From July 24th to 30th, 2022, ILEC will invite researchers from the National Water Research Institute of Malaysia (NAHRIM) to a workshop on lake basin management.

This workshop will be held as part of the fiscal year 2022 Global Environment Fund Grant Program of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency for the project entitled “Introduction of Participatory Ecosystem Services Shared Value Assessment (PESSVA) in Malaysia.”　PESSVA is one of the methods to promote public participation in the Integrated Lake Basin Management (ILBM), a concept promoted worldwide by ILEC over the past decades. The usefulness of the PESSVA approach has been confirmed in its application to similar projects in Kenya and India. This method allows the relative magnitude of the Ecosystem Service benefits accrued by lakes (water supply, fishery, tourism, biological habitat, history/culture, landscape, climate mitigation, etc.) to the basin stakeholders (interested parties), including the public, government offices, NGOs, and business operations. The stakeholder groups will play an active role in preparing the survey questionnaire and analyzing and evaluating the survey results. The evaluation results can be visually understood to be related to such attributes as the upstream/downstream relationship, gender, occupation, age, etc., allowing the stakeholders to discover and mutually recognize the similarities and differences in perception among the stakeholder groups, promoting the in-depth discussion on their reasons and backgrounds, that will lead to an increased awareness of the need for joint effort on sustainable use and conservation of precious lake basin resources.