Course description

Monitoring and evaluation is essential if you want to be accountable for the impacts you plan to make, and learn from what works as well as your mistakes. In this session, we will consider techniques for evaluating impact during the course of your work, with or without the collaboration of your stakeholders, and for doing evaluations after projects have ended. We will consider methods based on logical frameworks and theory of change, experimental designs, social science methods and approaches from the arts and humanities. The session will give you an opportunity to design your own impact evaluation in small groups and you will hear a case studies of impact evaluations from peatland research projects.

Key benefits:

• Gain new skills in monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning
• Discover how to use your existing research skills to evaluate your impact
• Be inspired by case studies from peatland research projects

At the end of the workshop you will receive slides and links to free resources to help you embed impact in your research. Prof Reed continues to answer all questions from participants via email after the course, guaranteeing a response to all questions within one week.

About the trainers

Mark Reed is Professor of Rural Entrepreneurship and Director of the Thriving Natural Capital Challenge Centre at Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC), and a Visiting Professor at Newcastle University, Birmingham City University and the University of Leeds. He has over 200 publications that have been cited more than 20,000 times, and has won awards for the non-academic impact of his research. He is author of The Research Impact Handbook, which he has used to train over 10,000 researchers from more than 200 institutions in 55 countries. He provides training and advice to Universities, research funders, NGOs and policy-makers internationally.

Dianna Kopansky is the Coordinator of the Global Peatlands Initiative at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), based in Nairobi, Kenya. An expert in ecosystems and biodiversity, she delivers a suite of landscape management and climate change programmes bringing science to policy to contribute to the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals.

About the Global Peatlands Initiative

The Global Peatlands Initiative is an effort by leading experts and institutions formed by 13 founding members at the UNFCCC COP in Marrakech, Morocco in 2016 to save peatlands as the world’s largest terrestrial organic carbon stock and to prevent it being emitted into the atmosphere. The current greenhouse gas emissions from drained or burned peatlands are estimated to amount up to five percent of the global carbon budget — in the range of two billion tonnes CO2 per year. Partners to the Initiative are working together within their respective areas of expertise to improve the conservation, restoration and sustainable management of peatlands. In this way the Initiative is contributing to several Sustainable Development Goals , including by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, maintaining ecosystem services and securing lives and livelihoods through improved adaptive capacity.

Find out more at: www.globalpeatlands.org