By Dr. Palitha Kohona
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 2 2014 (IPS)

Sri Lanka will host the World Biodiversity Congress (WBC) Nov. 24-27. Given its long and active history of preserving biodiversity, it would be most appropriate for Sri Lanka to be the next host of this global event, which also marks the U.N.’s Decade on Biodiversity.

The world is confronting massive threats to its biological resources due to climate change, pollution, agricultural chemical usage and pest control, land degradation, deforestation, unbridled development, indiscriminate harvesting of wild stocks, uncontrolled slaughter, accumulating waste, in particular, slow degrading waste, etc.Protecting its biodiversity at a national level has been a key challenge and a series of measures have been taken to protect elephants, a prized national asset.

Sri Lanka, while sharing many of the problems of other countries, remains strongly committed to the environment. It is no surprise that it is a party to many of the major international agreements that address environmental issues, especially biodiversity.

Sri Lanka ratified the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 1994. In 1979, it became a party to the 1973 Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (commonly known as the Bonn Convention) and the 1973 Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). The decision adopted by CITES in 1989, in Lausanne, banning the trade in ivory is strictly adhered to by Sri Lanka.

These international agreements have been implemented in Sri Lanka through its own domestic efforts to protect its extensive biodiversity, which is considered to be a unique national asset. Sri Lanka boasts of many endemic species and diverse ecosystems in both its terrestrial and marine environments.

Sri Lanka’s uniquely diverse range of ecosystems range from the wet and semi-dry highlands to the low-lying coast. There are grasslands, wetlands, many types of forests, including wet-zone, dry-zone and mangrove forests, lagoons, and coral reefs.

Furthermore, Sri Lanka, a country of only 65,000 square kilometres, is home to a staggering number of species of animals – some of which are endemic.

Amb. Palitha Kohona. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

There are 91 known species of mammals, 171 species of reptiles and over 106 species of amphibians, 90 of which are endemic. Sri Lanka may be the only country in which you can see both the Earth’s largest land mammal (the elephant, close to 6,000 remain in the wild according to the last count) as well as its largest marine mammal (blue and humpback whales) within a few hours of each other.

From the Sri Lankan leopard to the delicate Ceylon Rose butterfly, Sri Lanka possesses a larger percentage of endemic species than almost any other country of similar or larger land mass and is listed as a global biodiversity hotspot by the IUCN.

Protecting its biodiversity at a national level has been a key challenge and a series of measures have been taken to protect elephants, a prized national asset, including through providing two refuges for orphaned calves and facilitating captive breeding.

The country boasts a long history of training elephants for religious, commercial and domestic purposes. Elephants play a key role in Peraheras (Buddhist religious processions) where they carry the sacred relics of the Buddha with great dignity.

The annual Kandy Perahera could feature over one hundred caparisoned elephants regally parading through the streets of the ancient city of Kandy by torchlight.

The most serious threat to Sri Lankan elephants is human. There are approximately 200 human-caused elephant deaths annually, mostly through gunshots fired by rural farmers acting in self-defence or in retaliation.

The Sri Lankan government has, over the years, enacted legislation that has criminalised the killing of elephants.

The government has also worked closely with conservationists and rural farmers to encourage crops that are not attractive to elephants but are marketable. Ecotourism is fast catching on and will be a major component of the tourism industry.

Sri Lanka is committed to the implementation of the action plans to conserve biological diversity. A National Biodiversity Conservation Action Plan (BCAP), prepared in consultation with a wide range of stakeholders, including the private sector, the IUCN and NGOs, has been adopted.

The BCAP identifies the key challenges facing Sri Lanka which include, deforestation in the wet zones, development of wetlands, overfishing, the destruction of mangroves and coral reefs, the over use of agricultural chemicals and the impact of agriculture on plant diversity.

The BCAP also includes multiple recommendations for action, some of which are quite specific.

For example, on plant diversity, the BCAP has recommended that the government, in partnership with the Bandaranaike Memorial Ayurvedic Research Institute, establish five medicinal plant reserves.

The national medicine system (ayurveda) relies extensively on native plant species. A government policy paper, Haritha Lanka (Green Lanka), seeks to accelerate the greening of Sri Lanka, including by increasing the forest cover to embrace 35 percent of the country.

Sri Lanka has also enacted detailed national legislation to protect its fauna and flora. Central to these efforts are the 2009 amendments to the Flora and Fauna Protection Ordinance (FFPO) and the 1937 Forest Ordinance (FO).

The FFPO established six categories of wildlife reserves in which wildlife is protected by curtailing human activities. These protected areas, reflected in the policy paper, Green Lanka, constitute around 25 percent of the total land mass of Sri Lanka. The government has proposed to enlarge this area to 35 percent of the national land mass.

The FFPO also includes protection for endangered species and requires a permit for the export of any wild animal, plant or their parts from the country.

The FO created a system of reserve forests. These forests, usually in biologically diverse zones, are protected from felling, trespassing by cattle and other similarly disruptive activities.

Sri Lanka has also enacted legislation to address other issues, including the conservation of coastal areas, the regulation of fisheries, the establishment of national heritage wilderness sites (the Sinharaja Forest, a UNESCO listed preserve, is a unique tropical rain forest), and control over invasive species of plants and animals. A major turtle reserve provides protection to a beach where turtles have come to lay eggs for centuries.

Sri Lanka has actively participated in the work of the U.N. Open Working Group developing the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals. Included among the 17 goals identified is a goal on biodiversity, which the country supported throughout the negotiations.

It also supported the goal on the oceans, which contains targets aimed at the conservation and sustainable use of ocean, sea and other marine resources. Sri Lanka is the co-chair of the UN Ad Hoc Working Group on Marine Biological Diversity Beyond National Jurisdiction.

Incidentally, the WBC in Colombo, November 2014, will also coincide with the whale watching season in Sri Lanka.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

A pangolin in the Gir forest of Gujarat, India. Credit: Sandip Kumar/Wikimedia commons

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Pakistan, Oct 10 2012 (IPS)

Conservationists see the decimation of pangolins (scaly anteaters) in Pakistan as a sign of the callousness with which this country’s rich biodiversity is being traded away for commercial gain.   

Tariq Mahmood, assistant professor at the University of Arid Agriculture, Rawalpindi, tells IPS that if the illegal trade in pangolins – prized for their scales and meat – is not stemmed, the animal may well go extinct within the next few decades. 

Between December 2011 and March 2012, Mahmood’s team of researchers recovered 50 pangolin carcasses in the Potohar district of Punjab province alone.

International trade in Asian pangolin species is banned under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, but with each animal fetching about 125 dollars, poachers supplying markets in China and Southeast Asia are ready to take the risk.   

In China, the main market for pangolins, the meat of the animal is considered a delicacy with the scales, blood and other parts used as ingredients in traditional medicine.

“People in Pakistan know pangolins only as a harmless animal and are unaware that the animal also saves crops and plants from insect pests,” says Ejaz Ahmad of the World Wide Fund-Pakistan (WWF-Pakistan). “With their super strong sense of smell, they can detect termites and ants from hundreds of metres away.”

“They are natural pest controllers,” Rhishja Cota-Larson of Project Pangolin (PP) told IPS. “One pangolin can consume an estimated 70 million insects per year.

“If pangolins disappear, you would need to increase the use of pesticides in order to control the insect population. This, in turn, would have adverse affects on the environment and on people,” she said.

“We know of pangolins being killed for their scales in Pakistan and their seizures occur on a regular basis in India and Nepal,” Cota-Larson added. The PP has noted similar incidents in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Mozambique and Uganda.

The insatiable demand may have wiped out around 50,000 pangolins worldwide in 2011, according to PP. 

“In Pakistan, pangolins are bought for as much as 105 dollars per individual at some  five-star hotel for use in their Chinese restaurants,” said Mahmood.

Last year, Mahmood said, ‘Pangolins-wanted’ pamphlets were dropped by helicopter over rural areas around the Jhelum river giving details of people to contact if anyone had a captured animal for sale.  

There are no reliable estimates for the pangolin population in Pakistan as they are elusive, nocturnal animals. “We have no idea how many remain in the wild,” said Ahmad.

But pangolins are not the only animals under threat in Pakistan, and scientists have identified 100 species that are endangered. Taken together with the massive denudation of pine forests in areas such as Swat and the Khyber Paktunkhwa province, the damage to Pakistan’s biodiversity may already be irreversible, experts fear.   

WWF-Pakistan’s Ahmad said since every living thing is in a symbiotic web, balanced biodiversity is vital for the survival of life on earth. “Biodiversity is the summation of all living things on this planet.”

Already gharial, a crocodile species found in Pakistan till late 1970s, has vanished, says environmentalist Munaf Qaimkhani. “This knowledge alone should prompt us to take steps to save those species facing extinction,” he told IPS.

Similarly, the blind dolphin of River Indus, which lost its habitat due to the damming of the river, is now breathing its last, caught in nets, starved of fish and forced to live in increasingly toxic waters.  

In 2006, the WWF-Pakistan estimated that there were just 1,200 dolphins left in the Indus. “Each year almost two dozen dolphins get trapped in the irrigation channels,” said Nasir Panhwar, executive director of the Centre for Environment and Development, a non-governmental organisation based in Hyderabad in Sindh province.

Qaimkhani lists the snow leopard, white-backed vulture, falcons, houbara bustards, Chiltan markhor, Marco polo sheep, woolly flying squirrel and musk deer among animals in Pakistan that have become highly endangered.

Conservationists worry that there are cases where the government is not just apathetic about biodiversity loss but also collusive in its destruction for political or diplomatic reasons.

Raja Zahoor, a customs official, said many animals and birds are hunted for sport by foreign nationals with special permission granted by a government eager to “foster good relations” among influential countries in the Middle East. “Rare species of falcons and the houbara bustard are being taken away to Arab states on dubious documentation.”

Arab falconers hunt the internationally protected houbara bustard on special permits issued by the ministry of foreign affairs. They often bring in their own hunting falcons, but take back endangered Pakistani species using re-export permits. “It is very easy to swap the falcons,” said Panhwar.

“We know this is illegal, but our hands are tied. Customs officers who have tried to stop local falcons from being smuggled out of the country in this way have been taken to task,” Zahoor said. 

“In case a bird or animal is seized by customs, there are no facilities to keep it safely until the courts call for its exhibit or until the case is disposed of – often the animal or bird dies in custody,” Zahoor added.

With 2011 marking the deadliest year for poaching-related elephant deaths in Africa since an international ivory ban went into effect in 1989, a new investigative report released here Friday points to the ongoing impact of religious custom as well as the newfound economic might of China.

Elephant head with tusks removed by poachers, Voi area, Kenya. Credit: cc by 3.0

The situation also underscores the questionable efficacy of the international regime charged with overseeing the global ivory trade, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), a treaty signed in 1973 that covers 176 countries. Early next year, CITES is scheduled to consider re-opening the regulated trade in ivory.

“The parties to CITES must recognise that in the current climate of poor enforcement, lack of resources, failure of political will and corruption, there is no likelihood that any form of regulated trade is workable,” Mary Rice, the executive director of the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and the head of its elephants campaign, told IPS by e-mail.

“CITES remains, for the moment, the main mechanism through which illegal trade in ivory can be addressed … However, unless CITES applies its authority (it has teeth if it chooses to use them) and adopts a more transparent and open approach, it is open to abuse and gaming for sovereign political and commercial agendas and interests.”

Over its first 20 years, CITES was credited with a dramatic reduction in the ivory trade and a rebounding of elephant populations, especially in Africa. Over the course of the 1980s, some 600,000 elephants are estimated to have been killed in the continent.

For now, the successes of CITES appear to be in the past.

According to CITES own estimates, some 25,000 African elephants were killed by poachers in 2011, though others have suggested that this figure could be far higher. In January this year, in Cameroon, hundreds of elephants were killed by scores of poachers on horseback bearing high-powered weapons – one of the worst such single incidents since the 1989 ban went into effect.

According to Bryan Christy, an investigative reporter who spent the last three years looking into the issue and writes about the Cameroon event, elephant poaching is currently at its worst level in a decade, and the CITES ban “is under constant attack”.

Chinese maw

In a story published Friday, Christy discusses how pressure from several southern African countries eventually led CITES officials to allow certain countries to sell off stockpiled ivory in two “one-off” sales – first to Japan in 1999 and, second, and more controversially, to China in 2008.

While the idea was to allow these sales to flood black markets with cheaper, legally sold ivory, that is not what happened. Not only was there little evidence to show that the first sale had any significant impact on either poaching or smuggling levels, but following the 2008 sale the Chinese government proceeded to increase the price of domestic ivory substantially and then to monopolise its trade.

The effect, Christy reports, has been catastrophic for anti-poaching efforts worldwide, with the Chinese market drawing in increasing amounts of poached ivory.

“The Chinese government is the real puppet master here,” Christy told IPS, noting that Beijing has recently funded a new fleet of technical schools training a new generation of ivory carvers. “Now that China has the buying power to go into the ivory trade, the country with the biggest, most dynamically growing population is saying, ‘We want more; feed us ivory.’”

Meanwhile, Christy points to a central structural problem with CITES’s ability to regulate such a situation: as currently set up, the only metric that the Convention uses to asses ivory-related crimes is the number and size of seizures of illegal ivory.

“When they do that, they’re asking the same government officials who are often part of criminal syndicates to report on this,” he says.

“So, if China reports too many big seizures, it makes government officials look like criminals. Instead, they report lots of little ones, and no one gets hurt – but that doesn’t work. The CITES system relies on the very people who are parts of these criminal networks.”

Core principles

The new Chinese influence in the illicit ivory trade is taking place in parallel to a far older trend, though one that has not gained as much notoriety – the ongoing centrality of ivory in several religious traditions.

“This story began with a rumour that ivory was being smuggled from Africa to the Philippines – I had never heard of that. The Philippines is not considered a major ivory-consuming or -trafficking country,” Christy says.

“But in the Philippines, I found that the exclusive use for ivory was religious purposes. In fact, in both of the widely accepted dominant countries in this trade – Thailand and China – there is a strong religious underpinning.”

While Christy says the public understanding of the environmental implications of engaging in the ivory trade remains relatively undeveloped in countries such as the Philippines and China (Thailand is a bit different), the hierarchical and moral nature of religious communities offers a potent opportunity to turn the tide.

“All the core principles of Catholicism and Buddhism can be applied to fix this problem pretty quickly,” he says. “But these religions have clear leaders, and these leaders can lead. The key to solving these problems is to find and motivate local civil society – local Filipinos, local Thais, domestic Chinese.”

For advocates, the need for such involvement could now be more significant than anytime in recent decades. At the next CITES summit, in Bangkok in March, member states are slated to discuss proposals, tabled at a lead-up meeting this summer, that would seek to “systematise” the trade of ivory.

Not only are several African countries planning on requesting permission to sell their ivory stocks, but for the first time several Southeast Asian countries say they will do so as well, including Thailand and the Philippines. For many, the question is whether these countries are actually committed to the ban, as they say they are, or whether they’re just waiting for the ban to erode.

“It is imperative that the E.U. takes a strong position to oppose further sales and trade. With 27 member states, the E.U. vote is a deal-breaker,” the EIA’s Rice says.

“The U.S. also plays a pivotal role in how the issue gets dealt with in the international arena – many parties follow their lead. Currently, the sales of ivory are being held up as a ‘model’ for how other wildlife products could be traded.”

Yet Bryan Christy notes that Western countries, including the United States and those in the European Union, are inherently more disinterested than are countries that stand to gain financially from any renewed ivory trade.

“A growing number of African countries want to sell their ivory,” Christy says, “and, unfortunately, it’s often the interested parties that make the difference.”