The first of three planned capacity building exercises, the May 2004 workshop, involved CIFOR, Conservation International Indonesia (Papua Program) and the Indonesian Government's Institute of Sciences (LIPI) working in close partnership to deliver training programs to a range of local forest stakeholders. These included Cendrawasih and Papua Universities, Badan Pengendalian Dampak Lingkungan Daerah (BAPEDALDA) and Balai Konservasi Sumber Daya Alam (BKSDA) (Jayapura).

CIFOR's input focused on the use of Multidisciplinary Landscape Assessment (MLA) as a means of surveying and determining, from the perspective of local communities, what is important in terms of landscape, environmental services and biodiversity. Such information can help identify where local communities' interests and priorities might converge with conservation and sustainable development priorities and thus be of great assistance planners and decision-makers.

Apart from building local capacity in MLA techniques, an important side benefit of CIFOR's MLA training in the Mamberamo region was the way the training surveys helped build trust and relationships between various stakeholders through the need to cooperate and work together. Such early cooperation has laid an important foundation for future negotiations concerning the use of local forests.

Ongoing CI initiatives in the Mamberamo seek to strengthen biodiversity conservation and environmental management by informing and building capacity of local communities to participate in decision-making processes. They will also facilitate the creation of a Mamberamo Conservation Corridor, which links currently established protected areas through strategically placed "indigenous forest reserves". Thus the training by CIFOR in MLA methodology helped build the capacity of those carrying out these surveys within this overall conservation and development-planning context. The support for the necessary expertise in training and conducting the initial MLA is being funded through an external grant to CIFOR.