The Punta Leona private reserve on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, where the owners voluntarily protect biological diversity and use a small part of the property for ecotourism. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
PUNTA LEONA, Costa Rica , Nov 20 2015 (IPS)

Private voluntary nature reserves in Latin America should be seen as allies in policies on the environment, climate change mitigation and the preservation of biological diversity in rainforests, say experts.

“Private reserves in Latin America are not included in conservation policies; they should be integrated in our national strategies,” said Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, vice-president of conservation policies in Conservation International (CI) in Costa Rica.

Rodríguez, a former Costa Rican minister of environment, energy and mines (2002–2006), was addressing 150 environmentalists, promoters of voluntary conservation agreements, and ecotourism business owners, during the 11th Latin American Congress of Networks of Private Reserves, held Nov. 9-13 in the Punta Leona private nature reserve and tourism destination.

In his view, the private sector should play a more central role and governments and the owners of private nature reserves should work together to achieve compliance with the Aichi Biodiversity Targets adopted in Nagoya, Japan in 2010.

During the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Nagoya, 193 United Nations members established 20 targets to fight the loss of biodiversity, with a 2020 deadline.

“We are losing our natural capital due to climate change and the big gap between private and public conservation,” said Rodríguez. “The owners of private reserves should become political actors, to help meet the Aichi Targets.”

The global cost of financing efforts towards the targets is estimated at 150 to 440 billion dollars a year, according to figures from the Convention itself. But currently, CI says, the world is only channeling 45 billion dollars towards that end.

Rodríguez says private conservation efforts could help mitigate the shortfall in funds.

With that aim, the Latin American Alliance of Private Reserves was formally created Nov. 6 – the first of its kind in the world. It groups 4,345 private reserves in 15 countries, with a combined total of 5,648,000 hectares of green areas.

The 11th Latin American Congress of Networks of Private Reserves held No. 9-13 in the Punta Leona nature reserve on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

“The idea is to form a conservation chain,” Martin Keller of Guatemala, the president of the new alliance, told IPS. “Private areas can form a chain with national parks and expand national conservation systems. They are also a mechanism to absorb drastic climate changes.”

He argues that there should be no borders for private reserves in the region. “We are joining together in something magnificent, and formalising associations with international institutions so that they include us in environmental projects,” he said.

During the congress in Costa Rica, a pilot programme to encourage the sale of carbon credits was announced, with the donation of 200 hectares of land by a member of the Alliance. The programme will have an estimated 3,600 tonnes of carbon.

Keller hopes Latin America will begin to sell carbon as a bloc, starting in 2017.

“We have dreams and a passion for conserving nature,” the president of the Costa Rican Network of Nature Reserves, Rafael Gallo, who is donating the 200 hectares for the pilot plan, told IPS. “We want the sale of carbon to be a mechanism for private conservation at a global level.”

Gallo has an 800-hectare property on the Banks of the Pacuare River along Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. Of that total, 700 hectares are a forest reserve. It is located in Siquirres, 85 km east of San José, near the Barbilla National Park, which forms part of the La Amistad Biosphere Reserve.

“The market is still just getting off the ground, a ton of carbon is worth three dollars,” said Gallo, who believes the mechanism will become viable when the price of a ton reaches 10 dollars.

The countries in the Alliance are Argentina, Belize, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay and Peru. Uruguay and Venezuela also have private reserves, but they have not yet set up local networks – a necessary step before they can join.

Keller said he hopes the initiative will expand to the entire hemisphere, including the Caribbean island nations, Canada and the United States.

Private reserves in the northern Costa Rican province of Heredia. A pilot project for carbon credits will be carried out on one such reserve, thanks to a donation of 200 hectares of land by its owner. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

Private reserves would like to benefit from multilateral institution programmes, and with that in mind they have made contact with U.N. partners involved in one way or another with conservation issues, such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.

“We want to be a regional bloc, we want to be heard at an international level, and we want incentives for property owners to continue joining forces to support conservation – because we would have a massive impact as a bloc,” Claudia García de Bonilla, executive director of the Association of Private Natural Reserves of Guatemala, told IPS.

Voluntary conservation areas are set up by ecotourism businesses, academic institutions, research bodies, or organic agricultural producers, and their advocates see them as green shields against climate extremes and the loss of biodiversity.

“Forests are a sponge, absorbing storms and hurricanes. We have to keep expanding our ecological corridors,” Bonilla said.

The representative of private green areas in Chile, Mauricio Moreno, underscored benefits that nature reserves belonging to individuals or private bodies can offer a global vision of conservation.

“These areas are refuges protected with a great deal of goodwill and effort,” he told IPS. “They complement the public networks. There are reserves that border natural parks and thus create much bigger areas that make it possible to conserve species of animals. With a public and private effort, integral conservation is possible.”

According to Ariane Claussen, an engineer in renewable natural resources at the University of Chile, the budget assigned to public protected areas in the region is insufficient, which makes it difficult for countries to have the capacity to act on their own in the preservation of biodiversity.

“Rather than seeing private reserves as independent, they should be seen in an integrated manner,” she told IPS. “If these people didn’t decide to practice conservation, they would be using that land in different ways, for unsustainable monoculture or stockbreeding.”

She said “the property owners dedicate a small portion of this land to (economic) development like tourism, because they need an income.”

Claussen, along with another Chilean colleague, Tomás González, stressed the Latin American initiative Huella, aimed at voluntary cooperation in technical planning for conservation, environmental education and ecological activism in the region.

Private reserves cover gaps left by the state, she said. “The idea is that they take part in conservation as buffer zones and link up the ecosystems of public protected areas that are isolated and fragmented,” she explained.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Members of Costa Rica’s Environmental Administrative Tribunal (TAA) take a break during an inspection of damage to wetlands in Puntarenas by invading farmers. Back centre: TAA president, judge José Lino Chaves. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
PUNTARENAS, Costa Rica, Jul 2 2014 (IPS)

Biologist Juan Sánchez drives the leader of two off-road vehicles along a dirt road in southeastern Costa Rica. Officials and experts are on their way to inspect a homestead whose owner has destroyed part of a mangrove swamp.

Sánchez is a technical officer for the Environmental Administrative Tribunal (TAA), the environmental court that enforces environmental laws in Costa Rica.

During the inspection of the wetland, 280 kilometres southeast of San José, he told IPS that for the past seven years he has been “chasing the bad guys”: companies and individuals who are harming natural resources in this Central American country of 4.5 million people.

The TAA was created in 1995 and is one of the foremost mechanisms in Costa Rica to combat destruction of the ecosystem. It depends on the Environment and Energy Ministry (MINAE), not the judicial branch.

It only has 20 officials to fulfil its remit of enforcing green justice.

“We have been relatively successful in the area of environmental administrative justice,” the TAA president, judge José Lino Chaves, told IPS.

In his view, “the TAA’s change of language and actions since 2008 has managed to warn Costa Ricans that we were doing something really wrong,” and that “caring for the environment is a priority” for the country.

One-quarter of Costa Rican territory is under some form of environmental protection, 53 percent is forested and it contains nearly four percent of the world’s biodiversity. The country promotes its natural wealth as its chief attraction and an asset to combat climate change.

The TAA is complemented by the Public Prosecutor’s Agrarian Environmental Office, which is also very short-staffed.

“I remember that a study carried out in the early 1990s found that 98 percent of the environmental offences reported were dismissed,” the former Environment minister (2002-2006), Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, told IPS.

At the time, “the (formal justice) system was inefficient, and according to the study the accused were acquitted because their responsibility could not be proved,” said Rodríguez, who is an environmental lawyer and a current vice president of Conservation International, an NGO.

“I don’t doubt the good intentions of the members” of the TAA, congressman and environmental lawyer Edgardo Araya, who won the legal battle against the Crucitas mining project in the national Dispute Tribunal, told IPS. “But the TAA as it stands is not viable; it lacks resources and judges.”

Álvaro Sagot, another environmental lawyer who won a pollution case against dairy giant Dos Pinos before the TAA, agreed about the lack of resources, but highlighted to IPS the value of the environmental court’s accessibility, as any person, with or without knowledge of the law, can bring a complaint.

Plaintiffs can also resort to the ordinary justice system. But Rodríguez said the criminal justice route is no use, because of lack of awareness. “I remember talking to judges who freed poachers arrested in national parks, because they did not consider this an offence,” he said.

One of the most famous TAA rulings was in September 2009, when it compelled the Panama registered vessel Tiuna to pay a fine of 668,000 dollars for tuna fishing in protected areas.

The environmental court assessed the value of the 280 tonnes of fish taken from the Coco Island National Park, off the western Pacific coast, and levied a proportionate fine.

Costa Rica has sought to build an international reputation as a “green country.” For years its slogan was “No Artificial Ingredients,” and in 2007 the government launched its “Peace With Nature” initiative, reaffirming Costa Rica’s commitment to the environment.

But cases are piling up in the TAA’s offices and Chaves himself admits that creating environmental awareness is a complex process.

This month the environmental court had 3,600 open case files to deal with, more than three times the number a decade ago. There are only six lawyers and three environmental judges, two of whom are lawyers and one an engineer.

The three judges are tasked with visiting all the affected zones to see for themselves the environmental damage in the field, in order to make their rulings.

On these field trips, judges and biologists alike wear mountain boots, protective cotton sunhats and machetes at their belts.

As well as inspecting specific cases, the TAA carries out “environmental sweeps,” their term for inspection tours lasting several days, with the purpose of putting a stop to ecological damage in a given territory.

The TAA has already halted 200 real estate projects on the Pacific coast and 40 on the Atlantic coast since the sweeps started in 2008, its president said.

But the “bad guys” do not give up. Only days after Sánchez’s inspection trip, another group of lawyers, experts and judges visited mangrove swamps in Puntarenas, in the Central Pacific region, 80 kilometres east of the provincial capital, to investigate another complaint.

They found a scene of devastation: 25 hectares of mangrove had been reduced to ashes by invaders who were already planting maize and sugarcane.

“They go on and on, and if we let them they would devour the whole zone. They burn down the mangroves and use the land for farming,” forest biologist Alexis Madrigal, the coordinator of TAA’s technical department, told IPS at the scene.

While members of the technical team removed the plastic bags the invaders used to mark their new plots, Chaves and the two lawyers with him considered possible next steps.

The first thing is a precautionary measure to halt the land invasion, followed by a ban on agricultural use of the land or an order to pay an indemnity, or both.

The TAA inspired the creation of three environmental courts in Chile, and Chaves shared the Costa Rican experience with the courts’ Chilean promotors.

The two systems are similar in that they both have three judges, one of whom must be a scientist; they have wide independence and are responsible for punishing environmental harm. Peru is making headway with a comparable initiative.

The main challenge faced by the TAA is expanding the number of its technical field staff as well as the lawyers in its San José headquarters, so that members of the legal team are not burdened with the unmanageable load of 600 case files each, as they are now.

It also needs stability. From 2012 to 2014, Chaves was vice minister of Water and Oceans at MINAE. He was able to secure improved budgets for the ATT, but its activities, especially the sweeps, declined.

In July, after a year and a half of less ambitious inspections, the TAA will undertake a tour in which MINAE, institutions like the National Environmental Technical Secretariat, the Water and Sanitation Institute and the security forces will also participate.

They are bound for the north of the country, where expansion of agriculture is threatening biodiversity and water for human consumption. In his San José office, judge Chaves smiles and says: “The environmental sweeps are back.”

Eparama Kelo, a retired teacher, said a Fiji newspaper had recently reported that the plan was to bring in 18,000 to 20,000 Kiribatis to Vanua Levu. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Christopher Pala
NAVIAVIA, Fiji, Jun 9 2014 (IPS)

You can count the inhabitants of this isolated, tidy village of multi-coloured houses and flower bushes among global warming’s first victims – but not in the usual sense.

They are descendants of labourers from the Solomon Islands who came to Fiji to work on the coconut plantations in the 19^th century. In 1947, they were invited to move onto a large one called the Natoavatu Estate that the Anglican Church once inherited and were told they could stay there indefinitely as long as they practiced the Anglican faith.

In late May, the Church sold most of the 2331.3-hectare estate to the island nation of Kiribati, leaving the 270 villagers, who said they used 283 hectares to feed themselves, with only 125 hectares.

“We can’t live on just 300 acres [125 hectares],” said the village headman, Sade Marika.

Anote Tong, the president of Kiribati, said he bought land in Vanua Levu, Fiji’s second-largest island, so that his 103,000 people will have some high ground to go to when a rising sea makes his nation of 33 low-lying coral atolls unliveable. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

Kiribati’s president, Anote Tong, said he bought the land so that his 103,000 people will have some high ground to go to when a rising sea makes his nation of 33 low-lying coral atolls unliveable.

“We would hope not to put everyone on [this] one piece of land, but if it became absolutely necessary, yes, we could do it,” he told the Associated Press.

For years, Tong has claimed in climate change conferences and in interviews that sea-level rise was already claiming a heavy toll on his people, eroding beaches, destroying buildings and crops, forcing the evacuation of a village and wiping out an entire island.

His views are echoed by Conservation International, a large NGO based near Washington, D.C., on whose board Tong sits. The residents of “Kiribati, where the effects of rising sea levels already are being felt, [are] on the front lines of climate change,” says its website.

In Tarawa, Kiribati’s overcrowded capital island where half the population of 103,000 lives, Tong often warns in speeches that climate change will destroy their homeland but that he is working hard to obtain compensation from the countries that caused it.

Kiribati, with a per-capita income of 1,600 dollars, receives more foreign aid per capita than any other Pacific nation.

This year, the government organised a competition for the best song on climate change. The refrain of the winning song, frequently played in English on the state radio, is “The angry sea will kill us all.”

But while Tong’s warnings of impending doom for atoll dwellers have brought him a measure of fame abroad and even a panel that nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize, in Kiribati they elicit confusion in some people and derision in others. “I don’t think he did a proper valuation. And it’s clear the government doesn’t have any idea of what it’s going to do with the property now.” -- former Kiribati president, Teburoro Tito

“A lot of people now worry about climate change,” said Tealoy Pupu, a 20-year-old student, as she lay pandanus leaves out to dry. “We just don’t know what to think.”

Tong’s predecessor as president, Teburoro Tito, had read the scientific studies on atoll dynamics. “The scientists tell us that our reefs are healthy and can grow and rise with the sea level, so there is absolutely no need to buy land in Fiji or anywhere else,” he said emphatically. “How can we ask for foreign aid when we spend our own money on such foolish things?”

“We know that the whole reef structure can grow at 10 to 15 mm a year, which is faster than the expected sea-level rise,” confirmed Paul Kench, an atoll geo-morphologist at the University of Auckland.

“As long as the reef is growing and you have an abundant supply of sand, there’s no reason reef growth can’t keep up with sea-level rise.”

Kench and others also say that sea-level rise has had no effect so far on any Pacific atoll. They say that common images of waves crashing into homes give a false impression of permanent flooding when in fact they are caused by inappropriate shoreline modifications like seawalls to protect land reclaimed from the sea or by building causeways between islands.

In Vanua Levu, Fiji’s second-largest island, where the property Tong bought is located, an examination of the sales deeds of comparable parcels revealed that Kiribati paid four times more per acre than other buyers in the last few years.

Tito, the former president, said he believed that the 8.7-million-dollar purchase had been done solely for publicity purposes to highlight Tong’s far-sightedness and how seriously he takes climate change. “I don’t think he did a proper valuation,” he said. “And it’s clear the government doesn’t have any idea of what it’s going to do with the property now.”

In his announcement of the completion of the sale, Tong said a committee would be appointed to study what should be done with the land. In a separate statement, the government said the purchase marked “a new milestone” in its “development plans, which include exploring options of commercial, industrial and agricultural undertakings such as fish canning, beef/poultry farming, fruit and vegetable farming.”

Tong, through his spokesman, Rimon Rimon, declined all comment.

Tetawa Tatai, a former health minister and a member of parliament, said he was shocked that the Church of England, which he called “one of the most trusted institutions in the world,” would “gouge one of the poorest and most isolated countries in the world.”

In an interview in Suva, Bishop Winston Hanapua, Archbishop of the Polynesian Diocese of the Anglican Church, denied that the church had taken advantage of an inexperienced buyer widely believed to be representing the world’s first climate refugees.

On the contrary, he said, “I felt good about the whole thing because Kiribati is part of my jurisdiction. We were open for any offer, and there was an offer.”

Back in Naviavia, the Solomon Islander Anglican minister, Koroi Salacieli, complained that the Church had given him no clear notion of how many Kiribatis would be coming into their midst.

He, other villagers and an outside expert agreed that the property, of which two thirds is covered by densely forested steep hills, could only support a few hundred more people.

These would need housing and lengthy training to learn how to practice Fiji’s agriculture, which involves using bullocks to plough the land. In Kiribati, there is no agriculture to speak of: rice, canned meat and fresh fish form the mainstay of the diet.

Eparama Kelo, a retired teacher, said a Fiji newspaper had recently reported that the plan was to bring in 18,000 to 20,000 Kiribatis. “What are we going to do if they come?” he asked disconsolately.

Christopher Pala is a Washington-based journalist whose trip to the Pacific was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Anote Tong, the president of Kiribati, claims to have created a marine protected area, but fishing is banned in just three percent of the reserve. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Christopher Pala
TARAWA, Kiribati, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

A growing chorus of politicians, scientists and environmentalists are urging President Anote Tong of Kiribati to actually do what he claims was already done in 2008: create the world’s most effective marine protected area in a remote archipelago in the Central Pacific Ocean.

For years, Tong has been saying that under his leadership, Kiribati created the California-sized Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), “making it off limits to fishing and other extractive uses” – a quote that gets about 500 hits on Google, all Tong’s or his government’s. In speeches at climate change conferences and other venues, he has repeatedly called PIPA his country’s great gift to the world.

But what Kiribati actually did in 2008 was ban fishing in the three percent of the reserve that wasn’t being fished in the first place: the area around the islands, which are uninhabited. In the rest of the reserve, as in the rest of Kiribati’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), industrial tuna fishing has been steadily increasing as prices and profits soar.

In an interview with IPS in the capital island of Tarawa, Tong, who was first elected a decade ago, said that he had no intention of closing PIPA to fishing anytime soon. “It’s got to be done gradually,” he said, declining to set a date.

“President Tong has been misleading the world about the true status of the Phoenix Islands marine reserve,” Seni Nabou, an oceans campaigner with the environmental organisation Greenpeace, said in an e-mail from Fiji."Tong has been misleading the world about the true status of the Phoenix Islands marine reserve."
-- Seni Nabou

“While the world has hailed Kiribati for its conservation efforts, it seems the reserve has only served to bankroll the Spanish tuna fleets fishing in its waters. President Tong now needs to deliver on the talk.”

Misleading claims

For the creation of PIPA, Tong received several prestigious awards from organisations whose officials said in interviews that they had believed the entire reserve was closed to fishing. These awards include a Benchley Award for Excellence in National Stewardship of the Ocean in the United States and a Hillary Leadership Award in New Zealand.

In Tarawa, the skinny atoll home to more than half of Kiribati’s population of 100,000, most people queried, including several members of parliament, said they believed that PIPA had long ago been closed to fishing.

Teburoro Tito, Tong’s predecessor, was scathing about the current president’s descriptions of PIPA.

“The people of Kiribati will be disappointed to learn that their president had lied to the world and particularly those who were led to believe that he deserved prestigious awards” for closing PIPA, said Tito, who is still a member of parliament, now in the opposition. “He must close PIPA [to all fishing] immediately to salvage the country’s honor.”

An estimated 50,000 tons of tuna were taken out of PIPA last year at a time scientists say fishing levels should be decreasing, not increasing.

“Closing PIPA  would be the single most effective act of marine conservation in history” and a big step in preventing the world’s last major population of skipjack tuna from becoming as depleted as those of the Atlantic and Indian oceans, said Daniel Pauly, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

In the interview, Tong said no progress had been made toward banning fishing in PIPA in the last five years because Kiribati requires millions of dollars in financial compensation to do so.

Kiribati earns between 30 and 50 percent of its budget from selling the right to fish in its waters to foreign fleets. Tong insisted that the doubling last year of Kiribati’s income from these licences means that the current demand for compensation – 50 million dollars for the PIPA Trust Fund – should be increased.

“Would we lose any money as a result of closing PIPA?” he asked rhetorically. “We would.” Dismissing the notion that it would be hard to ask international donors for money to protect tuna at a time when Kiribati’s tuna income is soaring, he insisted that that revenue would increase by a slimmer margin if PIPA were closed, adding, “So there is that lost opportunity cost,” which he casually estimated at “an extra two, five million dollars” a year.

But experts disagreed with Tong and raised the question of whether he ever intended to close PIPA in the first place. They said that while the closure would inconvenience foreign fleets, the mobility of both the tuna and the drifting fish-aggregating devices the fleets use meant that they could easily fish around the reserve and catch the same amount of fish.

And with profit margins for purse seiners now exceeding 100 percent, or 1,000 dollars a ton, the fleets would be unlikely to leave Kiribati’s waters, of which the reserves makes up 11 percent, if PIPA were closed, experts pointed out.

“I’m sure foreign fishing interests will use the closure as a tool when they negotiate their fishing contracts, so the loss of revenue for Kiribati will depend on how well they negotiate,” said John Hampton, the region’s chief fisheries scientist.

Overlooking the dispute

Kiribati’s senior partner in PIPA, Conservation International of Arlington, Virginia, never challenged Tong’s compensation claims. With a staff of nearly 1,000, CI is one of the largest conservation organisations in the world. Its executive committee chairman is Wal-Mart’s head, Rob Walton, and its vice chair is the film star Harrison Ford.

CI’s senior vice president and chief scientist for oceans, Gregory Stone, who dived the Phoenix in 2000, proposed the idea of a giant reserve to Tong and helped Kiribati build a legal and financial infrastructure for PIPA.

Today, PIPA is CI’s biggest project, while Tong sits on CI’s board. CI’s website says the president “has gone further than almost anyone to protect the planet’s most pristine waters for the global good” and until recently called PIPA “completely off-limits to commercial fishing”.

In a series of phone calls, Stone brushed aside any questions of dishonesty and insisted that small countries like Kiribati needed sympathy and understanding to espouse conservation, not criticism. He said the negotiations over compensation were “progressing” and added, “Creating marine reserves takes time and patience.”

The management plan on PIPA’s website calls for CI to raise 13.5 million dollars by the end of 2014, after which another 25 percent of PIPA will be closed to fishing, for a total of 28 percent. Stone said he was optimistic he could raise the money, even though nearly a decade after fundraising began, the PIPA trust fund is still empty.

Jay Nelson, who recently retired as head of Pew’s Global Ocean Legacy program and was involved in creating several giant no-take reserves, said attracting such donations in today’s economic climate is unrealistic, especially since most people think the reserve is already closed.

“CI needs to admit that they won’t be able to raise that kind of money and tell President Tong to close it immediately so it lives up to its claim as a world-class marine reserve,” he said.