This past spring, EEM tested their facilitator skills with a diverse group of community stakeholders participating in a workshop of the Connexion Montérégie, a McGill University biodiversity and ecosystem services research initiative. McGill University researchers were seeking the collaboration of the local business community, local agriculture, NGOs, and municipal and regional governments, to build future land-use scenarios that could be used by the researchers to model the impacts on ecosystems. EEM’s challenge was to bring together all the players to develop creative, yet not improbable, scenarios of future trends and events that would influence the land-use over the next 50 years. The researchers will be combining the results of actual biological and landscape research with a selection of the most creative scenarios to model the impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services in the Richelieu Valley, with the idea of providing decision-makers with the best information possible. Our team of three facilitators planned the workshop outline, exercises and material and saw to the smooth running of what turned out to be a very stimulating event. Read more about Connexion Montérégie.
8 September 2014