Shimshal Nature Trust a community based conservation and development organization in the Northern areas of Pakistan has been awarded The Science and Practice of Ecology and Society Award by the Resilience Alliance, a trans disciplinary group of scholars. The award provides grant money to the Shimshal Nature Trust, and offers publication of the academic paper written by Mehjabeen Abidi, and Anna Larance, both at Oxford University, in the journal ‘Ecology and Society’.The “resilience” theory is a key emerging concept, which essentially means dynamic local systems that are able to blend and use externally available knowledge to renew themselves rather being obliterated by forces of change around them. This is different from the term ‘indigenous’ knowledge which refers to a body of frozen or disconnected knowledge.
Congratulating the community Mr. Izhar Ali Hunzai, general manage AKRSP said, “we are extremely pleased and proud that the spin off effects of AKDN are resulting in resilient local institutions, such as Shimshal Nature Trust, (His Highness Tha Aga Khan called communities in Northern Areas of Pakistan resilient back in 1983 in the documentary Valleys in Transition), that are the focus of global research and a source of new knowledge”.
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http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/news/announcements/spes_2007.php
Ismailimail 