Capacity Building
Establishing National Clearing-House Mechanisms
Decision X/15 encourages Parties to continue to take the necessary steps to establish, strengthen, and ensure the sustainability of, national clearing-house mechanisms. A number of capacity-building efforts are being made to achieve this goal by Parties and through partnerships.
European Portal Toolkit
The European Portal Toolkit is a key tool developed and maintained by the European CHM in order to facilitate the establishment of a National CHM website. It provides a complete set of modern features to create a web portal and manage its content. It is the most widely used tool across Europe and Africa. This toolkit is freely available on the European CHM website at
http://biodiversity-chm.eea.europa.eu/ptk.
Capacity Building Workshops
Several major CHM partners regularly organize capacity building workshops at regional or sub-regional levels. The purpose of these workshops is to strengthen the national capacity to establish or enhance their national CHM, mostly through technical training and sharing of experiences. The following partners can be contacted for more details:
The latest capacity-building workhop was the
Sub-regional capacity-building workshop for South Asia on the Clearing-House Mechanism held on 12-16 December 2011 in Dehradun, India.
Follow this link to see the corresponding presentations and guidance for developing national Clearing-House Mechanisms.
CHM Toolkit
A CHM toolkit was created several years ago to assist Parties in the development of their national clearing-house mechanisms (CHMs), with the following objectives:
- Facilitate the establishment of national CHMs, and promote their participation in activities related to technical and scientific cooperation;
- Synergize partnerships to assist with the technical development of national CHMs;
- Assist in the design and establishment of national CHM websites;
- Promote the exchange of biodiversity-related data, information and knowledge.
The toolkit’s 6 modules inform and educate users on best practices for establishing the key elements of a national CHM:
- Introducing tools in support of participation in the thematic areas and cross-cutting areas of the Convention;
- Assisting in the development of online communication to synergize new collaborative initiatives and promote exchange of ideas and knowledge;
- Assisting in the establishment of national CHMs by discussing potential activities, functions and responsibilities;
- Providing information on creating and structuring national CHM websites, with a focus on establishing partnerships with existing national CHMs;
- Offering information on existing technical toolkits, to facilitate the technical implementation of national CHM websites;
- Providing background information on formats, protocols and standards, particularly metadata and controlled vocabularies, to foster the creation of a global biodiversity information network;
- Providing links to expertise, partners, literature and resources.
This toolkit remains available
here.
