The Cape Action Plan for the Environment: overview of an ecoregional planning process

A recent trend in biodiversity conservation has been to undertake conservation planning exercises at regional scale, which attempt to protect a representative sample of all habitat types in an entire ecological region. The Cape Action Plan for the Environment (CAPE), which focussed on the Cape Floristic Region (CFR), is one of the more advanced of current initiatives. This 2-year project, funded by the Global Environment Facility, was designed to develop a strategy and action plan for the CFR. What was special about CAPE was the combination of stakeholder involvement with an explicit, quantitative planning procedure. This paper gives an account of the process by which this was achieved, and describes the project activities, the public involvement process and a brief overview of project findings. CAPE was a multidisciplinary conservation planning process at relatively large scale, with a key focus on building partnerships between executing agencies, non-governmental organizations, research institutes and the private sector from the outset. This was done to create commitment to implementation and ensure long-term "social" sustainability to match the efforts towards ecological sustainability. The paper concludes by offering some guidelines on the management of ecoregional conservation planning. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.