. The structure and content of the database will be guided by previous work conducted at CIFOR on ecological indicators.
2. Convene a 2-day expert working group (location TBD), to discuss potential socio-economic and contextual indicators, methods and tools to track wild meat use and impacts at the local, national and regional level, using the output in (a) as a basis for these discussions
3. Develop a final list of suggested indicators, methods and tools based on the work done in a) and b), finalise the indicators database and collaborate with the CIFOR WILDMEAT web team to develop the WILDMEAT indicators toolkit to include the new social and contextual indicators, methods and tools.
4. Conduct a literature and data review to analyse the current feasibility of applying these indicators with current available data, for a case-study region/country (TBD)
5. Where feasible, choose a selection of case study indicators (preferably with indicators chosen from ecological, social and contextual groups) and populate with data from the case study region/country (data potentially taken from WILDMEAT).
6. Test the applicability of these indicators at the national and project level, in collaboration and consultation with national and international partners (including, for example, the Institute de Recherche en Ecologie Tropical in Gabon, USFWS grantee projects and SWM project sites)
7. Write a technical report (~30 pages) to present the ecological, social and contextual indicators, with CBD Parties as the intended audience
8. Work with the WILDMEAT web team to develop visualisations of these indicators on the WILDMEAT website.

Education, knowledge and experience

• An understanding of sustainable use and of the development and use of indicators in conservation
• Experience in monitoring and evaluation (either development of M&E tools or field application)
• Experience and ability in collaborating within a multicultural and multidisciplinary team
• Demonstrable interest in the subject area
• Strong publication record appropriate to your career stage
• Experience of writing policy-facing documents
• Ability to communicate effectively in written and spoken English and French
• Excellent organizational skills
• Skills in statistical analyses (including use of R programming languages
• Experience in creating and working with scientific databases

Terms and conditions

• This is a consultancy position.
• The consultancy period from August 2023 to August 2024.
• Work location: Home-base, preferably based in Oxford, UK To apply, please visit our career site at: http://www.cifor.org/careers and https://www.worldagroforestry.org/working-for-icraf To learn more about CIFOR-ICRAF, please visit our websites at: https://www.cifor-icraf.org CIFOR-ICRAF promotes Gender Diversity – Applications from women professionals are encouraged. CIFOR-ICRAF is an equal opportunity employer. It fosters a multicultural work environment that values gender equality, teamwork, and respect for diversity.

Application process

The application deadline is 05 May-2023
We will acknowledge all applications, but will contact only short-listed candidates.