How can we protect the climate more effectively? How can we best preserve habitats and ensure ecosystem services are maintained? How can we halt the global biodiversity crisis? To find answers to these questions we need the smartest minds from a variety of disciplines – that’s exactly the purpose of the Frankfurt Conservation Center, to bring these minds together.
The intention is for the FCC to become a think tank, within which experts from a wide range of disciplines work together to find solutions to the most pressing problems of our time.
Through the FCC, we want to develop solutions, advise political decision-makers, lobby for biodiversity conservation and be an interface between decision-makers and those implementing conservation activities on the ground.
- Expertise and research competence on protecting ecological systems would all be under one roof
- Experts in science and conservation, business and politics, as well as the public would be involved in the development of solutions
- Local and indigenous knowledge from FZS project regions would be taken into account
- Increase competitiveness and visibility of biodiversity research and conservation
- Raise public awareness about the growing loss of biodiversity through targeted public relations with the aim to bring about a common will to act
- Promote the education and training of nature conservation experts in a targeted manner
At the end of 2020, the Frankfurt Zoological Society, Senckenberg Society for Nature Research, and the Goethe University Frankfurt founded the Frankfurt Conservation Center gGmbH. The magistrate of the city of Frankfurt am Main also decided at the end of 2020 to support the establishment of the FCC. A jointly financed new building at the east entrance of the Frankfurt Zoo is currently being planned.
Other cooperation partners include Frankfurt Zoo, the KfW Foundation, BioFrankfurt, Traffic, and the Nature Trust Alliance.
These institutions are already working together on nature conservation issues and finding solutions to those problems.
To address the pressing problems of our time – the loss of biodiversity in the context of global climate change – we need innovative strategies, new, and above all, interdisciplinary approaches to solutions as well as concrete recommendations for action. For the benefit of both nature and people.
As an independent, international competence center, the Frankfurt Conservation Center wants to contribute to the long-term preservation of our planet’s biological diversity. It aims to reconcile the conservation of biological diversity while ensuring sustainable use for us humans.
The Frankfurt Conservation Center (FCC) will merge professional and research expertise in all aspects of nature conservation under one roof. The FCC is both international and interdisciplinary. Thanks to the networking of a large number of competent organizations – located in one building – the FCC will enable the exchange of knowledge and experience as well as promising synergies. Practical solutions emanate from the FCC and are implemented in projects and applied research.
In addition to experts from science and conservation, public representatives, businesses, and politicians are involved in the development of these solutions. Furthermore, local or indigenous knowledge from the project regions is incorporated into the solutions and contributes to their success and acceptance. By bringing together different institutions within the FCC, the competitiveness and visibility of the topic of nature should increase – the FCC aims to establish itself as a competence Center for biodiversity.
In addition, with well-founded external communication, the FCC will ensure that the conservation of biodiversity receives more awareness in the media and the public and that it becomes more firmly anchored as a communal task. The FCC will promote the education and further training of nature conservation experts so that the skills required for the conservation of biodiversity can be taught in an even more targeted manner and systematically built up in the future.