Forest Management Practices: Economic Development Over Sustainable Conservation of Natural Resources

Brief

With your passion to make a real difference, you have joined MARD (Make a Real Difference) Limited as an employee.  MARD is a commercial organisation that seeks to develop creative and critical approaches and ethical solutions for its clients.  MARD's clients include charities, businesses, government agencies and philanthropists.  In 2023, MARD has developed a number of problem areas and country-setting that they wish to market to their clients to seek funds to further the solutions for the problems. The concept manager at MARD has approached all of its employees (you are included!) to develop a problem statement for a problem that each employee feels passionate about and for one that each employee can develop creative solutions/creative processes to develop solutions for.  MARD has provided employees with the 'Problem Areas and Countries' spreadsheet (you will see a copy of this in the Overall Assignment Details and FAQ canvas page).  (Note: All the assignments for BUSS5221 should be written to the clients of MARD , e.g. philanthropists. That is you are pitching your assignments to the clients of MARD).  The focus of your work for this task (Assignment 1) is as follows:

1) Provide a brief overall description of the problem area in a country setting (e.g. what is the status of environmental degradation in the Philippines).  Please note that the same problem may manifest itself in very different ways in a particular country and hence it is imperative that you provide a country-specific setting to the problem.  You need to include references and facts in this section. (approx 500 words)

2) Provide your problem statement and justify why it is important to address it.  Note that a problem statement is different from the overall description of the problem area in a country setting.  The problem statement provides an unbiased and concise statement of the problem in one to two sentences.  The problem statement provides a link between the current state of the problem and the desired state.  You need to include references and facts in this section. (approx 400 words)

3) Outline your creative (note that in BUSS5221, creative is defined as novel and useful) idea to address the problem.  Your creative idea can be a mix of creative processes and/or creative solutions.  You need to show convincing pieces of evidence that your idea is novel and useful . You can include your pieces of evidence in the Appendix (E.g. Appendix A - Evidence that idea is novel; Appendix B - Evidence that idea is useful). The evidence can be in the form of screenshots, web searches etc but it is your responsibility to provide that your idea is novel and useful.  These pieces of evidence are not included in your word count. (approx 500 words)

4) End of Document References. (approx 350 words).  In-text and end-of-document references are not included in the word count.  

5) You must follow all specific requirements 

Structure of Report

Please indicate your word count at the top of Page 1 of your assignment.  Please follow all requirements listed here - Specific requirements

1.0 Problem Area and Country Setting

2.0 Problem Statement

3.0 Creative Idea

4.0 References (APA-7 Format)

Appendix 

Use the above headings in your report.

Word Length 

The word length for this assignment is 1500 words.  Under the business school policies, you are allowed a buffer of 10% (150 words extra). 

Remember that the word length excludes both in-text and end-of-document references.  Appendices are not included in the word count.  Appendices are not marked but can be provided for additional support for your assignment.

Reference style

Please use APA-7 format