At the IUCN World Conservation Congress held in Jeju, Republic of Korea, in 2012, a resolution was adopted to establish an annual event aimed at gathering world leaders in conservation. The Koreans responded by offering to host the first of these events and so the 1st World Leaders Conservation Forum was held in the Republic of Korea on 7-9 July 2015, hosted by the Jeju Special Self-Governing Province. The theme for the event was Nature: a path to peace and coexistence and it was divided into three components across these three days: Expert Meetings (Day 1), Leaders’ Dialogue (Day 2) and Field Excursions (Day 3).

The Expert Meetings focused on topics relevant to the event’s theme and conservation at the global scale. One of these was entitled Peace: facilitating transboundary conservation and peace building, that reviewed the status of global transboundary conservation initiatives and articulated future trends with an emphasis on initiatives that foster international peace and security, and communicated a vision for transboundary conservation and the messages to the Leaders’ Dialogue. Considering that the IUCN WCPA Best Practice Protected Area Guidelines Transboundary Conservation: A systematic and integrative approach had just been published (May 2015), the session started with Kevan Zunckel’s presentation which used the new Guidelines as a basis to address the aspects mentioned above. Kevan Zunckel is one of the co-authors and co-editors of the Guidelines, and also WCPA Transboundary Conservation Specialist Group’s Regional Coordinator for Eastern and Southern Africa.

In terms of putting across a vision for transboundary conservation, the recommendations coming out of the Governance Stream of the IUCN World Parks Congress 2014 were reiterated, i.e. a call for all countries to embrace transboundary conservation as an efficient mechanism to enhance the achievement of conservation objectives. The call to action spoke to the need for the development of a comprehensive global inventory of Transboundary Conservation Areas, including the measure of their benefits, and the development and implementation of capacity building material aimed at rolling out the application of the WCPA Guidelines.

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