In a world where environmental policy spans decades and continents, the challenge isn’t just making the right decisions — it’s keeping track of them. For the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), that meant grappling with more than 2,000+ resolutions, adopted across generations of conservation leaders. Each document is binding, complex, and often interlinked with dozens of others. Manually tracing them? Impossible at scale.
That’s where ChatR&R comes in, a GenAI compliance assistant designed to streamline this exact task.
The Policy Challenge: Complexity at Global Scale
The IUCN’s resolutions are not advisory. They represent the collective will of the conservation world. But finding out what a past resolution said about, say, marine protected areas in Southeast Asia? That could take days. Some resolutions date back to the 1960s. Others have been revised or superseded. Staff needed a tool that could:
- Retrieve resolutions in seconds
- Understand their legal relevance
- Track changes and lineage
- Explain context across decades
This wasn’t a knowledge management problem. It was a compliance problem.
Why Standard AI Tools Fell Short
Off-the-shelf GenAI products aren’t built for institutional accountability. They hallucinate. They offer no traceability. For a policy organization like IUCN, that’s unacceptable. Every answer had to be grounded in fact, sourced, and auditable.
So IUCN partnered with S-PRO, a firm experienced in AI policy management software, to build something different. A custom, domain-trained LLM architecture with:
- Embedded citation tracing
- Document hierarchy modeling
- Access control layers
- Feedback loops from real users
The solution needed to be explainable, not just intelligent.
Building ChatR&R: From Principles to Product
ChatR&R (short for Charter, Resolutions, & Recommendations) started with a discovery phase involving legal experts, ecologists, and data teams. The result was a tool that:
- Accepts open-ended queries from staff (e.g., “What resolutions exist on coral reef protection?”)
- Surfaces relevant content with full citations
- Highlights overlaps, contradictions, and lineage
- Provides a user-friendly chat-like interface
It sits on a hybrid infrastructure, optimized for privacy and a low ecological footprint, a nod to IUCN’s commitment to sustainable tech.
Why GenAI Was the Right Fit (But Not the Whole Solution)
ChatR&R isn’t just a chatbot. It’s a combination of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), NLP-enhanced indexing, and decision-support logic. Its goal is not to replace policy analysts but to make their jobs faster and more accurate.
According to IUCN CIO François Jolles, “We wanted relevant AI, not just advanced AI.” That meant making the system conservative in its responses, favoring precision over novelty.
Adoption, Use, and What Comes Next
After internal testing and training, ChatR&R is now actively used within IUCN to:
- Support legal and policy reviews
- Prepare documentation for upcoming congresses
- Onboard new staff into institutional memory
It’s also influencing how IUCN thinks about responsible artificial intelligence. Every prompt, every answer is monitored for explainability and improvement potential.
This project is just one example of how artificial intelligence can serve public-interest organizations when it’s built with purpose.
Toward Smarter Institutions
ChatR&R is more than a tech upgrade. It’s an institutional shift. By embedding AI into the workflows of conservation governance, IUCN has shown what’s possible when deep domain expertise meets thoughtful software design.
Tools like this don’t just answer questions. They keep organizations aligned with their history, accountable to their goals, and ready for the next generation of action.
More organizations will need to follow suit. And when they do, they’ll need partners who understand both mission and machine.
