President Macron and Harrison Ford among speakers at the Congress Opening Ceremony. Credit: IUCN Ecodeo

By Guy Dinmore
St Davids, Wales, Oct 4 2021 (IPS)

The world’s most influential conservation congress, meeting for the first time since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, has issued its starkest warning to date over the planet’s escalating climate and biodiversity emergencies.

“Humanity has reached a tipping point. Our window of opportunity to respond to these interlinked emergencies and share planetary resources equitably is narrowing quickly,” the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declared in its Marseille Manifesto at the conclusion of its World Conservation Congress in the French port city.

“Our existing systems do not work. Economic ‘success’ can no longer come at nature’s expense. We urgently need systemic reform.”

The Congress, held every four years but delayed from 2020 by the pandemic, acts as a kind of global parliament on major conservation issues, bringing together a unique combination of states, governmental agencies, NGOs, Indigenous Peoples’ Organisations and affiliate members. Its resolutions and recommendations do not set policy but have shaped UN treaties and conventions in the past and will help set the agenda for three key upcoming UN summits – food systems security, climate change and biodiversity.

“The decisions taken here in Marseille will drive action to tackle the biodiversity and climate crises in the crucial decade to come,” said Dr Bruno Oberle, IUCN Director-General.

“Collectively, IUCN’s members are sending a powerful message to Glasgow and Kunming: the time for fundamental change is now,” he added, referring to the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) to be hosted by the UK in November, and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 15) to be held in China in two parts, online next month and in person in April-May 2022.

The week-long IUCN Congress, attended in Marseille by nearly 6,000 delegates with over 3,500 more participating online, was opened by French President Emmanuel Macron who declared: “There is no vaccine for a sick planet.”

He urged world leaders to make financial commitments for conservation of nature equivalent to those for the climate, listing such tasks as ending plastic pollution, stopping the deforestation of rainforests by eradicating their raw materials in supply chains, and phasing out pesticides.

Congress participants during an Exhibition event of the Sixth Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network. Credit: IUCN Ecodeo

China’s prime minister, Li Keqiang, said in a recorded message that protecting nature and tackling the climate crisis were “global not-traditional security issues”.

While noting that some scientists fear that the climate emergency is “now close to an irreversible tipping point”, the Marseille Manifesto also spoke of “reason to be optimistic”.

“We are perfectly capable of making transformative change and doing it swiftly… To invest in nature is to invest in our collective future.”

Major themes that dominated the IUCN Congress included: the post-2020 biodiversity conservation framework; the role of nature in the global recovery from the pandemic; the climate emergency; and the need to transform the global financial system and direct investments into projects that benefit nature.

Among the 148 resolutions and recommendations voted in Marseille and through pre-event online voting, the Congress called for 80 percent of the Amazon and 30 percent of Earth’s surface—land and sea—to be designated “protected areas” to halt and reverse the loss of wildlife.

Members also voted overwhelmingly to recommend a moratorium on deep-sea mining and reform the International Seabed Authority, an intergovernmental regulatory body.

“The resounding Yes in support for a global freeze on deep seabed mining is a clear signal that there is no social licence to open the deep seafloor to mining,” Jessica Battle, leader of the WWF’s Deep Sea Mining Initiative, said, quoted by AFP news agency.

The emergency motion calling for four-fifths of the Amazon basin to be declared a protected area by 2025 was submitted by COICA, an umbrella group representing more than two million indigenous peoples across nine South American nations. It passed with overwhelming support.

Representatives from COICA and Cuencas Sagradas present their bioregional plan for the Amazon during a press conference. Credit: IUCN Ecodeo

Jose Gregorio Diaz Mirabal, general coordinator of COICA and a leader of the Curripaco people in Venezuela, said the proposal was a “plan for the salvation of indigenous peoples and the planet”.

The Amazon has lost some 10,000 square kilometres every year to deforestation over the past two decades. Brazil is not an IUCN member and thus could not take part in the vote which runs against President Jair Bolsonaro’s agenda.

The five-page Marseille Manifesto makes repeated references to indigenous peoples and local communities, noting “their central role in conservation, as leaders and custodians of biodiversity” and amongst those most vulnerable to the climate and nature emergencies.

“Around the world, those working to defend the environment are under attack,” the document recalled.

Global Witness, a campaign group, reported that at least 227 environmental and land rights activists were killed in 2020, the highest number documented for a second consecutive year. Indigenous peoples accounted for one-third of victims. Colombia had the highest recorded attacks.

The resolution calling for 30 percent of the planet’s land and ocean area to be given protected status by 2030, said selected zones must include “biodiversity hotspots”,  be rigorously monitored and enforced, and recognise the rights of indigenous peoples to their lands, territories and resources. The  ‘30 by 30’ target is meant as a message to the UN biodiversity summit which is tasked with delivering a treaty to protect nature by next May.

Many conservationists are campaigning for a more ambitious target of 50 percent.

However, the 30 by 30 initiative, already formally backed by France, the UK and Costa Rica, is of considerable concern to some indigenous peoples who have been frequently sidelined from environmental efforts and sometimes even removed from their land in the name of conservation.

The IUCN Congress also released its updated IUCN Red List. The Komodo dragon, the world’s largest lizard, was reclassified from ‘vulnerable’ status to ‘endangered’, while 37 percent of shark and ray species are now reported to be threatened with extinction. Four species of tuna are showing signs of recovery, however.

Craig Hilton-Taylor, head of IUCN’s Head of Red List Unit, said the current rate of species extinctions is running 100 to 1,000 times the ‘normal’ or ‘background’ rate, a warning that Earth is on the cusp of the sixth extinction event. The fifth, known as the Cretaceous mass extinction event, occurred 65 million years ago, killing an estimated 78 percent of species, including the remaining non-avian dinosaurs.

One of the more controversial motions adopted – on “synthetic biology” or genetic engineering – could actually promote the localised extinction of a species. The motion opens the way for more research and experimentation in technology called gene drive. This could be used to fight invasive species, such as rodents, snakes and mosquitos, which have wiped out other species, particularly birds, in island habitats.

It was left to Harrison Ford, a 79-year-old Hollywood actor and activist, to offer hope to the Congress by paying tribute to young environmentalists.

“Reinforcements are on the way,” he said. “They’re sitting in lecture halls now, venturing into the field for the very first time, writing their thesis, they’re leading marches, organising communities, are learning to turn passion into progress and potential into power…In a few years, they will be here.”

Andrea Athanas, senior director of the African Wildlife Foundation, affirmed there was a sense of optimism in the Marseille air, in recognition that solutions are at hand.

“Indigenous systems were lauded for demonstrating harmonious relationships between people and nature. Protected areas in some places have rebounded and are now teeming with wildlife. The finance industry has awoken to the risks businesses run from degraded environments and are calculating those risks into the price of capital.

“Crisis brings an opportunity for change, and the investments in a post COVID recovery present a chance to fundamentally reshape our relationship with nature, putting values for life and for each other at the centre of economic decision-making,” he told IPS.

View the complete Marseille Manifesto here.

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Protest against the 30X30 conservation plan at IUCN World Conservation Congress, Marseille, France. Credit: Survival International

By Manipadma Jena
MARSEILLE, France, Sep 15 2021 (IPS)

One of the most hotly debated issues at the recently concluded IUCN Congress in Marseilles was about designating 30 percent of the planet’s land and water surface as protected areas by 2030.

This so-called ‘30X30’ debate is expected to escalate at the UN biodiversity conference in China next April. Indigenous People groups say the conservation has to recognise their rights to land, territories, coastal seas, and natural resources. Some activists argue that ‘fortress conservation’ was nothing but colonialism in another guise.

The world’s failure to achieve any of the global goals to protect, conserve and restore nature by 2020 has been sobering. In Kunming, China, 190 governments will gather in April 2022 after a virtual format in October this year, to finalise the UN Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework.

Ensuring legal land ownership of indigenous people is key to successful conservation. An indigenous community woman in eastern India happily holds out her land title.
Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

The draft Framework released this July aims to establish a ‘world living in harmony with nature’ by 2050 by protecting at least 30 percent of the planet and placing at least 20 percent under restoration by 2030.

The Marseille Manifesto, the outcome statement from the World Conservation Congress in Marseille from September 4 -10, 2021, gives higher visibility to indigenous people by “committing to an ambitious, interconnected and effective, site-based conservation network that represents all areas of importance for biodiversity and ecosystem services is crucial. Such a network must recognise the roles and custodianship of indigenous people and local communities.”

“The Congress implores governments to set ambitious protected areas and other area-based conservation measure targets by calling at least 30% of the planet to be protected by 2030. The targets must be based on the latest science and include rights – including Free Prior Informed Consent – as set out in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. IUCN must boost the agency of indigenous people and local communities,” the manifesto further urges. 

IUCN’s membership currently stands at 1 500 and includes 91 States, 212 governmental agencies, 1 213 NGOs, 23 Indigenous Peoples’ organisations and 52 affiliate members.

The indigenous people (IP) demand foremost of all “the secure recognition and respect for collective indigenous rights and governance of lands, territories, waters, coastal seas and natural resources.”

Strong demand for this came from IUCN’s indigenous people’s organisation members spanning six continents who banded together, developed the ‘global indigenous agenda’ and presented at their own summit – the first-ever event of its kind at any IUCN World Conservation Congress.

They aimed to unite the voices of indigenous peoples from around the world to raise awareness that ‘enhanced measures’ are required to protect the rights of indigenous peoples and their roles as stewards of nature.

Other activists take a more hard-line stand.

“The 30×30 plan is nothing but a massive land grab,” Sophie Grig, senior research and advocacy officer Survival International told IPS over the phone from the non-profit’s London headquarters.

“It’s no more than a sound bite, green lies. History has shown that promises are made but gradually, living for forest dwellers is made impossible till they are finally evicted from their generational homes of centuries. They are evicted for what? For animals and tourists. We see no real signs that this is going to change.”

Survival International and other activist entities organised the “Our Land Our Nature” congress a day before the IUCN congress began. They called for conservation to be ‘decolonised’.

“Fortress conservation violates human rights and fails to protect nature. The devastating impacts of fortress conservation on Indigenous Peoples, local communities, peasants, rural women, and rural youth has generated limited gains for nature,” said David R Boyd, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment, in an August policy brief just before the IUCN Congress.

Ending the current biodiversity crisis will require a “transformative approach” to what conservation entails, who qualifies as a conservationist, and how conservation efforts are designed and implemented,” Boyd further said.

Studies have shown that indigenous peoples, who comprise just 5% of the world’s population, contribute significantly to its environmental diversity as more than 80 % of the world’s remaining biodiversity is found within their lands.

The debate on the issue was going global. In an online forum coinciding but separate from the IUCN indigenous people’s summit, indigenous women, many from Southeast Asia, emphasised that it is “not enough for outsiders to merely observe indigenous practices and then attempt to reapply them in other contexts.”

Native voices need to be at the “centre of the conversation, not consigned to the margins.”

Traditional ecological knowledge is not just a theoretical concept. It is a “native science”, an applied knowledge amassed by indigenous people over thousands of years and most effective to address climate change and biodiversity challenges because it is based on the acceptance that “all living organisms are interdependent,” they said.

The indigenous people’s Agenda at Marseille also calls upon the global community – from states to the private sector, NGO conservation community, conservation finance and academia – to engage in specific joint efforts with them, such as “co-designing initiatives and collaborating on investment opportunities.”

“Our global goals to protect the earth and conserve biodiversity cannot succeed without the leadership, support and partnership of Indigenous Peoples,” said Bruno Oberle, IUCN Director General at the start of the Congress.

“So will the investment in this doubling of conservation areas, or at least some of the monies, go directly to indigenous people?” asked protestors at the ‘decolonise conservation’ Congress.

“Not likely,” Survival’s Grig said, “Fortress conservation is the racist and colonial model of conservation promoted by governments, corporations and big conservation NGOs.”

“The 30X30 plan sounds like a simple and painless process, but it is not so for indigenous communities. It’s simply a plan that enables you in the global north to continue burning fossil fuel and consuming unsustainably,” Grig added.

The indigenous people were clear in their demands. Their Agenda and Action Plan demands: “As Indigenous Peoples around the world, we call for an equitable environment for the recognition of Indigenous Peoples to thrive as leaders, innovators and key contributors to nature conservation.”

It remains to be seen to what extent words and promises of international policy and funding bodies translate into action on this contentious and critical issue in 2022.

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Golden Monkey (Cercopithecus mitis ssp. kandti) Endangered in IUCN Red List. In Cameroon, 1999 bushmeat was openly on sale along the road as 100-year-old trees were illegally logged and transported. Today large primates face the same fate, even if not so openly. Credit: Steve Morgan / Greenpeace

By Manipadma Jena
BHUBANESWAR, India, Sep 2 2021 (IPS)

As Arti Prasad rode the Kuala Lumpur Pavilion mall escalator up to the third floor, a pair of luscious lips pouted down at her. Next to the towering and oversized lips, the vibrant red shades of lipstick on the giant screen immediately caught the 36-year-old Indian tourist’s fancy.

Prasad headed straight to the cosmetic outlet and bought all four of the advertised lipsticks. She, like many others, is oblivious to a baby Orangutan’s plight – orphaned when its forest home was burned down to grow the palm oil that went into these beauty products. Primary forest losses mean that only 10% of gorilla habitat will remain in the Congo Basin by 2032.

Deforestation, a significant threat to biodiversity and climate change, is accelerated by global demand for commodities. However, a considerable share of this agro-commodity production is intended for export – driving massive deforestation and conversion of natural ecosystems in the global south.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates global forest areas declined by 129 million hectares between 1990-2015, equivalent in size to South Africa.

Data from satellite imagery released on Global Forest Watch in June 2020 recorded 3.75 million hectares of tree cover loss in humid primary forests in the tropics in 2019, an almost 3% increase from 2018 and the third-largest tropical forest loss since 2000. 

Consumption patterns of G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain, and the US) drive an average loss of 3.9 trees per person per year, over 15 years from 2001-2015, says a study published this year in Nature.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) will hold the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Marseille, France, from 3-11 September 2021. This premier conservation event will address global deforestation. More importantly, Congress motion 012 – the fight against imported deforestation – was co-sponsored by numerous IUCN Members and voted on and approved before Congress.

The IUCN Congress meets every four years to tackle the most pressing issues impacting people and the planet. This IUCN Congress in Marseille will drive action on nature-based recovery, climate change, and biodiversity for decades to come.

Congress motion 012 calls on countries to stop imported deforestation through several ambitious strategies, including imposing additional taxes on imported products that generate deforestation.
The aim is to recommend that private companies establish concrete action plans to guarantee supplies that did not result in deforestation.

Red-faced spider monkeys (Ateles paniscus) are found in undisturbed primary rainforests, in northern Brazil, Suriname, Guyana, French Guiana and Venezuela. Because of its ability to climb and jump, it tends to live in the upper layers of the rainforest trees and forages in the high canopy. With habitat loss and hunting it is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. Credit: la Vallee des Singes

The list of imported agricultural products contains, first and foremost, soy, palm oil, cacao, beef and its by-products, rubber, timber, and derived products that do not come from sustainably managed forests. Others include coffee, tea, or even cane sugar, which impact the deforestation and conversion of natural ecosystems.

“The most recent IPCC and IPBES reports show that we are now at the point where significant and permanent changes to consumption patterns and legislative regulation can no longer be delayed,” David Williams-Mitchell, Director of Communications, European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA) told IPS via email. Netherlands-based EAZA, an IUCN member, is one of the co-sponsors of Congress motion 012.

More than 50% of global forest loss and land conversion is attributable to the production of agricultural commodities, and forestry products are driven by consumer demand, as shown by a 2020 WWF study on Switzerland’s overseas footprint for forest-risk commodities.

To end deforestation, companies must eliminate 5 million hectares of conversion from supply chains each year.

“The concept of imported deforestation is still quite new to the public in Europe. For EAZA, the key issue is to establish understanding globally that imported deforestation is one of the root causes of climate change and biodiversity loss,” Williams-Mitchell said.

He cited examples of a hugely expanded meat industry leading to increases in greenhouse gases, carbon sink capacity loss, and biodiversity loss through habitat conversion.

In 2017 alone, the international trade of agricultural products was associated with 1.3 million hectares of tropical deforestation emitting some 740 million tonnes of carbon dioxide – this is equivalent to nearly a fifth of the EU28’s total greenhouse gas emissions that year.

“We need countries all over the world to participate in the fight against imported deforestation. We need to learn to use local resources and establish sustainable sources for exported products, especially without harming the forests,” says Jean-Pascal Guéry of Primate Conservation Trust. This France-based IUCN member also co-sponsors Congress motion 012.

The world’s forests absorb 2.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, one-third of the annual CO2 released from burning fossil fuels. Forest destruction emits further carbon into the atmosphere, with 4.3–5.5 gigatons of total anthropogenic Green House Gas (GHG) emissions per year, generated annually mainly from deforestation and forest degradation, according to Cameroon-based NGO Environment and Rural Development Foundation (ERuDeF).

IUCN Member ERuDeF, co-sponsor of Congress motion 012, estimates that half of the tropical forests worldwide have been destroyed since the 1960s. Every second, more than one hectare of tropical forest is destroyed or drastically degraded.

“Deforestation and conversion-free supply chains must protect not only forests, but all the terrestrial natural ecosystems threatened by the expansion of commodity production and trade including savannahs, grasslands, and peatlands among others,” Romain Deveze, WWF Switzerland’s senior manager, sustainable commodities & markets and co-author of the WWF 2020 study told IPS.
“It is vital that people understand that their choices and the frameworks that allow them to make those choices are at the heart of the solution,” Williams-Mitchell concurs.

“As governments, science engagement institutions, schools, and other providers and facilitators of education, we need to act to ensure this level of understanding at all levels of society,” Williams-Mitchell says, explaining why EAZA is sponsoring the motion.

Guéry is critical of some of the efforts to combat deforestation.

“There is awareness (too late, in our opinion) in certain European countries of the deleterious effects of this imported deforestation, and the French initiative to establish a national strategy to combat imported deforestation is commendable, but it lacks ambition and does not set binding and short-term goals,” he said.

“The assessments of companies including distributors, manufacturers, operators, rely too much on self-assessment rather than establishing an independent external certification,” Guéry said.

WWF also mentions that despite more initiatives to halt deforestation, including certification, corporate commitments, and market incentives, the rate of commodity-driven land use doesn’t appear to be declining. This means the negative impacts on local people and nature continue.

A full truck loaded with 60-70 Mukula logs at Katanga Province, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2016. Around 8-10 trucks transported out Mukula logs every day. Mukula is a rare and slow-growing hardwood unique to southern and central Africa, illegally logged and traded from Zambia and DRC. Credit: Lu Guang / Greenpeace

In a study earlier this year, Greenpeace said that “certification is a weak tool to address global forest and ecosystem
destruction.”

By certifying their products as ‘sustainable,’ some certification schemes can help guide consumption choices and have a positive impact locally, “but it is (largely) greenwashing destruction of ecosystems and violations of Indigenous and labour rights.”

So, while buyers think they are making the right ethical choice, they might still buy products linked to abuse and destruction.

However, WWF’s Deveze says, “certification and legality are critical to halt deforestation at scale. A hectare of conversion is just equally as harmful to people and nature whether or not it is done legally.”

Ranece Jovial Ndjeudja, Greenpeace Africa’s campaign manager in Cameroon, told IPS in a Zoom interview, “the limitations to the policy effectiveness for the IUCN Congress motion on imported deforestation is increased taxation aimed at deterring forest clearing. This, however, cannot always prevent deforestation.”

“Companies would just increase production to compensate for the tax hikes,” Ndjeudja said, speaking from Yaoundé, where Cameroonians rallied in early August to demand EU stop deforestation for rubber production.
“It is industrial logging and industrial agriculture which is the problem. Are these industrial productions really bringing in a large revenue to the exporting governments? No. If it did, Cameroon and Congo would not be so poor. A small group gets rich. While Cameroon’s natives lose access to food, health, and their culture,” Tal Harris, Greenpeace Africa’s international communications coordinator, told IPS from Dakar, Senegal.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) hosts the second-largest contiguous tract of tropical forests globally, including roughly 60 percent of the Congo Basin rainforest. It is home to plants and animals found nowhere else on earth.

“A government cannot work out of a capital city thousands of miles distant from such extensive forests,” Harris said. “Devolution of power to the local population is necessary.”

Local communities play a vital role in wildlife conservation and environment protection. Comprising less than 5 percent of the world’s population, indigenous communities protect 80 percent of global biodiversity, says ERuDeF.

Cameroon’s Ndjeaudja echoes this. To ensure trees are not cut, there is the need to work with local communities because, for generations, they have been living with forests and have the knowledge of their sustainable management.

“We have a lot to learn from them and must allow indigenous communities to share this knowledge,” he said.

Deveze concluded: “Economic and technical incentives are required to shift producer behaviour. At an international policy level, go for differentiated custom tariffs based on sustainability requirements and due diligence processes. Compensation mechanisms to support farmers in protecting high conservation value areas should be amplified.”

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The killing of rhinos by poachers has risen sharply since South Africa started easing COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. Their horns are cut off and trafficked mostly to Asia. Credit: AWF wildlife archive

By Guy Dinmore
St David’s, Wales, Aug 6 2021 (IPS)

A recent seizure at Johannesburg’s international airport of a large consignment of rhino horns confirmed worst fears – illegal trafficking of wildlife and the plundering of treasured species is back with a vengeance after a Covid-19 lockdown lull.

Destined for Kuala Lumpur, the 32 pieces of rhino horns weighing a total of 160kg were intercepted by a sniffer dog on July 17.

Rhinos in South Africa were being killed by poachers at the rate of three a day in 2019. But with domestic and international travel restrictions imposed because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the daily toll in 2020 fell to around one. However, a subsequent lockdown easing has given rise to “serious numbers” of rhino poaching incidents, according to WWF.

Carcases of rhinos left by poachers to bleed to death are unfortunately just one of the most visible images of the global illegal trafficking in wildlife – a multi-billion dollar industry often run by transnational syndicates, sometimes alongside trafficking in drugs, arms and people.

From the seas to the skies, the industrial-scale killing of animals, illegal logging of timber and the plundering of rare plants are driving many species to extinction.

Tigers – their bones and other body parts used in traditional medicine — are among the most threatened victims, with 97 percent of the wild tiger population estimated to have disappeared over the past century. Cheetahs are vanishing because of the demand for pets.

A quarter of shark species are now facing extinction, mostly due to illegal and unsustainable fishing. All seven remaining species of sea turtles are at risk. New species of orchids – there are about 28,000 known to science – have disappeared to collectors and thus become extinct in the wild before they are even recorded. Millions of birds are traded illegally each year. The list goes on and on.

The most trafficked mammal on earth is the pangolin, a scaly ant-eating creature. More than a million are estimated to have been poached from the wild in the last decade for their meat, skin and scales. All eight species are deemed at risk of extinction.

All eight species of pangolin, four in Asia and four in Africa, are threatened with extinction, mostly because of illegal poaching and trafficking. Credit: AWF wildlife archive

The Covid-19 pandemic has hammered home what scientists were long saying – that wildlife trafficking is also a serious threat to global security. Bats and pangolins are the focus of research into the evolutionary path of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the Covid-19 disease. A recent study by the Francis Crick Institute showed that SARS-CoV-2 could in theory have moved to humans from pangolins, after originating in a currently unknown bat coronavirus.

Three-quarters of all emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic, transferred from animals to humans, facilitated by environmental destruction and wildlife crime.

These findings only further underscore efforts by the International Union for Conservation of Nature to shape humanity’s response to the planet’s conservation crises. The IUCN World Conservation Congress, initially delayed by the pandemic and now to be held from 3-11 September in Marseille, is the world’s leading conservation event where government, civil society and indigenous peoples’ organisations will join discussions, debate and vote on motions that will set priorities and drive conservation and sustainable development action.

Two key motions tackle illegal wildlife trafficking: Motion 50 on implementing international efforts to tackle the role of cybercrime, the internet and social media in enabling traffickers, and Motion 65 on engaging the private sector to combat wildlife trafficking.

Jose Louies, a specialist in wildlife crime prevention with the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), a co-sponsor of Motion 50, says governments must make the illegal wildlife trade a top priority and set out clear guidelines on wildlife cybercrime. IT companies must also set policies to stop, control and monitor traffickers using their platforms.

Louies told IPS that WTI’s covert agents had been following pangolin traders online in recent months, connecting with suppliers and buyers from several countries.

Pangolin scales sold illegally through the internet by wildlife traffickers. The pangolin, sometimes called a scaly anteater, is the world’s most trafficked mammal. Credit: Jose Louies / Wildlife Trust of India.

“Most of these leads were picked up from a single social media platform where the buyers and sellers posted comments with email ids/ phone numbers to connect,” he added. ”We had 114 buyers and 69 sellers,” he said, naming the sample countries as Pakistan, Nepal, Iraq, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Myanmar and 17 states in India.

“The use of social media and messaging apps to build connections between suspects at various levels of trade is a serious matter of concern. Such fluidic and organic systems will enable a network to regenerate quicker than a conventional network.”

WTI sees IUCN as the leading global body to make recommendations and influence policies, regardless of political borders, and to act as an enabler for global conservation policies and practices. “Conservation is not an exclusive job of conservationists – it’s the collective efforts of everyone,” says Louies.

Among the various elements of Motion 50, IUCN members call on governments to strengthen legislation to tackle cyber-enabled wildlife trafficking; collaborate more in cross-border investigations; encourage and protect whistle-blowers; and encourage technology companies to step up efforts to stop online trafficking.

Known as Hatha Jodi, these dried penises of the monitor lizard were sold illegally by traffickers online. Credit: Jose Louies / Wildlife Trust of India.

The Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online, launched in 2018, now brings together over 40 companies from across the world in partnership with wildlife experts at WWF, TRAFFIC, and IFAW for an industry-wide approach to shut down online marketplaces for wildlife traffickers

The latest companies to join are China’s Douyin, a popular short video social media platform, and Huya, a video game company.
As the Coalition admits, advances in technology and connectivity, combined with rising buying power and demand for illegal wildlife products, have increased the ease of exchange from poacher to consumer. ”A largely unregulated online market allows criminals to sell illegally obtained wildlife products across the globe. Purchasing elephant ivory, tiger cubs, and pangolin scales is as easy as click, pay, ship.”

But despite such coordinated efforts, including GLACY+ involving Interpol, trafficking is getting even bigger.

“In Africa, cybercrime is escalating on many platforms via the internet,” says Philip Muruthi, vice president of the African Wildlife Foundation, also a co-sponsor of Motion 50. “You just need to do a Google search and you will find someone trying to sell some wildlife product or wildlife… but the capacity to deal with wildlife cybercrime is very low across the board. This is something that we have noted across Africa – a growing silent problem – for which we have limited knowledge and capacity to turn around.”

AWF has a program to train and equip law enforcement officers to combat wildlife cybercrime, starting in Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, but governments and other players could do much more, Muruthi tells IPS.

“What is agreed at these IUCN World Conservation Congresses often results in enhanced collective action. The issue of wildlife cybercrime may be elusive at a glance but deep analyses reveals it warrants local, regional and global attention,” Muruthi adds.

Stressing the importance of its unique structure spanning governments, NGOs, the private sector, individuals and indigenous peoples, AWF also benefits from being able to access more potential collaborators and span disciplines and themes.

Steven Galster, chair of Freeland which describes itself as a “lean, frontline international NGO with a team of law enforcement, development and communications specialists” fighting wildlife trafficking and human slavery, says traffickers are winning an unequal battle. Richer countries are not backing up their political promises with action, he says.

“I’m a big fan of IUCN. It’s an important body,” Galster tells IPS, praising IUCN’s Asia team. But he urges IUCN to shift priorities.

More broadly, Freeland, a co-sponsor of Motion 065, is calling on IUCN to go further and push for a global suspension of commercial trade in wild animals as a matter of urgency to save biodiversity and avoid another pandemic, rather than just trying to stamp out illegal wildlife trade as defined by CITES conventions.

“Legal trade also carries virus transmission risks. There remains so much unknown about the many viruses out there, and how they may mutate, that we should not be confining our containment to only some species of families of animals,” Galster says. ”The precautionary principle should be pushed harder than ever in wake of Covid-19.”

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Local environmental experts stress that conservation is crucial to sustain the ecological services provided by forests in Sri Lanka. Courtesy: CC by 2.0/charlieontravel.com

By Devana Senanayake and Janik Sittampalam
COLOMBO , Dec 15 2020 (IPS)

The Sri Lankan government recently cancelled three circulars that protected 700,000 hectares of forests, labelled Other State Forests (OSFs), which are not classified as protected areas but account for five percent of the island nation’s remaining 16.5 percent of forest cover.

Sri Lanka’s OSFs are areas managed by the Department of Forest Conservation (DFC), but are not a part of areas such as National Parks, Wildlife Reserves or Elephant Sanctuaries.

With the removal of three circulars, particularly 05/2001, control over OSFs have been handed back to Sri Lanka’s local authorities: District and Divisional Secretariats.

Even before the removal of the circulars, land had been allocated to families to construct temporary buildings. The removal of the circulars legitimised this practice and expedited the process.

Local newspapers have reported that the removal of the three circulars was pushed by corporate interests under the facade of protection for smallholder farmers. While the veracity of these claims are unclear, deforestation has occurred at rapid rates in Sri Lanka over the last 54 years.

• Convenor for the Center for Environment and Nature Studies, Dr Ravindra Kariyawasam, estimated that in 1882, Sri Lanka had a forest density of 82 percent but this reduced to 16.5 percent by 2019. 

Like other developing nations such as Brazil, India and Indonesia, deforestation for a variety of development purposes has been pursued at the cost of the country’s natural resources.

But local environmental experts stress that conservation is crucial to sustain the ecological services provided by forests. As a result, some have called for sustainable mechanisms that consider conservation and agricultural production should be adopted in the bid to develop the country.

Unpacking the obstacles to conservation in Sri Lanka

Conservation has been complicated in Sri Lanka. One of the primary obstacles to the implementation of a successful conservation strategy has been the lack of coordination by the DFC and the Department of Wildlife Conservation (DWC), according to executive director of Center for Environmental Justice (CEJ) Hemantha Withanage.

Recently, there have been reports of land grabbing in Nilgala Forest in Sri Lanka’s Uva and Eastern provinces. While Nilgala Forest’s Eastern section of 9,000 ha is under the DWC, another 15,000 ha are under the DFC. As forest areas are allocated to separate departments, it is unclear how issues such as land management and land acquisition are managed.

While Sri Lanka has several environmental conservation laws such as National Environmental Act No. 47 of 1980 and the National Environmental Act of 1988, conservation is rarely favoured over human interests.

For example, in October 2017, Forest Department officers arrested 17 persons who attempted to cultivate land in the Radalla Forest Reserve in Sri Lanka’s Eastern province. The Pottuvil Magistrate issued an order for the continuance of cultivation until the case’s conclusion. The order blocked the DFC, agriculture department, DWC and the police from taking action against people cultivating on protected land. Moreover, the order threatened legal action against any officer who interrupted cultivation activities. This order alone resulted in the deforestation of almost some 200 acres of the reserve.

There are also limited personnel to parole the areas. Recent reports of deforestation from Ampara, in Sri Lanka’s Eastern province revealed that only 22 Forest Officers were available to protect the Pottuvil and Lahugala areas.

“They also do not have enough staff members in the field. One Forest Officer might have 17,000  to 18,000 ha of forest area so you cannot manage such a forest area with one person,” Withanage, executive director of CEJ, told IPS.

Forests have ecological services

Despite the challenges of conservation, deeply forested areas in the dry zone have endemic biodiversity (such as the Sri Lankan leopard, sloth bear and elephants) and ecological services that are far too important to fully compromise.

“A study done by the World Bank looked at the value of the ecosystems on the planet and estimated it to be valued at $24 trillion annually,” systems ecologist and founder of Analog Forestry, Dr. Ranil Senanayake, told IPS.

Sri Lanka has a series of cloud forests—a unique alpine forest type that absorbs moisture for the air. Water is captured and released continuously by the trees in OSF forests. Many major rivers such as the Mahaweli River and Welawe River are fed by this water release, particularly in the dry season. Limited soil erosion prevents desertification and nutrient cycling reduces the farmers’ dependence on artificial fertilisers.

Trees reduce air pollution and improve air quality in urban areas. A study by the Journal of Environmental Health Science and Engineering revealed that green zones in urban areas decreased the lead percentage by 85 percent. Moreover, carbon sequestration absorbed CO2 from the atmosphere and reduced the risk of climate change.

These services are invaluable and perhaps even more expensive to retain or replicate artificially. A study by K. Ninan and M. Inoue analysed the total value of  Japan’s Oku Aizu Forest Ecosystem Reserve calculated ecosystem services such as: Water Conservation (valued at $1,385,430), Water Purification (valued at $46,725) and Air Pollutant Absorption (valued at $27, 039).

Can conservation and development be balanced?

There should be an evaluation of forests so that land can be released for development but the ecological services can be retained and the natural equilibrium of the environment is still kept intact, according to Senanayake.

Senanayake proposed a national system to evaluate the units released for development: “Certain pieces of land have limited ecological, biodiversity and biomass value. Those are the first lands that the government can think of giving out. Then there are lands of extreme value and therefore, these lands cannot be alienated. You may have the same endangered ecosystem in a local area. These ten pieces might be the only pieces in the entire planet. That’s the danger!”

When forests are released another solution is to provide incentives for conservation so that a proportion of the benefits of these ‘services’ can be reaped.

In Costa Rica, landholders are compensated for conservation of forests through tax certificates and direct payments. Pago de Servicios Ambientales (PSAs) are provided in different amounts for reforestation, forest management and natural regeneration.

Funding for these payments came from various sources such as fossil fuel tax and international donations, or by selling carbon credit bonds. By 1997, $14 million was paid for environmental services. These payments supported the reforestation of 6,500 ha, the management of 10,000 ha of natural forests and the protection of another 79,000 ha of forest.

A study by Conservation Biology in Costa Rica confirmed that agricultural areas with abundant tree cover provided services such as natural pest management, carbon sequestration and soil conservation.

According to Senanayake, perhaps the best scenario for local developers is to pursue methods such as analog forestry—an ecosystem restoration practice which considers forest formation and forest services to set up a system characterised by a high biodiversity to biomass ratio.

Senanayake implemented the practice on an abandoned rubber farm in Sri Lanka as an alternative to monoculture plantations. It has spread to several countries such as India, Costa Rica and Kenya.

“Analog forestry encourages you to mature your farm ecosystem which gives you stability and sustainability,” said Senanayake. “None of our agriculture considers our native biodiversity. Analog forestry demands that you also attend to that.”

“It pushes optimal production as opposed to maximum production. Maximum production pushes you to monocultures and depending on the market vagaries of one crop. Analog forestry helps you spread the risk. If the market for one thing decreases, there is a market for something else. So it’s optimal production.”

Senanayake currently plans to set up  a state recognised course on analog forestry with the Vocational Training Institute of Forestry. With this minimum qualification he hopes that local people can then provide for themselves while still conserving their environment.

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The hi-tech radio room that works with Google Earth maps at Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in northern Kenya where some of the 1,000 rangers of Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) trained in GPS use lead anti-poaching surveillance. Photo takes May 2016. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
NEW DELHI, Sep 19 2016 (IPS)

Every November, India’s Gahirmatha beach in the Indian Ocean region develops a brownish-grey rash for 60 to 80 days. Half-a-million female Olive Ridley turtles emerge out of the waves to lay their eggs, over a hundred each. For the sheer numbers, this arrival is hard to miss.

However, knowledge about this IUCN’s endangered species’ exact migration route across oceans has remained fragmentary for conservationists seeking to protect its globally declining population owing to destruction of habitat, global warming and trawl fishing.Migrating songbirds, beetles and dragonflies can soon be hooked up to space satellites helping to predict natural disasters and the spread of zoonoses - diseases that jump from animals to humans like swine flu and avian influenza.

As pressures from climate change, ecosystem loss and wild life crime threaten biodiversity and wildlife around the globe, scientists are responding by harnessing the power of sophisticated space technologies.

Migrating songbirds, beetles and dragonflies can soon be hooked up to space satellites helping to predict natural disasters and the spread of zoonoses – diseases that jump from animals to humans like swine flu and avian influenza. Radars will help locate poachers through infrared, detect through an elephant’s agitated movements, its imminent poaching. Cameras orbiting in space can capture the presence of crop diseases and invasive species in remote locations. The realm of science fiction has already stepped into the real world.

The International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space (ICARUS) project, whose trial phase starts in 2017, is developing solar-powered sensors weighing 1 to 5 grammes which can be attached to migratory songbirds, even dragonflies, beetles. The transmitted data will inform not simply the geo-positions and movements but provide important clues about the body functions or senses of the animal, giving significant indicators about impending natural disasters.

By 2020, ICARUS sensors could be small enough to fit into locusts, possibly even to use the micro-sensors to control the locust flight path to divert the swarm from valuable crops, say its researchers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Ornithology.

Scientists working on ICARUS say battery life is a major limiting factor for tracking small animals since the miniature batteries they can carry do not last long.

However, Russian space agency Roscosmos’s International Space Station, on which ICARUS hardware will be installed, is closer to the Earth than satellites, thus decreasing the amount of power required to upload data. Saving more battery life, the Station will wake the bird-mounted mini transmitter from its energy-saving mode only when it has visual contact to the in-flight bird. It’ll take only a few seconds to transmit all data back to the Station.

The urgency to go beyond manual patrolling to advanced space-based technology to combat poaching and illegal wildlife trade comes strongly from the World Wildlife Crime Report 2016.

The report builds on the data platform World WISE (The World Wildlife Seizures) that contains over 164,000 seizures related to wildlife crime involving 7,000 species from 120 countries spanning 2004 to 2015.

Trafficking of wildlife is now recognised as a specialised area of organised crime and a significant threat to many plant and animal species. The focus of the upcoming 17th Conference of Parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) is set to be the illegal wildlife trade. According to a 2016 UN Environment Programme report, the wildlife trade is estimated at 7 to 23 billion dollars annually.

With poachers increasingly using more sophisticated technology, wildlife rangers need to be equipped too. When a poacher moves in for the kill, elephants and rhinos will often behave unusually. Animal sensors help detect such behavior and send alerts to law enforcement, giving them time to act.

Other high-resolution constellations (10 or more) of radar satellites, unlike optical Earth observation satellites, are powerful enough to penetrate dense forest canopies, clouds and cover of darkness that aid poachers from detection. Infrared sensors attached to drones controlled by Global Positioning Systems (GPS) can also be used to detect campfires or warm bodies hiding in African bush land, say researchers.

Sophisticated satellites are already monitoring the extent of illegal logging, rate of deforestation and even soil moisture. The launch of hyperspectral imaging satellites that record detailed images in hundreds of electromagnetic wavelengths can assess the extent of disaster, crop growth and diseases, availability of water in remote locations and glacier melts, besides general biodiversity.

Development experts say the role that space tools can play for achieving the SDGs is broad and diverse, specifically Goal 15 to protect, restore and promote sustainable management of ecosystems, forests, soil and biodiversity, monitor not just wildlife but assess whether management practices put in place are having the desired effect.

“There are many types of satellites flying in space,” said Werner Balogh, a programme officer at the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA). “But how are they being used, is there more that can be done? Can we find joint mechanisms to share this data? It’s an exciting field and there’s still lots that needs to be explored.”

There has emerged consistent demand from developing countries who host rich biodiversity that mutual partnerships, free technical assistance, knowledge transfer, adequate resources and capacity building in space-based technologies to developing countries will significantly help achieve the 2030 Agenda.

But the high cost of technology solutions and access to the latest science and knowledge remain major constraints for the global South.

“In India, we use radio-collars to track movement for large animals like tigers and elephants. However, permits costs and taxes add to the already high cost of obtaining wildlife collars; for example, satellite collars to be used on elephants are available for 2,500 dollars each, plus annual subscription costs of 500 dollars,” Shashank Srinivasan, spatial analysis coordinator of World Wildlife Fund, India, told IPS.

The South Asia region, with 40 percent forest cover in Bhutan and Nepal and precious biodiversity, is very vulnerable to illegal traffic and wildlife crimes mainly because there exist easier traffic routes to large markets like China.

“The international community must design low-cost space-based appliances for sharing with developing countries like the solar transmitter chips (ICARUS) Germany is developing. It would be of great conservation value if we could procure it for 50 to 100 dollars,” Saroj Koirala, geospatial technologies expert with the World Wildlife Fund, Nepal, told IPS.

“Even if international commercial companies can provide us with, for example, hyperspectral images as old as of year 2010, this would still help country research. The process to access these are conditional and time-consuming,” Koirala added.

Srinivasan said except for initiatives like wildlabs.net that allow for the sharing of conservation-relevant technology, he knew of no other national, regional or international technology sharing or funding.

Experts say awareness of the importance of space-based technologies needs to be created among law makers for need-of-the-hour policies and fund allocation. Koirala said since nature conservation is linked to livelihoods, people themselves will pressurise democratic governments to set aside funds for latest technologies.

A man from the community of Mudja holds out his arm to show where he was injured by a park ranger. Credit: Zahra Moloo/IPS

By Zahra Moloo
MUDJA/BIGANIRO, Sep 14 2016 (IPS)

It is late afternoon when a light drizzle begins to fall over a group of young men seated together in Mudja, a village that lies approximately 20 kilometres north of Goma on the outskirts of the Virunga National Park. Mudja is home to a community of around 40 families of indigenous Bambuti, also known as ‘pygmies.’*

One of the men holds out his arm to show an injury he received from a park ranger. Others chime in.“When the colonialists left the country, the people who managed those protected areas were trained by the Belgians that conservation should be done without people, in the old-school way." -- Patrick Kipalu of the Forest People's Program

“Just the day before yesterday, they shot at me when I was looking for honey and firewood,” says Giovanni Sisiri. “I abandoned everything, took my tools, and ran.”

Armed paramilitary rangers from the Virunga National Park are tasked with protecting the park from poachers and trespassers, often at risk to their own lives. In Congolese law, human habitation and hunting within the park is forbidden, including for the Bambuti, its original inhabitants.

The Bambuti living in Mudja said that at times they defy these laws, venturing inside to collect wood, hunt small animals and gather non-timber products, but recently it has become more difficult.

“A pygmy cannot live without the park. Before, they could enter secretly,” said Felix Maroy, an agronomist and livestock farmer who works with Bambuti communities. “Since January 2015, the guards are always patrolling the area. And there are other armed groups too, like the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).”

Imani Kabasele, a resident of Mudja and the head of the local branch of an NGO, Program for the Integration and Development of the Pygmy People (PDIP), said that two years ago, a Mbuti resident of a neighbouring village, Biganiro, went to look for honey and disappeared for three days. His body was later discovered, cut up by a machete. Kabasele believes it was someone from the FDLR that killed him.

Imani Kabasele, the head of the branch of a Congolese NGO, PDIP, said that the Mbuti know the forest far better than any other communities, but is it is dangerous for them to venture inside. Credit: Zahra Moloo/IPS

Militarisation and colonial conservation policies

The initial demarcation of the Virunga National Park boundaries dates back to 1925 when it was first created by King Albert of Belgium.

The oldest national park in Africa, it was later expanded to include over seven thousand square kilometres of land. Classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979, it is now managed by a private-public partnership between the National Park Authority of the DRC (ICCN) and the EU-funded Virunga Foundation, and is home to about a quarter of the world’s mountain gorillas. Congolese farmers living around the Virunga said that its colonial history creates the impression that it was “created by the Mzungu (white man), for the Mzungu.”

After independence, other national parks were established, including Maiko National Park, and Kahuzi-Biega National Park in South Kivu.  According to the Global Forest Coalition, the creation of national parks led to the eviction of thousands of indigenous people who neither gave their consent nor received compensation for their loss of land. It was, they state, “in violation of international law” and the country’s 1977 law on expropriation for public purposes.

Patrick Kipalu, the DRC Country Manager for the Forest People’s Program, said there is an active conflict between communities around the park, both indigenous Bambuti as well as agricultural Bantu, and “conservationists, park rangers and other NGOs working for conservation.”

“The old school of conservation in the colonial period was ‘people out of the forest’ and ‘it’s a protected area without anyone inside,’” said Kipalu. “When the colonialists left the country, the people who managed those protected areas were trained by the Belgians that conservation should be done without people, in the old-school way. They have kept the same strategies, though the ICCN is thinking of a conservation strategy which is supposed to include and involve communities.”

Jean Claude (18, right), poses with his friend Denis Sinzira. Most of the youth in Biganiro only go to school until they are 9 or 10 years old. Credit: Zahra Moloo/IPS

Last year, in a letter to Kipalu, a representative of the customary chiefs in Lubero on the west coast of Lake Edward said that the ICCN had expropriated land without the consent of the people living on it and without offering any compensation. The letter also accused the ICCN of destroying and setting fire to villages. A 2004 report by a consultant to the World Bank, Dr Kai Schmidt-Soltau, states that the ICCN, along with WWF, claimed to have resettled 35,000 people from an area south-east of Lake Edward through a voluntary process, but that in fact the resettlement was carried out “at gun-point.”

Aggressive conservation activities are part of a widespread trend toward what some researchers call the militarization of conservation,an approach to protecting nature in which conservationists could engage in repressive policies that are counterproductive.

Jean Claude Kyungu, who in charge of community relations for Virunga, said that the park’s relations with communities around the park are good in some areas, but not in others, and that guards only fire at people if there is “resistance” from the population, for instance when communities “recruit armed groups to secure the land.” He added that the Bambuti are only arrested when they have defied the law.

When asked about the repressive behavior of park rangers and officers from the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC) towards civilians in and around the park, Norbert Mushenzi, the ICCN’s deputy director of the Virunga National Park, said that the officers are “undertaking legitimate defense.”

“We also try to educate communities to leave and find alternative solutions, for instance to go to the fields around the park. There were 350 families in one area that left voluntarily,” he said. “The problem is not land. It’s that people want to concentrate in the park and we don’t know why,” he said.

But leaving the park and finding other places to settle is not so simple. One problem, according to Kipalu, is that people living inside illegally have nowhere to go. “The park is so big that it takes the whole area where communities work on their traditional lands,” he said.

Compounding the issue are larger and more complex political dynamics.  According to a group of researchers, Virunga lies at the “epicenter of ongoing conflict since 1993-4” and is “strongly affected by cross-border dynamics with both Rwanda and Uganda.” It is also a hideout for numerous armed domestic and foreign groups.

Communities who enter the park often do so with the protection of armed actors, and links between them are further strengthened by politicians who take advantage of the widespread sentiment that the park expropriated people’s ancestral lands, leading these politicians, in some cases, to “finance armed groups operating in the park.”

The authors suggest that the park “adopt a more conflict sensitive approach to conservation”, and increase efforts to improve local communication. But Jean-Claude Kyungu believes that the park’s approach is not particularly repressive given the enormous challenges. “At Kibirizi, the population lives with the FDLR,” he said. “Do we let these people just go and make their own laws not just in a park, but in a country, that is not their own? People who do not respect the boundaries have to be removed.”

Reporting for this story was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation

*The word ‘pygmy’ has negative connotations and is used widely in the DRC. According to Survival International, it has been reclaimed by some communities as a term of identify.

Excerpt:

Tapantí National Park lies east from the capital San José covering more than 50.000 hectares of forest, which in turn provides valuable watershed protection. Picture: Diego Arguedas Ortiz / IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSE, Jul 26 2016 (IPS)

While Latin America keeps expanding its agricultural frontier by converting large areas of forest, one country, Costa Rica, has taken a different path and is now a role model for a peaceful coexistence between food production and sustainable forestry.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) flagship publication The State of the World’s Forests revealed that commercial agriculture was responsible for 70 percent of forest conversion in Latin America between 2000 and 2010.

“What FAO mentions about the rest of Latin America, clearing forests for agriculture or livestock, happened in Costa Rica during the 1970s and 1980s,” Jorge Mario Rodríguez, the director of Costa Rica’s National Fund for Forestry Finance (Fonafifo), told IPS.“Agricultural development doesn’t necessarily require the expansion of croplands; rather, it demands the coexistence with the forest and the intensification of production by improving national farmers’ productivity and competitiveness" -- Octavio Ramírez.

At its worst moment, during the 1980s, Costa Rica’s forest cover was limited to 21 to 25 percent of its land area. Now, forests account for 53 percent of the country’s 51,000 square kilometers, with almost five million inhabitants.

The country has managed to hold and even push back the advance of the agricultural frontier while strengthening its food security, according to FAO, which says that Costa Rica’s malnutrition rate is under 5 percent, something the organisation accounts as “zero hunger”.

“Here’s a learned lesson: there’s no need to chop down forests to produce more crops,” FAO Costa Rica director Octavio Ramírez told IPS.

Despite the increase in forest cover, FAO states the average value of food production per person increased by 26 percent in the period 1990–1992 to 2011–2013.

FAO attributes this change “to structural changes in the economy and the priority given to forest conservation and sustainable management” which were seized upon by Costa Rican authorities in a specific context.

“It has to do with the livestock crisis during the 1980s but also the priority given by Costa Rica to forest management,” said Ramírez, born in Nicaragua but Costa Rican by naturalisation.

In The State of the World’s Forests report, launched on July 18, FAO explains that Costa Rican forests were regarded as “land banks” that could be converted as necessary to meet agricultural needs.

“To keep the forest intact was looked upon as a synonym of laziness and unwillingness to work,” Ramírez explained.

But there were two key elements during the 1980s that led to better forest protection, the environmental economist Juan Robalino told IPS.

José Alberto Chacón weeds between bean plants on his small farm in Pacayas, on the slopes of the Irazú volcano, in Costa Rica. The terraces help control water run-off that would otherwise cause soil erosion. Picture: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

Meat prices plummeted while eco-tourism became a leading economic activity in the country, explained the specialist from Universidad de Costa Rica and the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center.

“This paved the way for very interesting policy-making, like the creation of the Payments for Environmental Services (PES) program,” said Robalino, one of the top experts in Costa Rican forest cover.

FAO states that a big part of Costa Rica’s success comes from PES, a financial incentive that acknowledges those ecosystem services resulting from forest conservation and management, reforestation, natural regeneration and agroforestry systems.

The program, established in 1997 and ran by Fonafifo, has a simple logic at its core: the Costa Rican state pays landowners who protect forest cover as they provide an ecosystem service.

From its launch until 2015, a total of 318 million dollars were invested in forest-related PES projects.  64 percent of the funding came from fossil fuel tax, 22 percent from World Bank credits and the remainder from other sources.

After studying PES impacts for years, Robalino explains the challenge for 2016 is to look for landowners with less incentives to protect their forests and bring them on board with the financial argument.

“The goal is to always look for those who’ll change their behavior because of the program,” Robalino stated.

Because of budget limitations, the program must decide which properties to work with, as applications exceed its capacity fivefold, according to Fonafifo director Rodríguez.

Priorities for PES funding include ecosystem services like watershed protection, carbon capture, scenic beauty and biodiversity conservation.

“Costa Rica learned that forests are worth more for their environmental services than because of their timber,” Rodríguez pointed out.

Fonafifo is now looking for new partnerships with the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock to launch a new program focused on small landowners who require more technical support, a road also favoured by FAO.

“Agricultural development doesn’t necessarily require the expansion of croplands; rather, it demands the coexistence with the forest and the intensification of production by improving national farmers’ productivity and competitiveness,” said Ramírez, FAO’s local representative.

Both FAO and local experts interviewed by IPS agreed that PES seized upon a national and international crossroads to launch a program that despite its success, is not the only cause for Costa Rica’s recovery.

“Costa Rica’s success cannot be exclusively attributed to PES since other policies, like the creation of the National Protected Areas System and its education system, also played a major role,” Rodríguez explained.

Beyond this program, the country has a longstanding environmental tradition: close to a quarter of its territory is under some type of protection, the forestry law bans forest conversion, and sports hunting, open-air metallic mining and oil exploitation are all illegal.

The country’s Constitution declares citizens’ right to a healthy environment in its article 50.

“I remember my school teacher telling us students that we had to protect the forest,” Robalino recalled.

However, Costa Rica’s forest recovery didn’t reach all ecosystems in the country and left mangroves behind. Their area has diminished in the past decades.

According to the country’s 2014 report to the Convention on Biological Diversity, mangrove coverage fell from 64.452 hectares in 1979 to 37.420 hectares in 2013, a 42 percent loss.

This ecosystem is particularly vulnerable to large monoculture plantations on the Pacific coast, where the local Environmental Administrative Tribunal denounced the disappearance of 400 hectares between 2010 and 2014, due to human-induced fire, logging and invasion.

Elephants in a solar-powered holding pen in Malawi, which is carrying out a major translocation between conservation parks. Credit: Charles Mkoka/IPS

By Charles Mkoka
LILONGWE, Jul 20 2016 (IPS)

One of the world’s largest and most significant elephant translocations kicked off earlier this month within Liwonde National Park in southern Malawi.

Patricio Ndadzela, Malawi country director of African Parks, a non-profit conservation group based in South Africa that is leading the relocation, told IPS that so far, 10 bulls and 144 family groups of elephants have been successfully captured from the park and transported 300 kilometers by truck to their new home in the Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve in central Malawi.

A few decades ago, around 1,500 elephants roamed Malawi’s biggest wildlife reserve, but now only a few herds totaling about 100 remain. The park is poised to be revitalised and serve as a critical elephant sanctuary for populations nationwide.

Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve covers 1,800 square kms of Miombo woodlands and afro-montane forest along Chipata Mountain on the border with Ntchisi district. The relocation, which began on July 3, involves tranquilising the elephants by dart from a helicopter and loading them by crane onto trucks for the journey to Nkhotakota."It's a story of hope and survival. It is a story of possibility." -- Peter Fearnhead, CEO of African Parks

The World Wildlife Federation notes that elephants remain under severe threat from ivory poaching, habitat loss, and human-wildlife conflict. Since 1979, African elephants have lost over half of their natural range. Less than 20 percent of African elephant habitat is currently under formal protection.

Local engagement for a balanced ecosystem

But Malawi is setting an example for the rest of the continent in how to protect elephants with the full consent and assistance of local communities. Before embarking on this major translocation exercise, African Parks engaged peripheral communities after taking over the reserve in July last year from government. Zonal area committees were established at the traditional authority level. These are chiefs of jurisdiction in the four districts that border the reserve. The districts are Nkhota Kota, Mzimba, Ntchisi and Kasungu.

“We have had a good working partnership with African Parks, together with the local people. They are managing the reserve for 25 years.  So far a number of activities have been done in consultations with the local people,” says Malijani Kachombo, the Traditional Authority Mphonde in Nkhota Kota district.

“They then brought the issue of restocking endangered species so that we have a more balanced ecosystem. This promise that they made has now been fulfilled today. The translocation of 500 elephants is no more a promise but reality.”

The animals will be well secured now as a new fence is already under construction and communities have been given ownership of the reserve, said the chief.

Other animals were also relocated, including 23 zebras, 25 elands, 220 waterbuck, 284 impalas, 32 warthogs, 99 kudu, 200 sables and two collared black rhinos.

A special landing site

As part of their integration into the reserve, a special landing site for the animals was chosen that provided for basic needs. According to Samuel Kamoto, African Parks Manager for Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve, the site was identified after confirming that it had adequate water, shelter and food for the animals.

More importantly, they considered the proximity of the landing site’s accessibility to the road, since the heavy trucks carrying the animals need to align the doors with the entrance of the holding pen.

“Elephants started arriving last night and we let them inside the holding pen so that they can rest and regroup as social beings and families. This enables the animals to settle down first other than just letting them out, which confuses them,” Kamoto told IPS.

Senior Lecturer in Ecology and Wildlife at Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources, John Kazembe, said that the move was a good option considering the fact that Liwonde National Park was relatively small. Overcrowding of elephant populations in Liwonde had led to the animals devouring large areas of vegetation and coming into conflict with local people.

“Elephant herds should be moved into the reserve at intervals so that the ecosystem is not overwhelmed by a one-off relocation,” Kazembe said.

Peter Fearnhead, Chief Executive Officer of African Parks, said “Most stories we hear about elephants in Africa are doom and gloom. This translocation of 500 elephants, which is a pivotal moment for Malawi who is emerging as a leader in African elephant conservation, is a story of hope and survival. It is a story of possibility.”

It’s hoped that this rich reserve, coupled with a good working partnership with the local populace, will enable the animals to resettle quickly.

The giant seven-week translocation is costing 1.6 million dollars, and has been made possible with support from the Dutch Postcode Lottery, the Wyss Foundation, the Wildcat Foundation, Donna and Marvin Schwartz, Dioraphte and the People’s Post Code Lottery.

Sipian Lesan, a semi-nomadic pastoralist from Lekuru village in Samburu County, Kenya, taking care of one of his edible fruit-producing plants. Credit: Robert Kibet/IPS

By Robert Kibet
SAMBURU, Kenya, Jul 30 2015 (IPS)

Sipian Lesan bends to attend to the Vangueria infausta or African medlar plant that he planted almost two years ago. He takes great care not to damage the soft, velvety, acorn-shaped buds of this hardy and drought-resistant plant. ”All over here it is dry,” says the 51-year-old Samburu semi-nomadic pastoralist.

“We hope that every manyatta [homestead] will have a small food forest and that these will grow in concentric circles until they meet and touch each other and expand, creating a continuous food forest" – Aviram Rozin, founder of Sadhana Forest
Sipian is from Lekuru, a remote village located in the lower ranges of the Samburu Hills, an area dotted by Samburu homesteads commonly known as ‘manyattas’, some 358 km north of Kenya’s capital Nairobi. Here, the small villages are hot and arid, dominated by thorny acacia and patches of bare red earth that signify overgrazed land.

Samburu County is one of the regions in Kenya ravaged by recurrent drought, with most of the population living below the poverty line.

Climate change has made pastoralism an increasingly unsustainable livelihood option, leaving many households in Samburu without access to a daily meal, let alone a balanced diet.

“Animals have and will continue to die due to severe drought,” said Joshua Leparashau, a Samburu community leader. “The community still wants to hold on to the concept that having many livestock is a source of pride. This must change. If we as a community do not become proactive in curbing the menace, then we must be prepared for nature to destroy us without any mercy.”

As he looks after his fruit-producing sapling, Sipian tells IPS that some decades ago, before people he calls “greedy” started felling trees to satisfy the growing demand for indigenous forest products, his community used to feed on their readily available wild fruits during extreme hunger.

Now, through a concept new to them – dubbed food or garden forest, and brought to Kenya by Israeli environmentalist Aviram Rozin, founder of Sadhana Forest, an organisation dedicated to ecological revival and sustainable living work – the locals here are adopting planting of trees and shrubs that are favourable to the harsh local weather in their manyattas.

Community tree-planting in semi-arid Samburu County, Kenya. Robert Kibet/IPS

On a voluntary mission to help alleviate the degraded land and food insecurity in this part of northern Kenya, Rozin said that his vision would be to see at least each manyatta owning a food forest.

“The rate at which the community is embracing the concept is positive,” he said. “We hope that every manyatta will have a small food forest and that these will grow in concentric circles until they meet and touch each other and expand, creating a continuous food forest.”

However, the work of Sadhana Forest is not limited to forestation, as 35-year-old Resinoi Ewapere, who has eight children, explained.

“I used to leave early in the morning in search of water and return after noon. My children frequently missed school owing to the shortage of water and food.” But this daily routine came to an end after Sadhana Forest drilled a borehole from which water is now pumped using green energy – a combined windmill and solar energy system.

“Apart from the training we receive on planting fruit-producing trees and practising low-cost permaculture farming, we currently receive water from this centre at no cost,” Ewapere told IPS.

According to Rozin, Sadhana Forest’s initiative to help the Samburu community plant the 18 species of indigenous fruit trees which are drought-resistant and rich in nutrients is also part of a major conservation effort in that the combination of “small-scale food security and conservation of indigenous trees. will also create a linkage between people and trees and they will protect them.”

“We produce the seedlings and then supply them to the locals at no charge for them to plant in their manyattas,” said Rozin. Then, with careful management of the land and water-harvesting structures (swales or ditches dug on contours), water is fed directly into the plants.

The quality of the soil on the swales is improved by planting nitrogen-fixing plants such as beans, while the soil is watered and covered with mulch to prevent evaporation, thus remaining fertile.

One of the tree species being planted to create the food forests is Afzelia africana or African oak, the fruits of which are said to be rich in proteins and iron.  Its seed flour is used for baking. Another species is Moringa stenopetala, known locally as ‘mother’s helper’ because its fruit helps increase milk in lactating mothers and reduces malnutrition among infants.

“Residents here understand that their semi-nomadic life has to be slightly adjusted for survival,” noted George Obondo, coordinator of the NGO Coordination Board, who played a role in ensuring that Sadhana received 50,000 dollars from the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) to jump start its Samburu project.

The money was used to set up a training centre with over 35 volunteers from various countries, including Haiti, to train locals and at the same time produce seedlings, and to build the green energy system for pumping water from the borehole it drilled.

“Things are changing,” said Obondo, “and Samburus know that their lifestyle needs to be altered and also tied to greater dependence on plant growing and not just livestock.” This is why the Sadhana Forest initiative is important, he added, because it is training people and giving them the knowledge and ability to create the resilience that they will need to avoid a harsh future.

Edited by Phil Harris

Young mangrove plants tended by women beneficiaries from the Small Fishers Federation of Lanka have helped the Puttalam Lagoon regain some of its lost natural glory. The success of the programme has prompted the government to support an island-wide project worth 3.4 million dollars. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
KALPITIYA, Sri Lanka, Jun 17 2015 (IPS)

Weekends and public holidays are deadly for one of Sri Lanka’s most delicate ecosystems – that is when the island’s 8,815 hectares of mangroves come under threat.

“The mangroves are a part of our life, our culture. We destroy them, we destroy ourselves.” -- Douglas Thisera, also known as Sri Lanka's Mangrove Master
With public officials, forest rangers and NGO workers on holiday, no one is around to enforce conservation laws designed to protect these endangered zones. Except the locals, that is.

Residents of the Kalpitiya Peninsula in the northwest Puttalam District are no strangers to the wanton destruction of the area’s natural bounty. Kalpitiya is home to the largest mangrove block in Sri Lanka, the Puttalam Lagoon, as well as smaller mangrove systems on the shores of the Chilaw Lagoon, 150 km north of the capital, Colombo.

For centuries these complex wetlands have protected fisher communities against storms and sea-surges, while the forests’ underwater root system has nurtured nurseries and feeding grounds for scores of aquatic species.

Perhaps more important, in a country still living with the ghosts of the 2004 Asian Tsunami, mangroves have been found to be a coastline’s best defense against tidal waves and tsunamis.

Many poor fisher families in western Sri Lanka also rely heavily on mangroves for sustenance, with generation after generation deriving protein sources from the rich waters or sustainably harvesting the forests’ many by-products.

But in Sri Lanka today, as elsewhere in the world, mangroves face a range of risks. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) says that the unique ecosystems, capable of storing up to 1,000 tonnes of carbon per hectare in their biomass, are being felled at three to five times the rate of other forests.

Over a quarter of the world’s mangrove cover has already been irrevocably destroyed, driven by aquaculture, agriculture, unplanned and unsustainable coastal development and over-use of resources.

On the west coast of Sri Lanka, despite government’s pledges to protect the country’s remaining forests, the covert clearing of mangroves continues – albeit at a slower rate than in the past.

But a small army of land defenders, newly formed and highly dedicated, is promising to turn this tide.

Douglas Thisera, better known as the Mangrove Master, has spent the last two-and-a-half decades protecting the mangroves of Sri Lanka’s northwest Puttalam District. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

When residents become rangers

They call him the ‘Mangrove Master’, but his real name is Douglas Thisera. A fisherman turned vigilante, he is the director for conservation at the Small Fisheries Foundation of Lanka (Sudeesa) and spends his days patrolling every nook of the Chilaw Lagoon for signs of illegal destruction.

“Suddenly we will see earth movers and other machinery clearing large tracts of mangroves – by the time pubic officials are alerted, the destruction is already done,” he tells IPS.

This pattern follows decades of state-sanctioned deforestation that began in the early 90s, when an aggressive government-backed prawn-farming scheme was taking root around the lagoon and private corporations as well as politically-linked business enterprises were eyeing and clearing the mangroves indiscriminately.

For years Thisera tried to draft the local community into conservation efforts, but they were up against a Goliath.

He recalls one instance, back in 1994, when a powerful politician cleared a 150-metre stretch of forest almost overnight. “We were helpless then, we did not have the organisational capacity to take on such figures.”

By 2012, prawn farming, salt panning, solid waste disposal and hotel construction for the country’s thriving tourist sector had conspired to cut Sri Lanka’s mangrove cover by 80 percent, according to some estimates.

Today, under the aegis of a major mangrove conservation programme in the region, Thisera not only has financial backing for his efforts – he has a network of residents just as dedicated to the task as he is.

The project is led by Sudeesa, whose chairman, Anuradha Wickramasinghe, believed that only “community-based” action could hope to save the disappearing forests.

But this was easier said than done.

Poverty stalks the population of Sri Lanka’s northwest coast, and the most recent government statistics indicate that the average income among fisher families is just 16 dollars a month, with 53 percent of the population here living below the national poverty line.

Unemployment is roughly 20 percent higher than the island-wide average of 4.1 percent, and most families spend every waking moment struggling to put food on the table.

So Sudeesa created a micro-credit scheme to incentivize conservation efforts, and tailored the programme towards women. Women are offered a range of loans at extremely low interest rates to start home-based sustainable ventures. In exchange, they care for young saplings, help replant stretches of mangrove forest and take it upon themselves to prevent illegal clearing for commercial purposes.

Together they have planted 170,000 saplings covering an area of 860 hectares in the district – and they are working to multiply this number.

Futures tied to the land

The entire scheme relies on community action.

Women are put in charge of designated locations, mostly close to their homes. When encroachment or illegal harvesting takes place, they use local networks and cell phones to get the word out.

Here, the Thisera plays a pivotal role, acting as an intermediary between local watchdogs and networks of public officials, which he can activate when the women raise a red flag.

Last year this rudimentary conservation machine managed to halt encroachment by a private company with a stake in prawn farming by forcing it to dismantle fencing around the mangroves and retreat to demarcations laid down in government maps of the area.

Thisera says powerful business interests present the biggest menace to locals. Although an epidemic in the late 1990s decimated most of the prawn farms, leaving large, empty man-made tanks in place of mangrove ecosystems, companies have been reluctant to retreat and many continue to pay taxes on former areas of operations.

“They want to keep a legal hold on the land for other purposes,” Thisera explains, such as tourism on the northern ridge of the Puttalam Lagoon that has seen a revival since the end of the country’s civil war in 2009.

Already two islands have been leased out to private companies, though no major construction operations have yet begun.

When they do, however, they will be forced to reckon with Thisera and his unofficial rangers.

“The mangroves are a part of our life, our culture,” Thisera explains. “We destroy them, we destroy ourselves.”

Self-confidence and self-reliance

Cut off from the country’s commercial hubs and major markets, women in this district have long had to rely on their wits to survive.

Take Anne Priyanthi, a 52-year-old widow with two children who until three years ago had struggled to feed her family. She tried to lift herself out of poverty by applying for a bank loan – but was refused on the basis that she did not “meet the criteria”.

In 2012 Sudeesa granted her a loan of 10,000 rupees – about 74 dollars – which she used to start a small pig farm. Today, she earns a monthly income of 25,000 rupees, or 182 dollars.

It seems a pittance – but it means her kids can stay in school and in these impoverished parts that is a monumental success.

Another beneficiary of Sudeesa’s conservation-livelihood project is 58-year-old Primrose Fernando, who now works as a coordinator for the NGO. The widow has three daughters, one of whom has a minor disability.

With her loan she was able to set up a small grocery shop for the disabled daughter and also invest in an ornamental fish breeding business.

“Without this assistance I would have been left destitute,” Fernando tells IPS.

Since 1994 Sudeesa had given out loans to the tune of 54 million rupees (over 400,000 dollars) to 3,900 women in the Puttalam District. Officials say that the loans have a repayment rate of over 75 percent.

By conserving the mangroves, thousands of women have also carved out a better life for themselves and their families and no longer spend every waking moment wondering where their next meal will come from. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

Now the loans scheme falls under a registered public organisation called Sudeesa Social Enterprises Corporation, of which 683 of the most active women are shareholders.

“It is the shareholders who run the orgainsation now, who decide on loans, repayments and follow-up action in case of defaulters,” explains Malan Appuhami, a Sudeesa accountant.

The operation is not your average micro-credit scheme – interest rates are less than three percent, and since the women are all part of the same community, they are more interested in helping each other succeed than hunting down defaulters.

For instance during the months of June to September, when rough seas limit a fisher family’s catch, the shareholders create more flexible repayment plans.

In a country where the female unemployment rate is over two-and-a-half times that of the male rate, and almost twice the national figure of 4.2 percent, the conservation-livelihood scheme is a kind of oasis in an otherwise barren desert for women – particularly older women without a formal education, as many in the Puttalam District are – seeking paid work.

Suvineetha de Silva, a Sudeesa credit officer, tells IPS that there has been a visible shift in women’s outlooks and attitudes – no longer ragged and shy, they now ripple with the confidence of those who have taken matters into their own hands.

Some have even been able to send their kids to university, de Silva says, something that was “unheard of” a decade ago, when the simple act of completing primary school was considered a luxury for youth whose parents needed the extra labour to help feed the family.

Other women are spending more time at home, with the result that sustainable cottage industries like home bakeries, dress making ventures and even hairdressing operations are thriving.

Best of all is that Puttalam’s mangroves now have a fighting chance, with determined women keeping watch over them.

Globally, an estimated 100 million people live in the vicinity of mangrove forests. What would it mean for the future of biodiversity if all of them followed Sri Lanka’s example?

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

This article is part of a special series entitled ‘The Future Is Now: Inside the World’s Most Sustainable Communities’. Read the other articles in the series here.

This reporting series was conceived in collaboration with Ecosocialist Horizons

Young mangrove plants tended by women beneficiaries from the Small Fishers Federation of Lanka have helped the Puttalam Lagoon regain some of its lost natural glory. The success of the programme has prompted the government to support an island-wide project worth 3.4 million dollars. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
KALPITIYA, Sri Lanka, Jun 16 2015 (IPS)

Weekends and public holidays are deadly for one of Sri Lanka’s most delicate ecosystems – that is when the island’s 8,815 hectares of mangroves come under threat.

With public officials, forest rangers and NGO workers on holiday, no one is around to enforce conservation laws designed to protect these endangered zones. Except the locals, that is.

Residents of Kalpitiya, a coastal area in the northwest Puttalam District, are no strangers to this phenomenon. Kalpitiya is home to the largest mangrove block in Sri Lanka, the Puttalam Lagoon, as well as smaller mangrove systems on the shores of the Chilaw Lagoon, 150 km north of the capital, Colombo.

Perhaps more important, in a country still living with the ghosts of the 2004 Asian Tsunami, mangroves have been found to be a coastline’s best defense against similar natural disasters.

Many poor fisher families in western Sri Lanka also rely heavily on mangroves for sustenance, with generation after generation deriving protein sources from the rich waters or sustainably harvesting the forests’ many by-products.

But in Sri Lanka today, as elsewhere in the world, mangroves face a range of risks. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) says that the unique ecosystems, capable of storing up to 1,000 tonnes of carbon per hectare in their biomass, are being felled at three to five times the rate of other forests.

Over a quarter of the world’s mangrove cover has already been irrevocably destroyed, driven by aquaculture, agriculture, unplanned and unsustainable coastal development and over-use of resources.

On the west coast of Sri Lanka, despite government’s pledges to protect the country’s remaining forests, the covert clearing of mangroves continues – albeit at a slower rate than in the past.

But a small army of land defenders, newly formed and highly dedicated, is promising to turn this tide.

Workers at Jamaica's Bodles Agricultural Station prepare fruit tree seedlings for distribution. Credit: Zadie Neufville/IPS

By Zadie Neufville
KINGSTON, Jun 4 2015 (IPS)

For Jamaica, planting more trees as a way to build resilience is one of the highest priorities of the government’s climate change action plan. So when Cockpit Country residents woke up to bulldozers in the protected area, they rallied to get answers from the authorities.

On May 18, Noranda Bauxite Limited acted on 2004 mining leases and moved its heavy equipment into the outer areas of the Cockpit Country, ignoring unresolved boundary issues. Their actions reignited a simmering row between stakeholders and government over demarcation and protection of the biologically diverse area.Bauxite mining is said to be the single largest cause of deforestation on the island.

Whilst the company denies that it has begun mining, its officials admit to prospecting. Noranda’s actions however, raised suspicions that government had reneged on a promise made in 2006 when several prospecting leases issued to Alumina Partners were revoked. Back then, authorities had promised residents that the Cockpit Country would be off-limits to bauxite mining.

Junior Minister for Mining and Energy Julian Robinson has reiterated his government’s commitment to preserving the area, but many continue to be wary.

Michael Schwartz, director of the Windsor Research Station, is fearful that government will seek to “placate” the people with “a token boundary” which defines the Cockpit Country to an area “where there is no bauxite to be mined”.

“My concern is that GoJ [the government] seems to be completely ignoring the Public Consultation Report, which they commissioned in 2013, and is going to come up with its own boundary,” he said in an email response to IPS.

Schwartz’s concern seems valid. After all bauxite was, until 2008 the island’s second largest earner of foreign exchange. That year bauxite earned 1.37 billion dollars and accounted for 55 per cent of Jamaica’s total merchandise exports and traditionally contributed around five to six per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Just prior to the economic fallout and closure of mining operations in 2009, the sector was the third largest foreign exchange earner.

Bauxite mining is also said to be the single largest cause of deforestation on the island. Not only are large areas of forests destroyed to extract the ore, the cutting of haul and access roads opens the prime forests to further threats from loggers, yam stick traders and coal burners.

Forest clearing is identified as one of the biggest threats to the island’s biodiversity and the remaining forests. The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007) also identifies forest clearing as one of the top contributors to climate variation.

Looking westward – Noranda Bauxite’s equipment cuts access roads for prospecting. Credit: Courtesy of Michael Schwartz

Minister of Environment and Climate Change Robert Pickersgill confirms that changes to the forest cover have  “significant implications” for Jamaica, given that is “highly dependent” on its environmental resources.

At a press conference to announce the findings of the most recent forest assessment surveys on Mar. 10, the minister said:  “The open dry forests that now stand as bare lands have increased the country’s vulnerability to the impacts of climate change and increased our risk of desertification. The loss of our broadleaf forests has reduced the forests’ capacity to provide us with ecosystem services such as water and clean air.”

“Cockpit Country is in relatively good shape today because of its topography, it has conserved itself, so to speak,” Schwartz said, pointing out that whilst farmers have been encroaching on the area for centuries, the difficult terrain had made access difficult thereby limiting the impact of their activities.

Depending on which of the three proposed boundaries is used, the Cockpit Country is estimated to cover between 820 and 1099 square kilometres (between 510 and 683 sq. miles). The core boundary – primarily forest reserves and crown lands – totals just over 56,000 hectares (138,379 acres), a transition boundary of just over 80,000 hectares (197, 684 acres) and the outer boundary of 116,218 hectares (287,181 acres).

The outer boundary proposed during the public consultations that the University of the West Indies conducted will more than double the reserves and is the preferred option. It seems that any other would not go down well with the stakeholders and according to Schwartz: “This would show a willful disregard of the public stakeholders.”

Aside from a rich biological diversity that supports the largest number of globally threatened species in the Caribbean region, Jamaica’s State of the Environment Report 2010 described the Cockpit Country as “the largest remaining primary forest” on the island. The area also supplies fresh water for about 40 per cent of islanders and recharges the aquifers in three major agricultural areas.

In what the Forestry Department describes as its most comprehensive analysis of forest cover change to date, a 2013 survey shows an overall increase in forests and a decline in the amount of high quality forests due to the destruction of wetlands and previously undisturbed areas. More than 4,000 hectares (about 10,000 acres) of mined-out lands have also been restored.

“We have gained new low-quality forests but lost high-quality closed and disturbed broadleaf forests. We also lost swamp forests and dry forests,” Conservator of Forests Marilyn Headley told IPS in an email.

The loss of the swamp forests, Pickersgill says, “poses serious risks to our tourism industry, as well as the success of our disaster management strategies and destroys the habitat for many of our essential wetland species.”

In addition to improved assessments, the Forestry Department is now updating the National Forest Management and Conservation Plan that aims to build on and outline additional strategies to arrest the loss of quality forests, promote sustainable use and regulate saw mills.

The Department continues to work with Local Forest Management Committees in the Cockpit Country and other areas across the island to replant and reduce the impact of the local communities on their forests. Schwartz is confident that ongoing sensitisation and community actions will help to preserve the areas if bauxite mining is excluded.

However, with an estimated one billion tonnes of bauxite remaining, a sluggish economy and most of the country’s earnings going to debt repayment, stakeholders are demanding a resolution of the boundaries sooner rather than later. Many believe that potential earnings from bauxite could tip the balance between preservation and mining of the prized ecological area.

“If mining were allowed, how would you explain how it’s alright for the big man to destroy large areas of forest, but it’s not okay for little man to cut a tree to improve his life?” the researcher asks.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The aftermath of a bushfire in southern St. Vincent. Credit: Kenton X. Chance/IPS

By Kenton X. Chance
KINGSTOWN, May 14 2015 (IPS)

For 32 years, Joel Poyer, a forest technician, has been tending to the forest of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

His job allows him a unique view of what is taking place in the interior of this volcanic east Caribbean nation, where the landscape mostly alternates between deep gorges and high mountains."Sometimes we hardly see any fish along the coastline, because there are no trees to cool the water for the algae to get food.” -- Joel Poyer

Poyer, a 54-year-old social and political activist and trade unionist, is hoping that during the 18 months before he retires, he can get the government and people of St. Vincent and the Grenadines to focus on how human activities on the nation’s beaches and in its forests are exacerbating the impacts of climate change.

“Right now, it’s like a cancer eating [us] from the inside,” he tells IPS of the actions of persons, many of them illegal marijuana growers, who clear large swaths of land for farming – then abandon them after a few years and start the cycle again.

Over the past few years, extreme weather events have shown the people of St. Vincent and the Grenadines how activities happening out of sight in the forest can have a devastating impact on coastal and other residential areas.

Three extreme weather events since 2010 have left total losses and damages of 222 million dollars, about 60 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product.

In October 2010, Hurricane Tomas left 24 million dollars in damage, including damage to 1,200 homes that sent scores of persons into emergency shelters.

The hurricane also devastated many farms, including the destruction of 98 per cent almost all of the nation’s banana and plantain trees, cash crops for many families.

In April 2011, heavy rains resulted in landslides and caused rivers to overflow their banks and damage some 60 houses in Georgetown on St. Vincent’s northeastern coast.

In addition to the fact that the extreme weather event occurred during the traditional dry season and left 32 million dollars worth of damage, Vincentians were surprised by the number of logs that the raging waters deposited into the town.

Forest Technician Joel Poyer says residents of St. Vincent and the Grenadines must play closer attention to how their own actions are exacerbating the effects of climate change. Credit: Kenton X. Chance/IPS

On Dec. 24, 2013, unseasonal heavy rains triggered landslides and floods, resulting in 122 million dollars in damage and loss.

Again, residents were surprised by the number of logs that floodwaters had deposited into towns and villages and the ways in which these logs became battering rams, damaging or destroying houses and public infrastructure.

Not many of the trees, however, were freshly uprooted. They were either dry whole tree trunks or neatly cut logs.

“We have to pay attention to what is happening in the forest,” Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves told the media after the extreme weather event of December 2013.

“If we are seeing these logs in the lower end, you can imagine the damage in the upper end,” he said, adding that the Christmas Eve floods had damaged about 10 per cent of the nation’s forest.

“And if those logs are not cleared, and if we don’t deal properly with the river defences in the upper areas of the river, we have a time bomb, a ticking time bomb, because when the rains come again heavily, they will simply wash down what is in the pipeline, so to speak, in addition to new material that is to come,” Gonsalves said.

Almost one and a half years after the Christmas disaster, Gonsalves tells IPS a lot of clearing has been taking place in the forest.

“And I’ll tell you, the job which is required to be done is immense,” he says, adding that there is also a challenge of persons dumping garbage into rivers and streams, although the government collects garbage in every community across the country.

The scope of deforestation in St. Vincent and the Grenadines is extensive. In some instances, persons clear up to 10 acres of forest for marijuana cultivation at elevations of over 3,000 feet above sea level, Poyer tells IPS.

“Some of them may cultivate using a method that is compatible, whereby they may leave trees in strategic areas to help to hold the soil together and attract rain. Other will just clear everything, as much as five to ten acres at one time for marijuana,” he explains.

But farmers growing legal produce, such as vegetables and root crops, also use practices that make the soils more susceptible to erosion at a time when the nation is witnessing longer, drier periods and shorter spells of more intense rainfall.

Many farmers use the slash and burn method, which purges the land of many of its nutrients and causes the soil to become loose. Farmers will then turn to fertilisers, which increases production costs.

“When they realise that it is costing them more for input, they will abandon those lands. In abandoning these lands, these lands being left bare, you have erosion taking place. You may have gully erosion, landslides,” Poyer tells IPS.

During the Christmas 2013 disaster, flood waters deposited large volumes of neatly cut logs into residential and commercial areas in St. Vincent. Credit: Kenton X. Chance/IPS

He says that sometime access to these lands is so difficult that reforestation is very costly.

“Sometimes we will have to put in check dams to try to reduce the erosion and allow it to come under vegetation naturally and hope and pray that in two years when it begins to come under vegetation that someone doesn’t do the very same thing that had happened two years prior,” he explains.

As climate change continues to affect the Caribbean, countries of the eastern Caribbean are seeing longer dry spells and more droughts, as is the case currently, which has led to a shortage of drinking water in some countries.

Emergency management officials in St. Vincent and the Grenadines have warned that the rainy season is expected to begin in July, at least four weeks later than is usually the case. Similar warnings have been issued across the region.

This makes conditions rife for bush fires in a country where the entire coastline is a fire zone because of the type of vegetation.

The nation’s fire chief, Superintendent of Police Isaiah Browne, tells IPS that this year fire-fighters have responded to 32 bush fires, compared to 91 in all of 2014.

In May alone, they have responded to 20 bush fires – many of them caused by persons clearing land for agriculture.

Poyer tells IPS that in addition to the type of vegetation along the coast, a lot of trees in those areas have been removed to make way for housing and other developments.

“And that also has an impact on the aquatic life,” he says. “That is why sometimes we hardly see any fish along the coastline, because there are no trees to cool the water for the algae to get food.”

Poyer’s comments echo a warning by Susan Singh-Renton, deputy executive director of the Caribbean Regional Fisheries Mechanism, who says that as the temperature of the Caribbean Sea rises, species of fish found in the region, important proteins sources, may move further northward.

The effects of bush fires, combined with the severe weather resulting from climate change, have had catastrophic results in St. Vincent.

Rising sea levels haves resulted in the relocation of houses and erection of this sea defence in Layou, a town in southwestern St. Vincent. Credit: Kenton X. Chance/IPS

Among the 12 persons who died in the Christmas 2013 floods and landslides were five members of a household in Rose Bank, in north-western St. Vincent, who died when a landslide slammed into their home.

“The three specific areas in Rose Bank where landslides occurred in in the 2013 floods were three of the areas where fires were always being lit,” Community activist Kennard King tells IPS, adding that there were no farms on those hillsides.

“It did affect the soil because as the bush was being burnt out, the soil did get loose, so that when the flood came, those areas were the areas that had the landslide,” says King, who is president of the Rose Bank Development Association.

As temperatures soar and rainfall decreases, the actions of Vincentians along the banks of streams and rivers are resulting in less fresh water in the nation’s waterways.

“The drying out of streams in the dry season is also a result of what is taking place in the hills, in the middle basin and along the stream banks,” Poyer tells IPS.

“Once you remove the vegetation, then you open it up to the sun and the elements that will draw out a lot of the water, causing it to vaporise and some of the rivers become seasonal,” he explains.

St. Vincent and the Grenadines has had to spend millions of dollars to protect coastal areas and relocate persons affected by rising sea, as was the case in Layou, a town on the south-western coast, where boardwalk knows stands where house once stood for generations.

Stina Herberg, principal of Richmond Vale Academy in north-western St. Vincent has seen the impact of climate change on the land- and seascape since she arrived in St. Vincent in 2007.

“Since I came here in 2007, I have seen a very big part of our coastline disappear. … The road used to go along the beach, but at a point we had really bad weather and that whole road disappeared. So we got like five metres knocked off our beach. So that was a first warning sign,” she tells IPS.

Richmond Vale Academy runs a Climate Compliance Conference, where new students join for up to six months and take part in a 10-year project to help the people in St. Vincent adapt to the challenges of global warming and climate change.

“We had trough system on the 24th December 2013, and that a took a big bite out of our football field. Maybe 10 per cent, 15 per cent of that football field was just gone in the trough system. … We have been observing this, starting to plant tree, getting more climate conscious, living the disasters through,” she says.

The academy recently joined with the Police Cooperative Credit Union to plant 100 trees at Richmond Beach, which has been severely impacted by climate change.

“They will prevent erosion, they will look more beautiful, they will motivate and mobilise people that they can see yes we can do something,” Herberg tells IPS.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Forest rangers putting out a fire at a charcoal burning kiln in Kenya’s Mau Forest. The future of the country’s indigenous forest cover is under threat but this has little to do with poverty and ignorance – experts say that it is greed which allows unsustainable practices, such as the lucrative production of charcoal and logging of wood. Credit: Robert Kibet/IPS

By Robert Kibet
NAIROBI, Apr 25 2015 (IPS)

Armed with twigs and placards, enraged residents from a semi-pastoral community 360 km north of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, protested this week against wanton destruction of indigenous forest – their alternative source of livelihood.

With climate change a new ordeal that has caused frequent droughts, leading to suffering and death in this part of Africa, the community from Lpartuk Ranch in Samburu County relies on livestock which is sometimes wiped out by severe drought leaving them with no other option other than the harvesting of wild products and honey.

“People here are ready to take up spears and machetes to guard the forest. They have been provoked by outsiders who are out to wipe out our indigenous forest to the last bit,” Mark Loloolki, Lpartuk Ranch chairman, who led the protesting community members told IPS.

They threatened to set alight any vehicle caught ferrying the timbers or logs suspected to be from their forests.Illegal harvesting of forest products is pervasive and often involves unsustainable forest practices which cause serious damage to forests, the people who depend on them and the economies of producer countries

Their protest came barely a week after counterparts from Seketet, a few kilometres away in Samburu Central, held a similar protest after over 12,000 red cedar posts were caught on transit to Maralal, Samburu’s main town.

Last year, students walked for four kilometres during International Ozone Day to protest against the wanton destruction of the same endangered forest tree species.

A report titled Green Carbon, Black Trade, released by the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) and Interpol in 2012,  which focuses on illegal logging and its impacts on the lives and livelihoods of often some of the poorest people in the world, underlines how criminals are combining old-fashioned methods such as bribes with high-tech methods such as computer hacking of government websites to obtain transportation and other permits.

Samburu County, in Kenya’s semi-arid northern region, hosts Lerroghi, a 92,000 hectare forest reserve that is home to different indigenous plants and animal species. Lerroghi, also called Kirisia locally, is among the largest forest ecosystem in dry northern Kenya and was initially filled with olive and red cedar trees.

It is alleged that unscrupulous merchants smuggle the endangered red cedar products to the coastal port of Mombasa for shipping to Saudi Arabia where they are sold at high prices.

“This is a business that involves a well-connected cartel of merchants operating in Nairobi and Mombasa,” said Loloolki.

In Kenya, the future of indigenous forest cover is under threat but has little to do with poverty and ignorance – experts say that it is greed which allows unsustainable practices, such as the lucrative production of charcoal and logging of wood.

“This forest is our main water catchment source and home to wild animals such as elephants,” Moses Lekolool, the area assistant chief, told IPS. “Elephants no longer have a place to mate and reproduce or even give birth, with most of them having migrated.”

According to Samburu County’s Kenya Forest Service (KFS) Ecosystem Controverter Eric Chemitei, “as a government parastatal, we [KFS] do not issue permits for transportation or movement of cedar posts. However, we do not know how they get to Nairobi, Mombasa and eventually to Saudi Arabia as alleged.”

At the same time, Chemitei told IPS that squatters currently residing inside the forest are mainly families affected by insecurity related to cattle rustling, adding that their presence was posing a threat to the main water towers of Lerroghi, Mathew Ranges, and Ndoto and Nyiro mountains.

He further noted that harvesting of cedar regardless of whether forest was privately or publicly owned was banned in 1999, and that over 30,000 hectares – one-third of the Lerroghi forest – has been destroyed.

Reports from INTERPOL and the World Bank in 2009 and from UNEP in 2011 indicate that the trade in illegally harvested timber is highly lucrative for criminal elements and has been estimated at 11 billion dollars – comparable with the production value of drugs which is estimated at around 13 billion dollars.

In a report on organised wildlife, gold and timber, released on Apr. 16, UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said: “There is no room for doubt: wildlife and forest crime is serious and calls for an equally serious response. In addition to the breach of the international rule of law and the impact on peace and security, environmental crime robs countries of revenues that could have been spent on sustainable development and the eradication of poverty.”

According to the KFS Strategic Plan (2009/2010-2013/2014), of the 3.4 million hectares (5.9 percent) of forest cover out of the Kenya’s total land area, 1.4 million are made up of indigenous closed canopy forests, mangroves and plantations, on both public and private lands.

The plan also indicated that Kenya’s annual domestic demand for wood is 37 million cubic metres while sustainable wood supply is only around 30 million cubic metres, thus creating a deficit of seven million cubic metres which, according to analysts, means that any projected increase in forest cover can only be realised after this huge internal demand is met.

Last year, Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary for Environment Judi Wakhungu said that KFS’ revised policy framework for forest conservation and sustainable management lists features including community participation, community forest associations and benefit sharing.

The policy acknowledges that indigenous trees or forests are ecosystems that provide important economic, environmental, recreational, scientific, social, cultural and spiritual benefits.

Nevertheless, illegal harvesting of forest products is pervasive and often involves unsustainable forest practices which cause serious damage to forests, the people who depend on them and the economies of producer countries.

Forests have been subjected to land use changes such as conversion to farmland or urban settlements, thus reducing their ability to supply forest products and serve as water catchments, biodiversity conservation reservoirs and wildlife habitats.

Meanwhile, the effect of forest depletion on women has been noted by Veronica Nkepeni , Director of Kenya’s Centre for Advocacy and Gender Equality, who told IPS that the “most affected are women in the pastoralist areas, trekking long distances in search of water as a result of the effects of forest depletion leading to water scarcity.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

Women in Pakistan fare worse than all their neighbours in terms of resilience to climate change. Credit: Ali Mansoor/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Mar 17 2015 (IPS)

When a group of women in the remote village of Sadhuraks in Pakistan’s Thar Desert, some 800 km from the port city of Karachi, were asked if they would want to be born a woman in their next life, the answer from each was a resounding ‘no’.

They have every reason to be unhappy with their gender, mostly because of the unequal division of labour between men and women in this vast and arid region that forms a natural boundary between India and Pakistan.

"South Asian countries need to realise the tremendous capacity for leadership women have in planning for and responding to disasters." -- David Line, managing editor of The Economist Intelligence Unit
“A woman’s work is never done,” one woman says.

“She works in the fields as well as the home, fetches water, eats less,” adds another.

Others say women are compelled to perform manual labour even while pregnant, and some lament they cannot take care of themselves, with so many others to look after.

While this mantra rings true for millions of impoverished women around the world, it takes on a whole new meaning in Tharparkar, one of 23 districts that comprise Pakistan’s Sindh Province, which has been ranked by the World Food Programme (WFP) as the most food insecure region of the country.

But a scheme to include women in adaptation and mitigation efforts is gaining ground in this drought-struck region, where the simple act of moving from one day to the next has become a life-and-death struggle for many.

Over 500 infant deaths were reported last year, the third consecutive drought year for the region. Malnutrition and hunger are rampant, while thousands of families cannot find water.

In its 2013 report, the State of Food Security, the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) listed Tharparkar as the region with the country’s highest caloric deficit, a by-product of what it labels a “chronic” food crisis, prompted by climate change.

Of the 1.5 million people spread out over 2,300 villages in an area spanning 22,000 square km, the women are bearing the brunt of this slow and recurring disaster.

Tanveer Arif who heads the NGO Society for Conservation and Protection of Environment (SCOPE) tells IPS that women not only have to look after the children, they are also forced to fill a labour gap caused by an exodus of men migrating to urban areas in search of jobs.

With their husbands gone, women must also tend to the livestock, fetch water from distant sources when their household wells run dry, care for the elderly, and keep up the tradition of subsistence farming – a near impossible task in a drought-prone region that is primed to become hotter and drier by 2030, according to the Pakistan Meteorological Department.

The promise of harder times ahead has been a wakeup call for local communities and policymakers alike that building resilience is the only defense against a rising death toll.

Women here are painfully aware that they need to learn how to store surplus food, identify drought-resilient crops and wean themselves off agriculture as a sole means of survival, thinking that has been borne out in recent studies on the region.

Conservation brings empowerment

The answer presented itself in the form of a small, thorny tree called the mukul myrrh, which produces a gum resin that is widely used for a range of cosmetic and medicinal purposes, known here as guggal.

Until recently, the plant was close to extinction, and sparked conservation efforts to keep the species alive in the face of ruthless extraction – 40 kg of the gum resin fetches anything from 196 to 392 dollars.

Today, those very efforts are doubling up as adaptation and resiliency strategies among the women of Tharparkar.

Women often bare the brunt of natural disasters since they are responsible for the upkeep of the household and the wellbeing of their families. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

It began in 2013, when SCOPE launched a project with support from the Scottish government to involve women in conservation. Today, some 2,000 women across Tharparkar are growing guggal gum trees; it has brought nutrition, a better income and food security to all their families.

“For the first time in so many years, we did not migrate […] in search of a livelihood,” 35-year-old Resham Wirdho, a mother of seven, tells IPS over the phone from Sadhuraks.

She says her family gets 100 rupees (about 0.98 dollars) from the NGO for every plant she raises successfully. With 500 plants on her one-acre plot of land, she makes about 49 dollars each month. Combining this with her husband’s earnings of about 68 dollars a month as a farmhand, they no longer have to worry where the next meal will come from.

They used some of their excess income to plant crops in their backyard. “This year for the first time, instead of feeding my children dried vegetables, I fed them fresh ones,” she says enthusiastically.

For the past year, they have not had to buy groceries on credit from the village store. They are also able to send the eldest of their seven kids to college.

Women in Pakistan’s drought-struck Tharparkar District are shouldering the burden of a long dry spell that is wreaking havoc across the desert region. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

Wirdho says it is a gift that keeps on giving. In the next three years, each of the trees they planted will fetch at least five dollars, amounting to net earnings of 2,450 dollars – a princely sum for families in this area who typically earn between 78 and 98 dollars monthly.

And finally, the balance of power between Wirdho and her husband is shifting. “He is more respectful and not only helps me water and take care of the plants, but with the housework as well – something he never did before,” she confesses.

Lessons from Pakistan for South Asia

The success of a single scheme in a Pakistani desert holds seeds of knowledge for the entire region, where experts have long been pushing for a gendered approach to sustainable development.

With 2015 poised to be a watershed year – including several scheduled international conferences on climate change, many believe the time is ripe to reduce women’s vulnerability by including them in planning and policies.

Such a move is badly needed in South Asia, home to 1.6 billion people, where women comprise the majority of the roughly 660 million people living on less than 1.25 dollars a day. They also account for 50 percent of the agricultural labour force, thus are susceptible to changes in climate and ecosystems.

The region is highly prone to natural disasters, and with the population projected to hit 2.2 billion by 2050 experts fear the outcome of even minor natural disasters on the most vulnerable sectors of society, such as the women.

A recent report by The Economist’s Intelligence Unit (EIU), ‘The South Asia Women’s Resilience Index’, concluded, “South Asian countries largely fail to consider the rights of women to be included in their disaster risk reduction (DRR) and resilience-building efforts.”

Using Japan – with a per capita relief budget 200 times that of India, Pakistan or Bangladesh – as a benchmark, the index measured women’s vulnerability to natural calamities, economic shifts and conflict.

A bold indictment of women’s voices going unheard, the report put Pakistan last on the index, lower than Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

On all four categories considered by the EIU in measuring women’s resiliency – economic, infrastructural, institutional and social – Pakistan scored near the bottom. On indicators such as relief budgets and women’s access to employment and finance, it lagged behind all its neighbours.

According to David Line, managing editor of The Economist Intelligence Unit, “South Asian countries need to realise the tremendous capacity for leadership women have in planning for and responding to disasters. They are at the ‘front line’ and have intimate knowledge of their communities. Wider recognition of this could greatly reduce disaster risk and improve the resilience of these communities.”

And if further proof is needed, just talk to the women of Tharparkar.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

“The forest used to be for the Baka but not anymore. We would walk in the forest according to the seasons but now we’re afraid,” say the Baka of Cameroon. Credit: © Survival International

By Lyndal Rowlands
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 5 2015 (IPS)

Indigenous and wildlife conservationists have common goals and common adversaries, but seem to be struggling to find common ground in the fight for sustainable forests.

The forest lifestyle of the Baka people of Cameroon helps provide improved habitats for wild animals.“When wildlife trafficking and bush meat trade results in the decline in wildlife populations, the very first people to suffer are indigenous people who need those wildlife populations to survive.” -- James Deutsch

When the Baka clear a patch for a camp, the clearing later turns into secondary forest that gorillas prefer, Mike Hurran, Survival International Africa campaigner, told IPS.

“When they harvest wild yams that grow in the forest, they always leave part of the root intact and that spreads the pockets of wild yams through the forest that elephants and wild bush pigs like,” he said.

They have “sophisticated codes of conservation” and have lived sustainably for generations following the ‘ancestor’s path’.

But pressures on the Baka’s forest home are coming from many angles; logging, mining, and illegal poaching.

According to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), worldwide wildlife trafficking is now worth an estimated 23 billion dollars annually, threatening endangered species and ruining opportunities for sustainable development.

On the ground, tackling wildlife crime is becoming increasingly difficult. Poachers, backed by the same international crime syndicates that traffic in drugs and people, are employing increasingly sophisticated techniques.

At the same time, forests are under increased pressure from resource exploitation. Mining and logging destroy habitats and brings thousands of workers to the forest who themselves hunt, eat and trade wild animals.

“When wildlife trafficking and bush meat trade results in the decline in wildlife populations, the very first people to suffer are indigenous people who need those wildlife populations to survive,” James Deutsch, vice president, conservation strategy for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), told IPS.

Deutsch said conservationists and indigenous people have common adversaries, in organised crime syndicates and the extractives industry.

However, Survival International is concerned that although conservationists have in recent years expressed a greater commitment to working with indigenous communities, this is not always reflected on the ground.

“What these anti-poaching squads are doing, and by extension the conservation agencies that fund them, is really just focusing on the least powerful people, who are really just hunting to feed their families as they have for generations,” Hurran said.

“Often the poaching squads [that] enforce wildlife law are maybe corrupt or they don’t have much respect for the human rights of tribal people, such as the Baka,” he said.

“The Baka have told us that even when they are hunting in their special zones, using techniques which are recognised as traditional and legal and hunting just for food and not for sale, sometimes their meat is confiscated, and they are being harassed or beaten by anti-poaching squads,” Hurran added.

Survival International has named specific international conservation organisations that they say provide funding to these anti-poaching squads, including World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in Cameroon.

In a statement provided to IPS, WWF said, “On the ground, advancing the status and rights of tribal communities while also protecting the resources vital to them and the global community is extraordinarily difficult… WWF agrees that parks need people, and models such as Community Based Natural Resource Management being pursued by WWF globally over many years have ensured that many parks have people.

“WWF is open to a collaborative approach to these issues.  WWF is standing by commitments to assist a Cameroon National Human Rights and Freedom Commission investigation of alleged human rights abuses by Ecoguards and military and is reviewing field experience and our activities in support of the Baka and forest protection in Cameroon.”

Deutsch also echoed WWF’s call for a collaborative approach, saying that a deeper partnership between the human rights community and the conservation community is needed to address complex conservation challenges. Survival International also says WCS funds similar anti-poaching squads in the Republic of Congo.

“The conservation community has to be committed to partnering with indigenous people, because that’s the only way that we’re both going to find a future for wildlife, but also do it in such a way that human rights are respected and traditional societies are respected,” Deutsch said.

Deutsch, who previously led WCS’s programmes in Africa for 11 years, said that solutions were not simple and required perseverance, working with local communities on the ground.

One area both sides agree on is shortfalls in national and international laws protecting indigenous people.

WWF’s statement said that complications included “lack of official recognition in law or in practice of customary rights (and) shortfalls in knowledge, commitment and infrastructure necessary to support international human rights agendas.”

Survival International also acknowledges that national and international laws need to provide more protection to tribal people, both on paper and in practice.

“The criteria that the Baka people need to meet in order to hunt legally is very strict and unrealistic, so often they are considered poachers, when they aren’t,” Hurran said.

Speaking at a United Nations event on World Wildlife Day on Tuesday, Nik Sekhran, director of the UNDP’s Sustainable Development Cluster, said, “For many communities and for indigenous people around the world, sustainable use of wildlife and sustainable use of flora for medicines for food … is really critical to their survival.”

The financial benefits of wildlife tourism are often cited as an important reason to support wildlife conservation in developing countries. However, tourism income does not always trickle down to the poorest communities in developing countries.

“It’s particularly a challenge with hunter-gatherer people,” Deutch said. “There are many cases where wildlife tourism has been created and the intention has been to benefit hunter-gatherer societies and yet in some cases it’s been difficult to make sure that the benefits go to those people because they are less able to deal with the scrum for resources that results.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Dead addax (white antelope) hunted by soldiers in Chad – “We should not underestimate the seriousness of wildlife crime”. Credit: John Newby/SCF

By Bradnee Chambers
BONN, Mar 1 2015 (IPS)

It is no exaggeration to say that we are facing a “wildlife crisis”, and it is a crisis exacerbated by human activities, not least criminal ones.

Whatever our definition of wildlife crime, it is big business. In terms of annual turn-over it is up there narcotics, arms and human trafficking – and the proceeds run into billions of dollars each year, helping to finance criminal gangs and rebel organisations waging civil wars.“Whatever our definition of wildlife crime, it is big business. In terms of annual turn-over it is up there with narcotics, arms and human trafficking – and the proceeds run into billions of dollars each year”

With seven billion people on the planet, it is tempting to shrug one’s shoulders and ask “What difference can any one individual make?”  Such an attitude means that we are in danger of repeating the “tragedy of the commons” – everyone making seemingly rational decisions in their own immediate interests – but this is a short-sighted approach that undermines the common good and ultimately sows the seeds of its own downfall.

With seven billion people on the planet, it is also tempting to say that people’s need for food, shelter and well-being should take precedence over nature conservation, but the two are not necessarily irreconcilable.  In fact far from it – the two often go hand in hand and are totally compatible – non-consumptive use of wildlife, such as whale-watching and safaris, provide sustainable livelihoods for thousands of people.

Extinction has been an ever-present phenomenon, with a few species losing their specialised niche or being edged out to a more aggressive competitor or, in the case of dinosaurs, being wiped out by a meteorite strike.

The number of species going extinct is increasing fast, at a rate that cannot be attributed to natural causes and it is clear that there is a human foot pressing down heavily on the accelerator pedal.

South Africa reports record numbers of rhinos killed for their horn; demand for ivory is pushing the elephant to the brink; tiger numbers might have risen in India of late but the wild population and the range occupied by the cats are a fraction of what they were at the beginning of the twentieth century.

And we are not just losing vital pieces in the elaborate jigsaw puzzle of ecosystems; we are losing elements of our natural heritage that contribute to human culture and society, and the lifeblood of sustainable activities that create employment in the tourism sector, generating foreign exchange and significant tax revenues.

Wildlife crime is not an abstract. It affects us all and there is more that individuals can do to make a difference than they perhaps imagine.  Understanding the consequences of killing the animals and highlighting the connection between the increased poaching and organised criminal gangs and terrorists have been extremely helpful in strengthening  political messages and in persuading  the public to demand that more be done.

The gangs care little about the fate of the animals – either the individuals they kill or the survival of the species.  They think nothing of shooting the rangers who stand in their way.  They do care about their profits and high demand for ivory in East Asian markets has sent the price through the roof – not that the poacher in the field or the craftsman in the backstreet workshop receive much of a share.

If demand evaporates, the price will fall and killing elephants for their ivory will no longer be a viable business. The gangs will have to find some other source of income, but they would have to do this soon anyway, as current levels of poaching mean that there will not be any elephants left in 30 years.

The maxim “get them while they are young” applies to many things, not least the environment and junior members of the household often influence the family’s behaviour with regard to recycling, saving energy and water, food purchases and a range of other “green issues”. So raising awareness among the younger generation of the need to tackle wildlife crime is crucial.

The fight against wildlife crime has to be conducted on several fronts.  It does register on governments’ radar and pressure from civil society can help keep it high on the agenda.  The public has a vital role to play in keeping pressure on governments, either individually or through local pressure groups and NGOs. People can also modify their own behaviour by minimising their footprint on the planet.

We should not underestimate the seriousness of wildlife crime, but nor should we dismiss the potential impact of the actions of individuals as consumers, customers or voters.

Edited by Phil Harris  

Excerpt:

Lesser Flamingos in flight, Credit: ©Mark Anderson

By Jacques Trouvilliez
BONN, Jan 31 2015 (IPS)

The first global treaty dealing with biodiversity was the Ramsar Convention – predating the Rio processes by 20 years.

Ramsar aims to conserve wetlands, the usefulness of which has been undervalued – even the eminent French naturalist of the 18^th century, the Comte de Buffon, advocated their destruction – and which have suffered large losses in recent decades.Wetlands are vital for birds – and especially waterbirds – but it is also the case that the birds are vital to the wetlands, playing a major role in maintaining nature’s balance.

Far from being wastelands, wetlands provide invaluable services, replenishing aquifers that supply drinking water and filtering out harmful pollutants. By maintaining a healthy environment, wetlands help ensure human well-being.

While the Ramsar Convention has had to deal with a broader spectrum of wetland issues over the years, it should be remembered that its full title includes “especially as waterfowl habitat”, and in AEWA, Ramsar has a strong ally with a clear focus on waterbird conservation in the African-Eurasian Flyway.

The areas designated as Ramsar Sites form an important part of the network of breeding, feeding and stopover grounds that are indispensable to the survival of the 255 bird populations of listed under AEWA.

Ramsar Sites are vital “hubs” in the network of habitats that constitute the African-Eurasian flyway along which millions of birds migrate in the course of the annual cycle. They include habitats as diverse as the Wadden Sea in Europe and the Banc d’Arguin in Mauritania, both also designated as UNESCO World Heritage Sites and important staging posts for birds migrating between Arctic breeding grounds and wintering sites deep in Africa.

Despite being often far apart geographically and different morphologically, these sites are inextricably linked by the birds that frequent them.

The definition of “wetland” extends to fish ponds, rice paddies, saltpans and some shallow marine waters, so Ramsar has sites of significance to other species covered by the Convention of Migratory Species, under which AEWA was concluded.

Examples are the Franciscana dolphin (the only dolphin species to inhabit wetlands) found in the estuary of the River Plate and along the coast of South America; and the European eel – a recent addition to the CMS listings – which spends most of its life in rivers but spawns and then dies in the Sargasso Sea.

But it is waterbirds that have the strongest links to wetlands and the future of many species is in doubt as a result of the continuing reduction in area of these most productive of habitats. Of great concern is the fate of the mudflats of the Yellow Sea which are under increasing pressure from human developments because tied to them is the fate of a number of threatened shorebirds.

Lake Natron in the United Republic of Tanzania is the only regular breeding site of over two million Lesser flamingoes. Applications have been made to exploit the area’s deposits of soda ash leading to fears that irrevocable damage would be done to the site resulting in the species’ extinction.

The habitats of Andean flamingoes – the Puna and Andean Flamingoes – are facing similar problems as illegal mining activities have eroded the nesting sites and contaminated the water, exacerbating other threats such as egg collection.

Fragile wetland ecosystems also fall victim to man-made accidents – the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico and the Sandoz chemical works fire in Basel, Switzerland in 1986 being just two examples of countless incidents, both leading to the death of thousands of birds and fish.

Wetlands are vital for birds – and especially waterbirds – but it is also the case that the birds are vital to the wetlands, playing a major role in maintaining nature’s balance.

Government representatives will gather in Paris later this year in the latest effort to seek agreement on the steps necessary to arrest the causes of climate change. Wildlife is already feeling the effects and one of the best ways to ensure that animals can adapt is to ensure that there are enough robust sites providing the habitat and food sources at the right time and in the right place.

The theme chosen by the Ramsar Convention for this year’s campaign is Wetlands for Our Future and there is a particular emphasis being placed on the role of young people. While wetlands are of course vital for humans, they are no less important for the survival of wildlife and to a great extent also depend on the birds that live in them.

It is the role of AEWA to provide a forum where the countries of Europe, West Asia and Africa can work together to maintain the network of sites making up the African-Eurasian flyway.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

The Irulas harvest produce from the mangrove forest for a livelihood. Here, an Irula man pulls a crab trap that he had laid out in the morning before heading off to fish in the sea. Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
PICHAVARAM, India, Dec 10 2014 (IPS)

When the Asian tsunami washed over several Indian Ocean Rim countries on Boxing Day 2004, it left a trail of destruction in its wake, including a death toll that touched 230,000.

Millions lost their jobs, food security and traditional livelihoods and many have spent the last decade trying to pick up the pieces of their lives. But for a small tribe in southern India, the tsunami didn’t bring devastation; instead, it brought hope.

Numbering some 25,000 people, the Irulas have long inhabited the Nilgiri Mountains in the states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, and have traditionally earned a living by ridding the farmland of rats and snakes, often supplementing their meagre income by working as daily wage agricultural labourers in the fields.

Now, on the eve of the 10-year anniversary of the tsunami, the Irulas in Tamil Nadu are a living example of how sustainable disaster management can alleviate poverty, while simultaneously preserving an ancient way of life.

Prior to 2004, the Irula people laboured under extremely exploitative conditions, earning no more than 3,000 rupees (about 50 dollars) each month. Nutrition levels were poor, and the community suffered from inadequate housing and sanitation facilities.

They were finally included on the government’s List of Scheduled Tribes, largely thanks to the efforts of a government official named G.S. Bedi from the tsunami-ravaged coastal district of Cuddalore in Tamil Nadu.

Inclusion on the list enabled the community to become legal beneficiaries of state-sponsored developmental schemes like the Forest Rights Act and other sustainable fisheries initiatives, thereby improving their access to better housing, and bringing greater food and livelihood security.

More importantly, community members say, the post-tsunami period has marked a kind of revival among Irulas, who are availing themselves of sustainable livelihood schemes to conserve their environment while also increasing their wages.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

By Bradnee Chambers
BONN, Mar 16 2014 (IPS)

They say religion doesn’t mix well with certain subjects, but in the case of conservation and religion this old rule of thumb doesn’t seem to apply.

Conservationists have been increasingly aligning with different religious groups to further their work, either by promoting conservation projects on the ground, or by working with religious groups to promote good conservation principles to their flocks of followers.

High in the Tibetan Plateau where some of the last snow leopards roam, Buddhist monks regularly send out patrols to ensure that the highly endangered cats are not taken by poachers. According to George Schaller, who works for a conservation group called Panthera, Buddhism has as a basic tenet – the love, respect and compassion for all living beings. For the last 3,000-4,000 snow leopards this is welcomed help to ensure their continued existence.Environmental organisations are increasingly seeing the advantage of working with different faiths to protect endangered wildlife.

In Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world, Islamic clerics working with the World Wildlife Fund have issued a fatwa, a code of law under which violations are considered immoral and forbidden, to protect endangered animals. This fatwa could play an important role in protecting species such as the Asian Elephant sought after for its ivory, and even aquatic mammals such as dugongs, dolphins and whales.

Pope Francis, who took his name from the St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals and the environment, has on many occasions made strong statements on the subjects of climate change and nature protection. For example, upon meeting the Ecuadoran President, he is reported to have advised him to “take good care of creation. St. Francis wanted that. People occasionally forgive, but nature never does. If we don’t take care of the environment, there’s no way of getting around it.”

Some conservation groups say that there is still more to be done as there are links between the ivory trade and religious artefacts such as crosses and rosaries.

The Shembe Church of South Africa, officially a Baptist group but deeply immersed in Zulu customs, recently agreed to replace its leopard and animal hides seen as a symbol of wealth and prestige with faux skins.

Environmental organisations are increasingly seeing the advantage of working with different faiths to protect endangered wildlife. Most of the largest religions promote harmony with nature.

Christianity teaches that humans are meant to be stewards over God’s creation with a moral obligation to protect nature. Hindus believe that the Divine is everywhere and we are not separate from nature. Muslims have many elements in their religion advocating environmental protection. Over 80 percent of the world population follow one religion or another so the potential alliance is potentially very powerful.

In 1995, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh recognising the common goals between religion and conservation, founded ARC, the Alliance of Religions and Conservation. The group based in the United Kingdom works with religious groups to develop environmental programmes founded on their own core teachings, beliefs and practices. GreenFaith does similar work promoting social and environmental justice in the U.S.

The alliance between religion and conservation couldn’t come at a better time, because the threats to international wildlife have never been greater. The Convention on Migratory Species is one of the few global wildlife conventions in place; it protects species moving between countries, but finds its tasks increasingly difficult to carry out with regard to the most iconic animals in the world.

Big cats, dolphins, whales, sharks,  gorillas, elephants, bats, birds of prey and even monarch butterflies which have roamed the Earth for millennia are in danger either from direct threats such as poaching, illegal trade, overfishing, bycatch or loss of their habitat. Then there are indirect threats from climate change affecting their breeding and feeding patterns.

In the face of these threats unprecedented in human history, conservationists are exploring new avenues to protect these species. So why not religion? Conservation and wildlife organisations see the opportunity. Religion is not a threat to wildlife, but it could be a major ally for wildlife conservation because it can change and influence our fundamental values.

A question often asked is,why protect wildlife? Development can improve lives so why forgo it in place of killing off a few species? One can go through all the different arguments – its economic worth, its value importance for future generations or simply its beauty. But the powerful answer must be because it is part of our culture and therefore part of our beliefs and even our own identify. Once it’s second nature and part of a value system, no one will ever again ask the question why protect it.

Excerpt:

Part of the Sustainable Urban Masterplan for Shanghai, this image shows the channels with pedestrian and slow traffic lanes on the right, and urban food gardens on the left. The channel transports water from vertical farm to vertical farm, cooling the city and being filtered through various plants and organisms along the way. Credit: Except Integrated/cc by 2.0

By Stephen Leahy
NANTES, France, Oct 5 2013 (IPS)

With presidents and prime ministers failing to take meaningful action to avert a planetary-scale climate crisis, the mayors of cities and towns are increasingly stepping up to enact changes at the local level.

“Cities are on the front lines of climate change,” Richard Register, founder and president of Ecocity Builders, an organisation that pioneered ecological city design and planning, told IPS.

With the backing of their residents, many cities and towns around the world are becoming cleaner, greener and better places to live by banning cars, improving mass transit, reducing energy use and growing their own food while adding public and green spaces.

“Getting cities right solves many problems,” Register said.

Cities are truly ground zero for action on climate change, protection of ecosystems, biodiversity, energy use, food production and more because that’s where most people live today, he said. Cities consume about 75 percent of the world’s energy and resources. They are directly or indirectly responsible for 75 percent of global carbon emissions.

By 2050, 75 percent of the world’s 9.5 billion people will live in cities. The urban areas to house this huge increase amounts to more than all the building humanity has ever done. Nearly all of this new building will be in the developing world.

“All of this new urban infrastructure must be done right,” said David Cadman, a city councillor from Vancouver, Canada and president of ICLEI, the only network of sustainable cities operating worldwide and which counts 1,200 local governments as members.

ICLEI members have committed to reduce their carbon emissions by 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050.

“Cities are major players in issues like energy, climate, sustainable food production,” Cadman told IPS.

Climate change is a “five-alarm fire and hardly any national government is taking the needed actions”, he said. On top of that, national governments largely ignore the role of cities and only recently granted them 10 minutes of speaking time at the annual U.N. climate negotiations to create a new global treaty.

“We continue to have the political courage to act,” said Anna Tenje, deputy mayor of the small Swedish city of Växjö, which slashed its carbon emissions 40 percent and aims to be Europe’s greenest city.

Växjö was a very polluted region in the 1960s, but the public and business community backed efforts to re-invent it as a green city. People now fish and swim in the once polluted lakes that surround the city, she said at the 10th Ecocity, the World Summit on Sustainable Cities, a recent conference that drew more than 2,000 mayors, local officials and members of civil society to Nantes.

Växjö is doing also every well economically, Tenje said, proving that cutting emissions is not a burden.

All new apartment blocks are so well-insulated they don’t need furnaces for heat. Solar panels have been installed in schools and on the roof of City Hall. A biogas plant produces vehicle fuel from sewage and school food leftovers, while another larger plant using domestic waste as its feedstock is under construction.

The city aims to be fossil fuel-free by 2030 and has launched a major effort to get people out of their cars by making public transit, walking and cycling more enjoyable than driving, the deputy mayor said.

Last year’s landmark sustainability summit Rio+20 in Brazil chose “The Future We Want” as its motto. While little was accomplished in Rio, some cities and towns were already creating the future they want, said Andrew Simms, a climate economist at Global Witness and fellow of the New Economics Foundation in the UK.

Around the world, cites and towns are creating their version of what Simm’s nine-year-old daughter calls ‘Happyville’:  Green, sustainable places with thriving local economies and healthy, prosperous lifestyles for all residents, Simms told IPS.

Many Danish cities get their energy from wind, and the Belgian city of Ghent doubled the number of bikes on streets in less than 10 years with the dream of becoming car-free. Citizens in the Brazilian city of Puerto Alegre have weekly neighbourhood meetings to discuss how the city budget will be spent, resulting in a big improvement in services.

Cities can also grow much of their own food, Simms said, noting that Havana’s urban gardens grow half the city’s fresh fruit and vegetables. New York City estimates it has 4,000 acres on which it too could grow food. The city of Boulder, Colorado is working towards producing all of its own food.

Skyrocketing resource use fuelled by overconsumption remains a major challenge, but here too cities have a major role to play. The Brazilian mega-city of Sao Paulo banned billboards and transit advertising, while Europe’s premier city, Paris, has reduced such advertising by 30 percent to beautify the cityscape and de-emphasise material consumption.

Simms says that public spiritedness has become rarer in cultures bombarded by 180 ads a day telling people all they need to be happy is to buy stuff.

The only barriers to every village, town and city becoming ‘Happyville’ are a lack of political courage and self-interest dominating public interest, he said.

By Anna Shen
NEW YORK, Oct 4 2013 (IPS)

When author Deni Béchard discovered bonobos shared almost 99 percent of human DNA, and based their relationships on cooperation and collaboration, he knew he had to write about them.

Courtesy of Deni Béchard

He was fascinated to learn that as a flagship species, bonobos are the only great ape that do not kill their own. More importantly, he wanted to understand how one innovative NGO could use them as a symbol for larger issues in conservation, and knew that saving them from extinction was of extraordinary importance.

In his just-published book, Empty Hands, Open Arms: The Race to Save Bonobos in the Congo and Make Conservation Go Viral (Milkweed Editions, 2013), he draws from a rich palette of profoundly committed Congolese conservationists who have lived through war and lost everything they cared about. Against great odds, with few resources, they continue to commit themselves to saving these great apes.

Béchard also chronicles the determined and heroic efforts of the Bonobo Conservation Initiative, an NGO that works directly with Congolese communities, while tackling the root causes of poverty and unemployment that lead to the hunting of bonobos in the first place.

One of his goals is to show how the choices of our leaders and our consumer appetites have affected that country. He does so, but also tells very human stories of the culture and history of the Congo, painting a vivid picture of the place and its people.

His book tour kicks off this week.

Excerpts from his conversation with Anna Shen follow.

Q: How did learning about bonobos change your vision of humanity?

A: As humans, we have a hard time seeing the boundaries of our culture or conceiving of the ways that we might radically change. Meeting bonobos – especially the famous bonobo Kanzi in the Iowa Primate Learning Sanctuary – who can understand English and communicate with humans through the use of lexigrams, made me understand how dynamically great apes can change with their environments and with their cultures. Kanzi illustrates the power of culture to alter many of the traits that we associate with a species.

On a more dramatic level, the matriarchal and largely nonviolent structure of bonobo society, and the evolutionary circumstances that may have created it led me to consider the degree to which humans are a product of our environment. An abundance of resources and the resulting relative absence of competition may have allowed bonobos to develop more stable, peaceful societies in which all young are cherished.

Human societies have such a wealth of resources that no children should be privileged over others, and I have considered how quickly our culture would change if our priority were to use our resources for the benefit of the young – for their education, health care, and environmental well-being.

After a few generations of investing our national wealth into our young, what would we look like as a race? I think we would seem dramatically different. It’s essential for us to remember how much control we actually have over our environment and culture, the ways that we can use it to actively change our race for the better, and the speed at which we would see results.

Q: What are the similarities and differences between bonobos and humans?

A: Bonobos share many of the same traits as humans: empathy, imagination, loyalty, grief, hope, and love. The only difference between us, as far as I can tell – not having integrated into their society – is that their experience of life appears much more unmitigated.

Humans tend to bury their experiences in meaning; we tell ourselves stories, romanticising and dramatising, or trying desperately to give our loves and struggles – the narratives of our lives – greater significance. Learning about bonobos stripped a lot of that away and reminded me of the degree to which we are great apes, in a long evolutionary lineage, and that often, by trying to overload our lives with meaning, we lose touch with the simple animal impulses that drive us – impulses that are no less real or beautiful for being animal.

If anything, as the primatologist Frans de Waal suggests, what we see as our highest ethical values is encoded in our biology.

Q: What are a few of the approaches to conservation that might make it “go viral”?

A: What makes a conservation system self-replicating or “viral” is adapting it as closely as possible to the culture and conditions where it is being implemented. The organisation I was writing about for Empty Hands, Open Arms¸ the Bonobo Conservation Initiative, has its staff meet with various different social groups in a future protected area.

They get a sense of how local leaders view the forests and wildlife and possible conservation projects, as well as how the various members of the communities do. When it comes to time to set up projects, BCI’s staff supports a leader who is from the area that will become a reserve, someone who understands the values of the people, and they frame conservation in terms of the spiritual traditions of the communities.

The end result is that the people feel a deep sense of ownership for projects. Their successes are celebrated, and the conservationists who come from outside often defer to their knowledge. The local people so thoroughly embrace conservation that neighboring communities see the benefits and begin surveying endangered wildlife in their own regions and setting up their own protected zones with relatively little support from outsiders.

Q: Are you optimistic about the future of conservation in Africa?

A: I see cases for both optimism and pessimism. I meet more and more people from countries worldwide who care about their environment and the preservation of their natural wealth, and I think that if we can shift to a more intimate, integrative model of conservation, seeing people as the solution and not the problem, then we have the potential to do a great deal of good.

At the moment, the arrogance of those with the planetary wealth is one of the major stumbling blocks, as the West has little respect for the knowledge, vision, and passion of impoverished people in developing countries. Our sense of entitlement, and especially our sense of exceptionalism lead us to behave in racist ways and to act without learning how we can most effectively take action.

But this is gradually changing, and I think that we are learning to listen more than we used to.

Excerpt:

A group of flashmobbers took to the slopes in southeastern Kazakhstan on a crisp March morning this year to spell out a heartfelt SOS with their bodies.

In this case, SOS could have stood for “save our slopes:” the 70 activists who lay down in the snow to form the letters were protesting controversial plans to build a ski resort in an area of pristine natural beauty near the commercial capital, Almaty. Opponents were also calling attention to apparent conflicts of interest that surround the project and raise the potential for corruption.

The dispute over plans to develop the pristine slopes of Kok-Zhaylau (“green summer pasture” in Kazakh) pits the city government and powerful business interests against environmental activists and concerned citizens, who are fighting to preserve a beauty spot inside the Ile-Alatau national park. Despite the official designation, development in protected territory is legally possible in certain cases.

Supporters assert that the resort will attract tourists from as far afield as India and China, and with them a flood of investment and jobs. They say the project feeds into Kazakhstan’s strategy of promoting infrastructure projects and boosting the tourism sector to wean the economy off its current reliance on oil and gas exports.

“In 30-40 years the oil will finish, and mountain tourism could become the engine of Kazakhstan’s economy,” Bakitzhan Zhulamanov, head of Almaty City Hall’s Tourism Directorate, a driving force behind the project, argued at public hearings in January.

Opponents counter that development will damage the environment and threaten rare flora and fauna.

“What is the chief objective of national parks? To preserve biological diversity; preserve forests; preserve water resources; preserve unique types of Red Book flora and fauna which inhabit the territory of the national park?” asked Sergey Kuratov, head of the Green Salvation environmental group. “Or to develop mountain tourism, exhausting water resources; chopping down forests; annihilating rare fauna; destroying glaciers; ruining landscapes?”

The plans – which Kuratov argues contravene national law and international environmental commitments – are not finalised, but are well-advanced. A feasibility study has been conducted by two companies, Canada’s Ecosign Mountain Resort Planners (an international leader in ski resort design) and the Kok-Zhaylau firm, founded and owned by Almaty City Hall.

According to Ecosign’s website, if plans are approved, 77 ski slopes will be constructed stretching 63 kilometres, with 16 lifts capable of carrying 10,150 skiers at a time. In addition, hotels with a total of 5,736 beds will be built.

The resort is “intelligently planned according to the state-of-the-art international planning and development standards,” Ecosign says.

The goal is to attract a million visitors a year from within a four-hour flight radius of Almaty, spanning areas of India, China and Russia. Opponents argue this target is unrealistic. An influx would undoubtedly change the face of Kok-Zhaylau, whose unspoiled slopes are currently reached by most visitors via a steep three-hour hike.

Many opponents say they have no objections to building a new ski resort near Almaty (which already boasts several, including a popular spot at Shymbulak), but not inside a national park.

“We’re not trying to get rid of the plans for developing a ski resort, for developing the mountains, because […] we would also love our country to develop, but our position is that we call for all kinds of ski resorts to be placed out of the national park,” Nursultan Belkhojayev, a member of the Initiative Group of Kok-Zhaylau Protection (an unofficial body with no funding), told EurasiaNet.org.

Developers “are going to change the habitat of the endemic species” in the park, added group member Zhamilya Zhukenova. This includes the endangered snow leopard – a symbol of both Kazakhstan and the city of Almaty.

According to an open letter to President Nursultan Nazarbayev against the project signed by over 8,000 people, the area is home to 811 types of flora (including 17 listed as endangered by Kazakhstan) and 1,700 types of fauna.

Officials at Kazakhstan’s Environmental Protection Ministry told EurasiaNet.org it has no jurisdiction over Almaty’s municipal government. City Hall’s Tourism Directorate rejected environmental “misgivings” as “verbal assertions without the presentation of any proof,” it told EurasiaNet.org in a written response to a query about the issue. There will be solid environmental safeguards, it added, and international experience will be considered “to reduce to a minimum the impact on the environment.”

The Kok-Zhaylau firm said it was attentive to environmental concerns, but studies had shown that the area selected has the best climatic and geographical conditions for the resort. “We are hearing and listening to public misgivings,” it told EurasiaNet.org in writing. “This is a normal process – the exchange of opinions with society.”

The company said it was preparing to conduct environmental field research, “so at this point public misgivings about the resort’s negative impact on the environment are not supported by facts – the results of ecological studies.”

Zhulamanov has pledged that if research finds that the project will seriously damage the environment, it will be abandoned. He has promised to replant more trees than will be chopped down, and install webcams for real-time public monitoring of construction.

City Hall also is dismissive of concerns about the potential for corruption and cost-overruns, saying that the close scrutiny to which the project is subject guarantees transparency. There is big money involved: as currently envisioned, the state will invest 700 million dollars in infrastructure and seek 2.1 billion dollars in private investment.

Misgivings have also been voiced about potential conflicts of interest. According to a report published in the Alau monthly last September, Zhulamanov, the official propelling the project forward, is a long-time associate of Serzhan Zhumashev, the chairman of Capital Partners, which has built several major infrastructure projects around Almaty, including reconstructing the Shymbulak ski resort.

Capital Partners managing director Aleksandr Guzhavin stepped down to head the new Kok-Zhaylau company founded by City Hall.

Capital Partners did not respond to requests for comment, and in its written response city hall did not answer a question about potential conflicts of interest. The Kok-Zhaylau firm rejected the idea as unfounded in any “official information.”

*Editor’s note:  Joanna Lillis is a freelance writer who specialises in Central Asia.

This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Indigenous activists Ángel Durán from Bolivia and Bernardette Angus from Australia share their experiences in conservation at the WIN conference in Darwin. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
DARWIN, Australia , May 28 2013 (IPS)

“Are you a park ranger?” IPS asked. “No, I am one of the owners of the territory,” Ángel Durán responded in a firm voice. The Bolivian indigenous leader is in this northern Australian city along with 1,200 other native delegates from over 50 countries for the World Indigenous Network (WIN) conference.

Durán, who was born in and lives on a collectively-owned native territory, is attending the conference in representation of eight native groups from Bolivia’s Amazon region that total more than 20,000 people.

Although he is not on the programme as an official speaker and can only communicate in Spanish, this is not stopping him from sharing his knowledge and experiences with other indigenous leaders walking from one auditorium to another at WIN headquarters in Darwin, the capital city of Australia’s Northern Territory.

The meeting, supported by the Australian government, runs May 26-29, with presentations of successful projects for the preservation of ecosystems and biodiversity, the sustainable use of protected natural areas, and the development and food security of indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia, Latin America and other countries like Canada or Australia itself.

On Monday, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous Peoples James Anaya stressed the importance of governments recognising international instruments that protect the basic rights of native people.

Melissa George from Australia told IPS that the conference was a major contribution by the Australian government and a form of recognition that indigenous people were the first to use their knowledge to protect the territory.

George, who belongs to the Wulgurukaba aboriginal tribe, added however that there was still much to be done.

The activist has dedicated 20 years – nearly half her life – to developing projects for administering natural resources in aboriginal territories. She is now co-chair of the WIN National Advisory Group.

The international network of indigenous and local community land and sea managers recently became an official part of the United Nations after the government of Australia handed over its management to the Equator Initiative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The initiative brings together the United Nations, governments, civil society, businesses and grassroots organisations to advance local sustainable development solutions and support the work of indigenous people around the world by means of capacity-building.

Eileen de Ravin, manager of the Equator Initiative, told IPS that this concerted effort opens up enormous possibilities for people from a South American country like Bolivia to learn directly what is happening in Canada or Australia.

“Our goal is to influence the governments to get them to respect and listen to these valuable experiences and solutions,” de Ravin said.

The Equator Initiative awards a prize every two years, recognising 25 outstanding local sustainable development projects. In the past decade, 152 indigenous community organisations, of 2,500 that have been nominated, have won the prize.

One of the presentations at the WIN conference was on the conservation of protected areas by indigenous and local communities in Canada, Australia, Sweden and Brazil by means of indigenous forest rangers, park rangers or environmental agents.

“The name doesn’t matter, the objective is the same: to make use of traditional knowledge to protect nature and culture from the different threats,” Brazilian activist Osvaldo Barassi with the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) told IPS.

ACT’s annual indigenous park ranger training programme provides conservation and land monitoring capacity-building to native communities, including the use of tools like GPS tracking technology.

Since 2005, the Brazilian organisation has trained 190 people from 30 native ethnic groups in forest management and conservation, which has enabled the communities to develop projects to monitor illegal logging in order to protect the local flora and fauna.

But in spite of the contribution made by the indigenous forest rangers trained by ACT, they receive no payment from the government for their work.

That is in contrast to Australia’s indigenous land stewardship programme, which has created Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs) in more than 50 locales on traditional aboriginal lands over the last 15 years, covering a total of 43 million hectares.

Bernardette Angus, a park ranger from Western Australia, told IPS that it is indigenous people who have been caring for the plants and animals and protecting the land and the sea since a long time ago, and who are teaching young people to continue doing so when the current generation is gone.

In Bolivia, the federation of indigenous peoples from north of La Paz, led by Durán, are seeking to go one step further in their conservation efforts, and have asked the government of Evo Morales – the country’s first-ever native president – to legally recognise the “guardians” of community-owned indigenous land to enable them to levy penalties on those who invade their land and make illegal use of their natural resources.

Durán, who belongs to the Leko de Apolo indigenous community, said no government plan aimed at protecting biodiversity could leave out the communities. “Not even scientific knowledge can compare to the ancestral know-how of the local people. We take care (of nature) because it is our way of life,” he told IPS.

But while Barassi recognised the importance of indigenous knowledge, he warned that it was not always a guarantee in and of itself of the successful management of natural resources. For that, capacity-building is key, the ACT activist stated.

Participants at the conference agreed on the need to join forces to maximise results in the face of threats from illegal activities, large-scale private investment projects, or the effects of climate change.

“I never imagined that the forests could disappear, but it is happening,” said Joao Evangelista, a Brazilian park ranger who was unable to travel to Darwin, but sent a videotaped message presented by Barassi to an audience keen on cutting the distances between them.

“That’s why capacity-building is important; it’s a form of liberation for us, and of preparing ourselves to confront outside threats,” he said.

Biodiversity activists with UNEP's Achim Steiner and Pavan Sukhdev. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
HYDERABAD, India, Oct 18 2012 (IPS)

With negotiations to mobilise resources for preservation of biodiversity at a major United Nations conference going nowhere, the Group of 77 and China have hinted at  possible suspension of the ‘Aichi targets’  under the Nagoya Protocol.

Algeria, current G 77 chair, stressed in a statement at the 11^th Conference of Parties (COP 11) to the CBD, underway in this south Indian city, that developing countries had made significant commitments at COP 10 in Nagoya, Japan, on the expectation that financial resources would be forthcoming to meet the Aichi targets.

The Algerian statement hinted that unless COP 11 – which ends Friday after almost two weeks of fruitless negotiations – addresses the issue of resource mobilisation the gains at Nagoya would be negated and the momentum towards realising the Aichi targets lost.

G 77, a loose coalition of 77 developing countries, now expanded to 132, was founded in 1964 to promote the collective economic interests of members and create joint negotiating capacity at the U.N.

At stake now are the 20 Aichi targets aimed at halving the rate of loss of natural habitats, conserving 17 percent  terrestrial and inland water areas, 10 percent of marine and coastal areas, restoration of biodiversity by up to 15 percent with countries implementing national biodiversity strategies and action plans by 2015.

Resource mobilisation has been the most contentious area of negotiations at Hyderabad. Developing countries, home to rich biological diversity, are now doubtful that the promise of increasing financial resource flows from developed to developing countries by 2015 will materialise.

Developed countries are firm that a baseline is necessary to determine the sum that is already being spent and that needs to be increased. But developing countries are pushing for commitments on interim figures.

Experts say funding from diverse international and national sources, and across different policy areas, is required to secure the full range of economic and social benefits to be gained from meeting the Aichi targets.  

Public funding and private sector investment (still under debate),  innovative measures, incentives such as payments for ecosystem services, conservation agreements including with local communities, water fees, forest carbon offsets, and green fiscal policies are among possible sources.

A high-level ‘Global Assessment of Resources for Implementing the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020’, sponsored by Britain and India and released at the COP 11, informs that addressing the drivers of biodiversity loss and ecosystem restoration, over the 2013 – 2020 period could cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

“Whilst there are some big numbers in this report, our panel found that the greatest resource needs are around reducing the direct drivers of biodiversity loss – those which occur throughout our economies and societies,” said Pavan Sukhdev, an economist and goodwill ambassador of U.N. Environment Programme at the COP.

Sukhdev who is also chair of the Global Assessment of Resources (GAR) report said if the direct drivers of biodiversity are addressed, they will “deliver benefits, far beyond biodiversity, to human health, livelihoods, and sustainable development.”

Sukhdev said research is needed to “fully assess cross-benefits cutting across many areas” and noted that the “drivers that destroy biodiversity are multifarious, climate change being one of them.”

India, in a show of commitment to cutting biodiversity loss, had Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pledging 50 million dollars at COP 11 to strengthen technical, institutional and human capacity building in India, and to also help other developing countries.

India is one of the six countries, out of the 193 members of the CBD, to have ratified the Nagoya Protocol.

Clarity on how much funds would be necessary to globally implement the Aichi targets is yet to emerge at COP 11 with experts reluctant to quote numbers.

“It may be good not to look at numbers. The roadmap to achieving the Aichi targets is important. Setting interim targets would be more practical; we do not till now even know the entirety of biodiversity,” said M.F. Farooqui, a key official in India’s ministry of environment and forests.

“Two-thirds of the proposed outlay for the Aichi targets is in the form of investment. But in initial stages, estimates like this can only be approximations,” Sukhdev told IPS.

“Funding for biodiversity should not be seen as costs but as investment for future global well being,” Braulio Ferreira De Souza Dias, executive secretary of the CBD, commented while speaking with IPS.

The other view among experts is that more than financial investment, policy change is important for saving biodiversity.

“It is not true that funds will flow from the North to the South. This may be the catalyst but nationally designed policies will make all the difference,” said Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, a senior environmentalist from Costa Rica associated with the GAR report.

“Costa Rica tripled per capita income and doubled forest cover by investing in institutional transformation,” Rodriguez said. “The same policies that caused the problem in the first place cannot continue. There is an urgent need to understand the need for appropriate policy development.”

“Conservation of biodiversity also depends on redefining the relationship between economic progress, environmental sustainability and social equity,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme.

Steinem was satisfied that countries were increasing their investments in biodiversity. “This is not an issue of one moment or nothing… resource mobilisation is supposed to be for accelerating these efforts.”

Farooqui said India is currently spending two billion dollars, directly and indirectly on biodiversity conservation, including tiger protection areas that concurrently conserve nature’s chain down to microbes.

“Large developing countries like India and Brazil are already investing enormously in preserving biodiversity,” André Aranha Correa do Lago, a senior official at Brazil’s ministry of external relations, told IPS.

“Other than the larger developing countries, there are those that need additional resources. I cannot imagine that developed countries do not take this into consideration,” Lago said. “India and Brazil too can do more if there are additional resources.”

“It (funding by developed nations) is not charity, it is a compelling rationale,” said Steinem. “You cannot leave Hyderabad without numbers.”

Elephants in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are in danger of being culled. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
PORT BLAIR, India, Oct 5 2012 (IPS)

Midway through Wildlife Week in India, celebrations have been marred by news that 29.8 kilogrammes of ivory, worth 336,800 dollars, had been seized on the Andaman Trunk Road.

“Chances are that the feral elephants in Northern Andamans fell prey to poachers,” Denis Giles, editor of the Andaman Chronicle in Port Blair, told IPS.

Though they are a highly protected species under India’s Wildlife Protection Act, elephants on the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands (ANI), which lie at the juncture of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, are deprived of all protection, reflecting a serious lack of political will for wildlife conservation.

Now, spotted deer introduced by the British as a source of protein in the Islanders’ diet, and feral elephants introduced for logging, are in danger of being culled because they are considered an ‘invasive species’.

The issue has generated hot debate across the country, with scientists, conservationists and researchers deeply divided over how to tackle the problem.

Chief Wildlife Warden for the Forest Department, Dr. Shashikumar, told IPS, “There is no credible estimate of the size of the cheetal (spotted deer) population on the Islands. Today, about 86 of the 130 elephants that were shipped to the Islands for logging are domesticated and are mainly in the custody of the Forest Department and Corporation.”

When logging stopped, 40 of the elephants were abandoned by their captors on Interview Island, located 925 kilometres south-east of Kolkata, and 10 elephants were dumped in the jungles of North Andamans, 20 nautical miles southwest of the Myanmar Coco Islands.

According to a recent study by the Foundation for Ecological Research, Advocacy and Learning (FERAL), a Pondicherry-based NGO, “The presence of introduced herbivores has led to the local disappearance of a few species and is likely to affect species richness over large parts of the island chain, if not controlled.”

“Forest Department sources have maintained that cheetal are causing habitat damage. However, the type of damage being caused and the likely consequences on the forest (ecosystem) have not been quantified,” according to the FERAL study.

This argument that invasive creatures are decimating the fragile island ecosystem has found support among people like Dr. K. Sivakumar, scientist in Endangered Species Management at the Wildlife Institute of India in Dehradun, who told IPS, “It is neither recommended nor feasible to introduce any kind of birth control programmes for cheetal in the Andamans. Elimination is the only option.”

He also dismissed the idea of relocating the deer, claiming they are far too sensitive to survive capture and relocation.

On the other hand, “Trying a birth control programme for elephants, as they are a smaller population, is recommended,” Sivakumar explained.

“Animal welfare advisors must also offer solutions. No budgets are made available for removal of cheetal in a humane manner, or for that matter feral dogs in the Andamans, which threaten to wipe out endangered species,” Bittu Sahgal, editor of the Sanctuary Asia Magazine in Mumbai, told IPS.

Culling sets dangerous precedents: elephants and cheetal are both listed as endangered animals under the Wildlife Protection Act (WPA) of 1972; they enjoy legal protection from hunting in most parts of India.

But Shashikumar explained to IPS that WPA regulations do not protect ‘invasive species’ in the Islands, and cheetal are often hunted by the local communities. “As and when hunting cases are detected action has been taken,” he said, adding that poachers exploit the lax laws, wantonly killing deer.

The lack of legal protection for elephants on the Islands possibly explains the cache of ivory seized in the Andamans earlier this week.

“The Wildlife (Protection) Act does not include the term ‘culling’. Only the Federal Government has the power to declare a wild animal ‘vermin’ for a specified area, through a notification valid for a specified period only,” said Praveen Bhargav, a Wildlife First trustee.

Conservationists around India are strongly against culling.

“Culling is the most disgusting and detrimental way to contain wild animals. (Instead), the elephants can be brought back to the mainland as soon as rescue centres are put up. The deer should be left in place. It is easy to introduce some form of birth control or see which predators were native to the islands before being wiped out,” wildlife activist and Member of Parliament, Maneka Gandhi, told IPS in New Delhi.

“Although expensive, given the small population of elephants it is logistically feasible to capture and translocate elephants to the mainland but there might be a certain level of injury during translocation,” said Sivakumar.

Humans must account for introducing species, and ensure their survival. If it was possible to ship the animals to the Islands in the first place, then shipping them back should be logically plausible, conservationists argue.

(END)

Excerpt:

A man stands in front of a giant cut-out of the Spoon-billed Sandpiper, of which only 100 breeding pairs survive. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
JEJU, South Korea, Sep 15 2012 (IPS)

The Red River Giant softshell turtle (Rafetus swinhoei) is the stuff of legend in Vietnam. The fabled turtle in Hanoi’s Hoan Kiem Lake is popularly known by the name Kim Qui or Golden Turtle God, and it made its first historical appearance in 250 BC.

Today this species could indeed use some divine intervention. Experts at the World Conservation Congress here in South Korea’s southern resort island of Jeju warned that there are only four specimens of the famous turtle known to be alive. And only two have any realistic hope of breeding, said Professor Jonathan Baillie, director of conservation at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).

At the Congress, which ended Saturday, the ZSL and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) released a list of the 100 most threatened species in the world and called for concerted action to save those unfortunate enough to make it on to the list, like the Red River Giant turtle.

The report, titled “Priceless or Worthless?”, says that all breeding efforts to produce hatchlings of the Red River Giant have failed since 2008. “We have to get the last ones together to breed,” Baillie put it starkly.

The Red River Giant is probably the most famous species on the list that includes such obscure species as the Liben Lark (Heteromirafra sidamoensis) from Ethiopia, of which less than 300 survive, or the Javan Rhino (Rhinoceros sondaicus), considered the rarest of all living rhinos. A Javan Rhino horn goes for as much as 30,000 dollars on the black market, it is that rare.

Or take the case of the Suicide Palm (Tahina spectabilis), found in northwestern Madagascar. Only discovered in 2007, it is probably a good thing that it can grow so large that individuals can be detected on satellite imagery, as only 90 known individual trees have been located. The tree’s name comes from the fact that it dies exhausted from the effort of producing so many flowers on a stem up to 16 feet long.

The list, which covers 48 countries, was developed by 8,000 scientists from the Species Survival Commission of the IUCN, which organised the 10-day Congress in Jeju.

But Baillie and the other authors fear that the species on the list will be lost because none of them offer any obvious benefit to humans.

Baillie told IPS that despite the global media’s focus on threatened species, half of the most threatened hardly get any attention. “This new report will challenge the way we look at conservation,” he said.

What scientists like Baillie and activists are hoping for is a paradigm shift in the traditional outlook on animal conservation – one that will look not at how useful the species are to humans but rather at whether they have a right to live and avoid extinction due to human exploitation.

But Baillie said he was not confident that the new report, and the renewed lobbying by the conservation community at this year’s IUCN Congress, would change the plight of the listed species.

The IUCN Congress brings together policy-makers and environmentalists every four years.

In 2004, a set of conservation targets were drafted, with a six-year timeframe. In 2010, a fresh set of targets and commitments were inked, as the 2004 targets had not been met. This recent conservation record is the cause of Baillie’s unease.

“I am not overly optimistic. But if the conservation community starts to really put out a strong message, that these species are absolutely essential, that we must value life – this would have much broader implications,” he said.

He also said that if one or two species with no obvious use for humans were allowed to simply disappear without any action taken, it would set a dangerous precedent.

There is no lack of public pronouncements by decision-makers about their commitment to conservation. But the same enthusiasm is not apparent when translating such rhetoric into action on the ground.

“Few politicians will say they don’t value life, (it is) just that we have not followed through with the legislation,” Baillie said.

But other conservation experts told IPS that even legislation did not help when community will to save a species is lacking.

“Very often we can get the legislation in place, but then it is not enforced,” Jane Smart, the director of the IUCN Global Species Programme, told IPS. She said the only thing that changes after laws are passed is that exploitation continues at the same rate, albeit illegally.

There are other conditions as well that can drive species to extinction, which cannot be deterred by simply putting laws in place. IUCN Red List Unit Manager Craig Hilton Taylor told IPS that disease, changing climates or shrinking habitats can all lead to extinction.

“You need to asses what threats are driving the species to extinction before you can decide on the action to be taken,” he said.

So far what is known is daunting in itself: 21 percent of all known mammals, 29 percent of amphibians, 12 percent of birds, 35 percent of conifers and cycads, 17 percent of sharks and 27 percent of reef-building corals are threatened with extinction, according to the IUCN.

But Smart warned that the figures only reflect part of the story. “We know what to do for many species. But there are many, many we don’t know what to do about,” she said.

What the conservation community wants are firm commitments from governments that they will take action on what is known.

“We know what we have to do. What we need is for decision-makers to find the political will to make it happen,” Smart said.

For Baillie, it is a simple question of life and death. “If we value the right to life, then we have to step up to the plate,” he said.

Mandera North, in Kenya’s North Eastern province has also been the scene of recent conflict over water. Credit: Protus Onyango/IPS

By Protus Onyango
NAIROBI, Sep 11 2012 (IPS)

Water scarcity is fuelling deadly inter-ethnic wars that continue to claim lives in Kenya, according to government officials. And if nothing is done to educate communities on how to conserve the valuable resource, the situation will escalate, governance experts and environmentalists warn.

On Sunday, Sep. 9, 38 people were killed in revenge attacks in the Tana River Delta district of Kenya’s Coast province. The deceased include eight children, five women, 16 men, and nine police officers.

The incident occurred as the government announced it would conduct a disarmament exercise in the Tana River Delta following clashes over water and pasture that have left more than 80 people dead.

Coast province police boss Aggrey Adoli told IPS that about 500 raiders from the Pokomo ethnic group attacked the Kilelengwani village, in Tana River Delta, and torched a police camp and several other structures at dawn. On Monday, Sep. 10 the area was inaccessible and police officers were flown in by helicopter to quell the violence.

“This was in retaliation to Thursday’s incident in which 13 Pokomos were killed when raiders from the Orma (ethnic group) struck the Tarassa village in the area,” Adoli said.

The attacks are in retaliation to an Aug. 22 incident over water and resources that resulted in the death of 52 people, including 11 children and 31 women. The attack occurred after cattle owned by the Orma ethnic group strayed onto farmlands belonging to the neighbouring Pokomo community and destroyed their crops. Both communities have a long history of conflict over resources.

But conflict over resources is not confined to this region. Also on Aug. 22, four people were killed in a separate incident in Muradellow village in Mandera North, in North Eastern province. Police said that the conflict occurred at a water point where herders had taken their animals.

In March, 22 people were killed in Mandera, in North Eastern. More than 1,500 people fled their homes as a result of the violence, which occurred in El Golicha village, close to Kenya’s border with Somalia.

North Eastern provincial officer Ernest Munyi, who is also the region’s assistant commissioner of police, told IPS that the attacks were becoming more frequent.

“Clan attacks are common in the region, which has now been witnessing clashes every month since February. The attacks were often sporadic, targeting members of other clans but usually arise from resource competition.

“These are nomadic pastoralists who depend on livestock for survival. They rustle livestock and fight over water and the few grazing fields,” he said.

Political leaders, human rights activists and environmentalists are calling on the government to address the problem urgently.

Mwalimu Mati, the chief executive of Mars Group, an NGO that deals with governance, told IPS that the government must provide equitable resources to end the clashes.

“Resource conflict will be with us for a long (time) because the government policies that promote timber harvesting have resulted in deforestation,” said Mati, who is also a lawyer. Scanty forest cover has resulted in the reduced rainfall here, according to water experts.

Peter Mangich, the director of water services at the Ministry of Water and Irrigation, told IPS that due to the effects of climate change, the country now only received one quarter of its previous rainfall.

“The average annual rainfall is 630 millimeters, which should be four times this figure to be enough. The National Development Plan 2002 to 2008 recognises Kenya as a water-scarce country where the water demand exceeds renewable freshwater sources,” he said.

“Our depleting natural water resources, due to inadequate rainfall and scanty forest cover that stands at three percent, are the problem. The country’s water basins do not reach an equitable area of the country,” he said.

And it is the reason for the increased conflict, according to Dr. Bernard Rop, a former Commissioner of Mines, a geologist and environmentalist.

“As a result of the skewed water distribution between the country’s water basins and within the basins, water use conflicts arise out of demand of water for irrigation, livestock, wildlife and environmental conservation,” Rop told IPS.

“There have been clashes over water and grazing fields in most parts of North Eastern, Turkana, Samburu and Pokot in the Rift Valley and the Coast regions for the last 10 years, resulting in the death of 400 people and the theft of 10,000 livestock,” he said.

Mati pointed out that conflict over resources would spread to other parts of the country that were not water scarce.

“Conflict will not only be in dry areas. Climate change is real and even countries that share the River Nile are quarrelling over it. Let the government adopt other means to solve this problem,” he said.

Mati explained the need for water had resulted in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Sudan calling for the revocation of a 1959 treaty, brokered by the United Kingdom, that gave Egypt, and to a lesser extent Sudan, historical rights to the river’s resources.

Rop said that Kenya had water readily available, it just had to be tapped. “This country produces 290 megawatts of geothermal energy, the leading in Africa. It has a lot of underground water. If this water is tapped and distributed to the affected areas, conflict will end,” he said.

Mangich said that the government is addressing the problem.

“Since last year, we have partnered with NGOs like World Vision to sink boreholes in the affected areas so that residents can have enough water for their livestock and domestic use. We also encourage them to use the water to grow vegetables and maize to complement livestock keeping,” he said.

But Mati said that nomadic pastoralists should be encouraged to engage in other economic activities that are more vialable and suggested that the government encourage urbanisation.

“This will allow many people to live in towns that have social amenities and to farm on land as a group, not as individuals,” he said.

Kenya’s Minister of Educatoin Mutula Kilonzo told IPS that the government needed to implement existing policies regarding access to water.

“The new constitution has very good policies to cater for the dry regions by sinking boreholes and promoting irrigation. Let us implement laws that deal with agriculture and the clashes will end,” he said.

Jeju Island is home to multiple UNESCO World Heritage sites and other environmental and cultural special status designations. Credit: oshokim/CC By 2.0

By Jon Letman
KAUAI, Hawaii, Aug 10 2012 (IPS)

As construction of a hotly contested naval base on South Korea’s Jeju Island advances, there’s a showdown underway.

Korean groups, increasingly aided by sympathetic outsiders, are protesting the base which they say is being built in Gangjeong village under pressure from the United States.

But the latest battle isn’t between base protestors and Korea’s military or police, it’s between the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and those opposing its upcoming Sep. 6-15 World Conservation Congress (WCC) at Jungmon resort, seven km from Gangjeong.

Jeju, home to multiple UNESCO World Heritage sites and numerous other environmental and cultural special status designations (see side bar), is taking on new strategic importance as regional military powers and the United States, which maintains dozens of military bases in South Korea, Japan and Okinawa, vie for dominance in northeast Asia.

The naval base at Gangjeong, which Seoul said will also have civilian uses, is expected to accommodate submarines and up to 20 warships, including U.S. Aegis-equipped destroyers which opponents say will make the island less safe, not more.

For five years, Gangjeong has been the site of daily protests and frequent arrests. Now, just weeks before the Congress is to begin, conservationists, academics and NGOs are challenging the IUCN.

In mid-July 55 Korean environmental and civic groups sent a memo to the IUCN asking it to clarify its position on at least half a dozen environmental issues including the naval base while strongly criticising the decision to hold the Congress on Jeju.

A second group, Jeju Emergency Action Committee, submitted an open letter to the IUCN calling for the postponement or relocation of the Congress unless base construction is halted.

One of the authors of that letter is Jerry Mander, founder and co-chair of the International Forum on Globalization. He said the South Korean government’s support for the base, next door to the event, defies the IUCN’s historical purpose. He contends the IUCN is being “nice” about the base just to act like “grateful guests”.

“I think the IUCN’s willingness to praise its financial sponsors while, next door, the sponsors undermine the entire purpose of the IUCN is unforgivable,” Mander told IPS.

The IUCN has confirmed that Samsung C&T and Hyundai are among sponsors helping the South Korean government offset the cost of hosting the Congress. Critics are quick to note that Samsung is the lead contractor at the base and Hyundai Heavy Industries is working with Lockheed Martin to produce the Aegis Combat System to be deployed on U.S. warships at the Jeju naval base.

Opponents say holding the WCC so close to the site of the disputed development and its associated protests, arrests and a police crackdown on groups fighting to protect the environment is in direct conflict with the IUCN’s stated aim to “improve how we manage our natural environment for human, social and economic development”.

In a written statement responding to criticism, IUCN director general Julia Marton-Lefèvre said: “Unfortunately, no country has a totally unblemished record on the environment…The Jeju Congress will bring together thousands of dedicated conservations from all over the world to debate, discuss, share and vote on our most pressing environmental problems and their solutions.”

In an interview on Korean television, Marton-Lefèvre explained that IUCN’s vision is “a just world that values and conserves nature” with a mission to “influence society based on good science to conserve nature and natural resources in an equitable and sustainable manner”.

Speaking to IPS from Switzerland, IUCN director of communications John Kidd said, “IUCN is not a campaigning organisation like Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. We’re a membership organisation that exists to promote scientific research and facts and to bring different groups in society together.”

Kidd said it’s important that the WCC, which is held every four years, remains on Jeju.

“We want (the base) issue, with all the people involved, to be discussed at the Congress…in a very open, pragmatic, structured way.” To postpone or relocate the Congress, Kidd said, would not be good for people affected by the Gangjeong base or other environmental issues in Korea.

“Part of the benefit of the Congress is that (as) a movement to be more sustainable and environmentally conscious, (it) spills over to the place where the Congress is held. We’ve seen that going back decades,” Kidd said.

With between 8,000-10,000 attendees (about half from IUCN member organisations) at the quadrennial gathering, Kidd said the Congress provides an important venue to discuss the Gangjeong base and other issues.

“We’re very confident there will be a proper, open dialogue between the two main parties at the Congress (South Korean government and NGOs, specifically the Gangjeong village association) regarding the base.”

Kidd continues, “We’d like people to learn the background to these issues… and to look at both sides and the facts behind the issues, versus the politics…. We hope that delegates will go visit the site of the naval base…We’d like people to look at these also in view of similar issues in their own countries and regions.”

Sung-Hee Choi, who has been actively protesting in Gangjeong since 2009, told IPS she also wants IUCN members to see the culture and environment whose existence she said is threatened by the base.

Choi, who was photographed lying on the ground to block a bulldozer with her own body, argues Jeju is not only ecologically and culturally sensitive, but filled with spiritually important sites.

Another protestor, Jung-Min Choi from Seoul, has been arrested three times in Gangjeong. She told IPS that even if the IUCN doesn’t postpone its meeting, she wants it to include a statement about the impact of the base in its final resolution.

The theme for this year’s World Conservation Congress is ‘Nature+’ which the IUCN said is “about boosting the resilience of nature – improving how quickly nature and people adapt to change”.

As construction of the naval base in Gangjeong continues to alter the human and natural landscape of Jeju, many fear nature’s resilience is no match for the military and they’re pleading for help.

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Aug 8 2012 (IPS)

Humanity is living beyond its means with the growing demand for food, medicines and other nature-based products, making sustainable consumption and conservation a matter of life and death. This is according to the world’s oldest and largest global environmental network, the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

International Union for Conservation of Nature director general Julia Marton-Lefèvre says that a sustainable future cannot be achieved without conserving biological diversity. Courtesy: Laurent Villerent

The IUCN says that despite prioritising attempts to halt the global extinction of plant and animal species, the battle is far from being won.

“We need to do more conservation – which works – and scale it up, and at the same time we need to change our production and consumption habits to make them more sustainable,” IUCN director general Julia Marton-Lefèvre told IPS from Switzerland.

On the eve of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Brazil, in June, the IUCN released its latest update of the Red List of Threatened Species.

The Red List – a global barometer of the health of global biodiversity – indicated that of 63,837 species assessed, 19,817 are threatened with extinction. Freshwater ecosystems are particularly under pressure from the growing human population and exploitation of water resources. In addition, unsustainable fishing practices and the destruction of their habitat through pollution and the building of dams threaten freshwater fish.

According to the IUCN, a quarter of the world’s inland fisheries are on the African continent and 27 percent of freshwater fish in Africa are threatened, including the tilapia (Oreochromis karongae), an important food source in Lake Malawi that has been overfished.

Twenty seven percent of freshwater fish in Africa are threatened, including the tilapia (Oreochromis karongae), an important food source in Lake Malawi that has been overfished. Credit: Claire Ngozo/IPS

Marton-Lefèvre told IPS reporter Busani Bafana, ahead of the IUCN’s World Congress to be held in Jeju, South Korea Sept. 6 to 15, that a sustainable future cannot be achieved without conserving biological diversity.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Q: In its 2020 Strategic Plan for biodiversity, the IUCN has drawn up a number of targets, and target 12 aims that by 2020 the extinction of known threatened species would have been prevented and their conservation status, particularly of those most in decline, improved and sustained. Are you on target with this strategic plan to halt extinction?

A:  Unfortunately, at the moment the answer is “no”. That is why we have made this target our top priority at IUCN. That is not to say that we haven’t got inspiring examples of conservation success. For example, through our SOS or Save Our Species initiative, IUCN and partners have already helped conserve close to 100 threatened species in over 30 countries. We know that conservation works, but we need significantly greater resources if we are to reverse the current extinction crisis.

Q: In the light of the latest Red List report in June 2012, which shows that a large number of species are threatened with extinction, would you say we have reached a tipping point?

A: Indeed, the latest update of the IUCN Red List paints a bleak picture: one in three corals, one in four mammals and two out of five amphibians are at risk of extinction.

Moreover, a recent ground-breaking study found that we have overshot three out of nine of the so-called “planetary boundaries” that define a “safe operating space” for humanity, including biodiversity loss.

Today we are dangerously close to reaching such “points of no return”, but it is very difficult to predict precisely when a tipping point is reached until it actually happens. For instance, the collapse of the north Atlantic cod fishery happened back in the 1970s but its impacts are felt even today.

Q: What needs to change? Our consumption habits or our conservation efforts?

A: We certainly need both. We need to do more conservation – which works – and scale it up, and at the same time we need to change our production and consumption habits to make them more sustainable.

Consumer demand for nature-based products – for food, medicine, clothing – has emerged as a major threat for many species that had not been affected by habitat loss or climate change thus far. Nature simply cannot keep up with our insatiable appetite for everything from raw materials to live animals – and we need to change that.

Q: Do you think there is now greater political will to halt the extinction of species than, say, 20 years ago?

A: Twenty years ago, at the Rio Earth Summit (United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development), world leaders signed the Convention on Biological Diversity into existence. Today it is one of the most widely ratified global treaties. It is difficult to compare the level of commitment then and now, but one thing is for sure: the political will that is required today is much greater because of the magnitude of the problem.

Q: How has the work of the IUCN and its partners made an impact?

A: For many years, the answer to the central question of the impact of global conservation action has been both anecdotal and elusive. Thanks to the efforts of IUCN, its Species Survival Commission, and our more than 1,200 members around the world, we now have solid evidence that without targeted conservation efforts, the loss of biodiversity as measured by the Red List Index would be almost 20 percent worse.

Q: What challenges remain?

A: The biggest challenge now is getting everyone to understand what is at stake: that nature is not a luxury but the very foundation of our own wellbeing on this planet. We also need to strengthen political will to take the necessary action. As I’ve said before, the situation is quite critical, and our Congress will look at several of these challenges.

Excerpt:

It took six years for a dedicated team of scientists from the Wildlife Institute of India, wildlife officials from six Indian states and officials from the federal ministry to secure international protection for one of India’s most precious biological reserves.

India’s Western Ghats mountain range is the birthplace of 62 rivers. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

Finally, earlier this month, the United Nations’ Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) granted World Heritage Site status to India’s Western Ghats, which many believe to be the crown jewel of India’s biodiversity reserves.

The mountain range, which geologists estimate to be more than 150 million years old – older even than the Himalayas – runs along the country’s western coast and is the thought to be the last vestige of all representative ecosystems in the subcontinent.

Hosting six different types of forest ecosystems, including thick wet evergreen rainforests, moist deciduous forests, pine forests, grasslands and Sholas, or valley forests, the site is home to the largest floral and faunal diversity in the world.

More than 62 rivers originate in the Western Ghats, serving the water needs of at least 74.85 million people around the Indian Ocean rim in 28 countries.

The forests here are also crucial catchment areas for monsoon rains. The mountain range runs parallel to India’s west coast for a distance of nearly 1,600 kilometres, averaging a height of 1,200 metres above sea level. Hardly anywhere else in the world is there a more conducive rainfall laboratory occurring so naturally. Small wonder, then, that 17 countries in Asia supported India’s nomination of the Western Ghats for World Heritage Site protection.

Grasslands that flank the valley forests harbour rare wildlife like king cobras, Malabar pit vipers, cobras, kraits and pythons. At least 508 species of birds, 156 species of reptiles, 334 species of butterflies, 120 species of mammals, 121 species of amphibians and 218 species of fish are endemic to the Ghats.

The cloud-kissed mountains harbour more than 4000 species of endemic flora; a single cave in the Kudremukh forest sprouts three rivers – the Tunga, Bhadra and Netravati.

A total of 39 sites are earmarked for UNESCO inscription, effectively protecting their fragile conservation status with solid international monitoring.

“The 39 sites cover an area of some 8000 square kilometres, or roughly five percent of the 140,000 square kilometres of the Western Ghats,” Dr. V.B. Mathur, the dean of the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), told IPS.

The Ghats also contains one elephant reserve, 11 tiger reserves, 12 wildlife sanctuaries, seven national parks, eight reserved forests, four eco-sensitive ranges, and two wildlife-dense forest divisions.

Better protection, less development?

Conservationists who have long lamented the weakness of environmental protection and conservation laws in India were quick to praise UNESCO’s decision.

But the move is now facing stiff opposition from political leaders and businessmen, whose plans for anthropocentric development of the reserve will effectively be thwarted.

In the past, mine pits have been “excluded” from the environmental mandate, allowing mining to continue in enclosures where conservation laws were effectively rendered defunct.

With international observation it will no longer be possible to manipulate conservation laws to allow activities like mining, dam construction, hydel power projects or highway construction.

The governments of Karnataka and Kerala in particular are strongly against additional protection of the mountain range, with the Karnataka Legislative Assembly going so far as to adopt a resolution to oppose the UNESCO tag, while local politicians in both states insist that existing laws are adequate to safeguard the biodiversity hotspot.

“Conservation of the Ghats should come from concern within rather than attention from the outside,” Dr. K.N. Ganeshiah of the University of Agricultural Sciences told IPS. “The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel set up by the federal Ministry of Environment and Forests has done a far more meaningful job of advising what we need to do and those recommendations are more inclusive and elaborate than what the World Heritage tag can offer,” he stressed.

He is not alone in his trepidation. The Ghats’ rich terrain and sprawling river systems make ideal real estate for development projects involving hydel power and mining. The forest minister of Karnataka bemoaned the fact that “even development of eco tourism will be affected” by UNESCO’s strict conservation standards.

International monitoring required

That it took an Indian Supreme Court ruling to halt construction of the seventh dam across the Kalinadi River that meanders through virgin jungle in the Western Ghats speaks volumes about the appalling lack of political will for conservation.

Similarly, it was the Supreme Court that put a halt to iron ore mining in the Kudremukh forest in 2000, tipping the scales against economic profits in favour of long-term protection of the fragile ecosystem, which contains the largest valley in all of Asia and is home to the endemic rainforest species Poeciloneuron indicum.

If not for a Supreme Court verdict in 1996, mining in the Dandeli Anshi Tiger Reserve in the Western Ghats would never have ceased.

Such interventions have repeatedly vindicated conservationists’ calls for international monitoring of the site.

Experts argue that the presence of at least 50 dams in the mountain range also shed light on government indifference to conservation.

Manoj Kumar, a forest officer in the Dandeli Anshi Tiger Reserve, explained that apart from eating up large swathes of forest, dams also block wild animals’ migration paths. “This could lead to inbreeding, which results in local extinction of some species,” he said.

UNESCO protection crucial for tigers

The mountain range is also a sanctuary for a slowly growing tiger population, though the endangered animals are far from being entirely safe.

Signs of increasing tiger presence have prompted calls for notification of the Kudremukh forests as a tiger reserve. A future Kudremukh Tiger Reserve could create a corridor for wildlife migrating from the nearby Bhadra Tiger Reserve.

According to a 2010 study by the WII, the Western Ghats hosts almost a third of the tigers in India. “Around 534 (tigers currently live here), (indicating) a rise of about 32 percent since 2006,” the report stated.

A previous report by the WII identified one corridor in the Western Ghats, the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve, as one of the potentially sustainable landscapes for long term in situ tiger conservation.

Apart from tigers, other carnivores in these thick jungles include leopards, black panthers and the Indian wild dog. Rare and endangered wildlife include the lion-tailed macaque and fresh water otters and dolphins.

A black-coated feline in the Anamalai Tiger Reserve is yet to be identified by the scientific community. However, tribals and communities dwelling in the forest fringes have established that a black skinned carnivore, distinct from the Black Panther, has roamed the forests for centuries.

(END)

A grieving Michael Kusolo and his wife Mary lost all their four children in the recent landslides. They are sitting on a spot where they suspect their children were buried by the mudslide. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

By Wambi Michael
BUDUDA, Uganda, Jul 4 2012 (IPS)

The Ugandan government says it will forcibly remove people settling on the steep slopes of Mount Elgon in eastern Uganda’s Bududa District, as the growing population has resulted in increased landslides in recent years.

In the latest one on Jun. 25, an estimated 100 people are feared dead and up to 250 have been unaccounted for when three villages were washed away after heavy rainfall in the area.

Over the last three years, landslides have buried alive several hundred people living on the slopes of Mount Elgon.

In March 2010, 365 people were killed in Bududa District during a landslide. However, prior to that there were fewer fatalities in the area. In 1997, 48 people were killed in a landslide.

But the increasing number of fatalities resulting from the landslides has not stopped people from settling here. Mount Elgon, according to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, has the country’s highest population density of 1,000 people per square kilometre with a population growth rate of 3.4 percent per annum.

Many locals have been hesitant to move to low-lying areas as some say that the soil is very fertile for farming, while others claim cultural and historical attachments to the mountain.

However, Dr. Steven Malinga, Uganda’s Disaster Preparedness Minister, told IPS that the government is now determined to enact a law to allow it to evict all those living on dangerous parts of the mountain slope in order to resettle them elsewhere.

“This place has been one of the most risky areas as far as landslides are concerned. And they are getting more frequent and severe. So a special committee of cabinet has been formed. The committee will go round the mountain sensitising people on voluntary relocation,” Malinga told IPS.

The recent landslide has left a huge hollow in the mountain the size of 10 football pitches. A mound of soil mixed with eucalyptus trees, banana suckers and wrinkled iron sheets that once were part of people’s houses stands at the bottom of the mountain. Buried underneath it are human bodies and cattle carcasses.

Malinga said if people did not want to move voluntarily for their own safety, the government would use force.

“If they do not move we shall have no option but to forcefully evacuate them. We shall use our security forces, if necessary, to have those people moved,” he said.

He added that the country’s current constitution did not allow the government to forcefully evict communities, even if they were in danger.

“That is why we need another law to allow for the forceful evacuation of people living in danger. Otherwise they will claim their rights are being violated,” he said.

Over 600 people were relocated to government-owned land in Uganda’s Midwestern district of Kiryandongo after the March 2010 landslides. However, Malinga said many had returned.

“That kind of thing should not be happening. We have got to teach our people that these are risky areas,” he said.

He added that the government would aid those who could not afford to buy land elsewhere.

The Mount Elgon area conservation manager Adonia Bintora told IPS that although landslides have occurred in Bududa District since the early 1900s, they are likely to become more frequent and deadly as the population increases.

Bintora told IPS that the population growth has exerted more pressure on the land and natural vegetation leaving the soil denuded and therefore vulnerable to landslides.

“So if the hills are stripped of vegetation, the soil gets saturated with rain water and therefore it easily caves in,” said Bintora.

Dr. Mary Goretti Kitutu, an environment information systems specialist with Uganda’s National Environment Management Authority, has extensively researched landslide occurrences in Bududa District and their causes.

She explained that overpopulation in the area has exerted pressure on the clay-rich soils as residents clear hillside forests for firewood and farming.

“And when there are no trees with complex roots to hold the soil in place after constant rain, then you end up with landslides. The moment trees are cleared, water becomes the only downward driving force, and you will end up with land slides,” she said.

Apart from felling trees and extensively tilling the land, Kitutu told IPS that the practice by cutting into slopes for the construction of houses and roads has triggered slope failure.

When IPS visited the affected areas, it was easy to observe houses constructed on excavated slopes. The backs of the houses are situated next to high walls of mud that could easily cave in.

“The cutting of slopes removes the lateral support of the slope leading to slope failure,” said Kitutu.

Scientists have also said that Mount Elgon has developed a 40-kilometre crack with a width of between 30 to 35 centimetres. Bintora told IPS that the crack could affect up to three million people living on Kenyan and Ugandan sides of Mount Elgon.

Moving may be the only option to save the community here from further devastation. But some locals are resistant to the idea.

Gabriel Buyela, who lives just across the hill from the area where latest landslides occurred, told IPS that he would only move to a low lying area in the district if government provided him with land. But he added that he could not abandon his ancestral home.

Zaina Namono lost a relative in the landslide but said she and her family were hesitant to move.

“The government relocated our people to Kiyrandongo after the March 2010 landslides but we have heard that they are suffering and going without food. We cannot accept to be subjected to the same,” she said.

Though some who have lost everything say they will relocate.

A grieving Michael Kusolo and his wife Mary lost all their four children in the recent landslides. Kusolo told IPS that he had no alternative but to move because everything he had was now destroyed.

“Even all the land is gone; the graves of my father, my mother and brothers were swept away. So I will move,” he said.

Baka from Ngoyla, near Cameroon’s Nki National Park, hold up a map of the forest. The dark red areas are those they have been restricted from entering which are of social, economic and cultural interest to them. Credit: Ngala Killian Chimtom/IPS

By Ngala Killian Chimtom
YAOUNDE, Jun 28 2012 (IPS)

As Lysette Mendum listens to the sound of bulldozers crashing through the forest clearing a road to a mining site near her small village of Assoumdele in the Ngoyla-Mintom forest block in Cameroon’s East Region, she has never been more fearful in her life.

The forest block is 943,000 hectares of relatively intact forest that straddles part of eastern and southern Cameroon. And it is Mendum’s home.

But all the indigenous Baka widow thinks about when she hears the bulldozers is how uncertain the future is for her three kids. The indigenous Baka, historically called pygmies, are an ethnic group of about 35,000 people who have traditionally lived within the forests of southeastern Cameroon.

But now they have been displaced from their traditional homes in the government’s bid to develop this West African nation into an emerging economy.

“The government of Cameroon and some white people moved us out of the heart of the Ngoyla-Mintom forest block and resettled us in this village in the precinct of it. Now we go into the depths of the forest in the day and return in the evening. We are not allowed in there at night,” Mendum told IPS.

As logging and mining companies are granted concessions to large portions of the country’s forests, environmental agencies have expressed concern about the situation.

Of Cameroon’s 22.5 million hectares of forest area, 17.5 million or roughly 78 percent are classified as productive forests and are being allocated to logging companies, according to statistics from the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife (MINFOF).

Out of the 17.5 million hectares of productive forests, the government has already granted logging concessions for 7.5 million hectares. In the Ngoyla sub-district where Mendum lives, an Australian iron ore exploration and development company has been granted mining rights.

A source at the MINFOF told IPS that a modest 20 percent of the 17.5 million hectares of productive forests has been classified as wildlife reserves, which include national parks, game reserves, botanical and zoological gardens, sanctuaries and hunting zones.

“Government has been dishing out logging and mining permits since the early 2000s to various companies in an effort to generate wealth and become an emergent economy by 2035. But this has had the effect of depriving the Baka Pygmies of access to the forests they have always considered their natural home,” David John Hoyle, director of conservation at the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), told IPS.

This is because the 1994 Wildlife, Forestry and Fishery law prohibits human settlement inside protected areas, which include areas marked for logging and national parks. The law also restricts access to these areas.

So from 2000, the government began moving the Baka out of the productive forests and attempted to integrate them into society.

Mfou’ou Mfou’ou, the director of conservation at the MINFOF, told IPS that the government was working with its partners to ensure that the forests are managed in a sustainable manner.

“This means also protecting the rights of the Baka,” he said.

He said his ministry signed a 1.7-million-dollar accord with the Ministry of Social Affairs to enable it to implement best practices in the socio-cultural and economic integration of the Baka into mainstream society. But it has been against their will.

“The Baka have been living in the forests of southern Cameroon for thousands of years, and they have lived in total harmony with the forest,” Hoyle said.

For the Baka, it has been a devastating exclusion from their traditional land and its resources.

“At first we thought our people would benefit from all these companies coming here, but all we got at the end was an interdict asking us not to go into some parts of the forest near the Boumba Bek National Park,” said Ernest Adjima, president of Sanguia Bo Buma Dkode, a Baka association, which translated from the original Bakola means “One Heart”.

Samuel Naah Ndobe, coordinator of the Cameroonian Centre for the Environment and Development, told IPS that the government now wants to settle the Baka on agricultural land along the country’s main roads.

“But the Baka have to burrow the forest for game … and agricultural lands along the main roads are generally considered to belong to the dominant Bantu tribes. So when the Baka come out of the forest to settle here, the Bantus simply tell them ‘You don’t have land here, this is ours.'”

But now when they return to the forests they are treated like unwelcome visitors.

“We can’t help being afraid because everyday strangers come to us preaching a new gospel of mining. And as the days go by, we see systematic restrictions on our rights,” Mendum told IPS.

Naah Ndobe said that when the Baka attempt to access the forests, game rangers and conservators routinely evict them.

“With no land to call their own, these first settlers are now very vulnerable. They no longer have rights to the land which they have enjoyed and considered home for centuries,” he told IPS.

Government’s user rights policy for the forests has also sidelined the Baka.

The policy allows the Baka the right to retrieve non-timber products from the forests like medicinal herbs, wild fruits, tubers, honey, and game for personal consumption. But the Baka have not been allowed to sell any of the items they collect from the forest.

“The Baka can only hunt game for family consumption, for instance. So they cannot sell the game to send their children to school,” Naah Ndobe said.

Now, there is a deep sense of defiance among the Baka and an urgency to share in the resources of their traditional land.

“If they come for us we shall not run away, we shall wait for them to come and kill us here because we rely on this forest for our basic needs,” Mendum told IPS.

But they are not struggling alone.

In 2000, the WWF began its Jengi Southeast Forest Programme, which aims to negotiate access rights for the Baka into protected forest areas, among other things.

Hoyle said progress has been made, with some logging companies committing to protect the forests.

“WWF has been assisting logging companies that have embraced Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification standards and, along with the Baka, mapped out areas of social, economic and cultural interest to the Baka within logging concessions with guarantees that they can harvest wild tubers, honey and medicinal plants and carry out fishing in such areas,” Hoyle told IPS.

The FSC is a non-governmental organisation established to promote the responsible management of the world’s forests.

He also said a memorandum of understanding has been reached with the government to guarantee the Baka access to the Boumba Bek National Park. It not only enables the Baka to gather food, it also allows them to perform their traditional Jengi rites, which usually take place at night. Jengi is the Baka god or spirit of the forest.

Mfou’ou said that while efforts are being made to guarantee the Baka access rights to national parks, social infrastructure like schools and health centres are also being constructed.

However, Naah Ndobe said it was urgent that Cameroon develop more specific support structures and policies to cater for the rights of the Baka.

In Antigua, these boats now sail through a channel, behind where they are docked, where coral once thrived. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
ST. JOHN'S, Antigua, May 23 2012 (IPS)

Eli Fuller is a third-generation Antiguan who, for the past two decades, has been exploring the Antigua and Barbuda coastline. But he laments the fact that he can no longer see the coral that he recalls were somewhat of an underwater jungle when he was a young boy, akin to what you’d see in the Amazon rain forest.

Eli Fuller, a marine environmentalist and third-generation Antiguan who remembers when coral reefs once resembled underwater jungles. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

“Nobody ever thought – I didn’t think – the corals would be dead in my lifetime,” Fuller, a marine environmentalist, told IPS.

“When I was a child, no sailboat would ever sail through certain areas, but nowadays yachts are sailing through all of these channels because the reef is…dead, gone. They’re broken up.”

Scientists say warmer seas and a record hurricane season in 2005 devastated more than half of the coral reefs in the Caribbean. The World Conservation Union (WCU) warned in a report that this severe damage to reefs would probably become a regular event, given predictions of rising global temperatures due to climate change.

Fuller said Caribbean countries could do several things to help damaged coral reefs rejuvenate, including designating certain places as marine protected areas.

A protected area is a specific region of land or water legally protected from specific human activities because of its ecological, archaeological or other type of value. A marine protected area may be declared, for instance, to safeguard its fish stocks, reefs, wreckages, breeding sanctuaries and the like.

In Belize, marine protected areas where fishing was forbidden rejuvenated much more quickly than did unprotected reefs in Jamaica after suffering similar hurricane damage, Fuller said.

When a coral gets damaged, algae naturally grow on it, he explained. Then, parrotfish and other herbivorous fish like blue tang eat the algae.

In Belize’s marine protected areas, “there are millions of parrotfish. The hurricanes came, destroyed the coals, algae grew up and the fish just ate it all and slowly the coral starts growing back.”

Protected areas, in name only

Fuller said while technically there are marine protected areas dictated by the Antigua and Barbuda Fisheries Act, in reality, there is no real protection.

As a result, “you have large scale overfishing of key species…important to keep(ing) the reefs healthy,” he said. A ban on hunting parrotfish and blue tang would help corals recover much more quickly from hurricanes, but as Fuller pointed out, parrotfish are easy to shoot with a spear gun, “and a lot of local people love parrotfish”.

“If there is one fish in Antigua I’d say you have to protect, it’s the parrotfish, but the Fisheries Department exports it,” Fuller added.

Apart from Belize, other examples of successful, zoned marine protected areas exist in the Caribbean.

In Antigua, the absence of barrier reefs forces developers to use boulders to protect against groundswells coming ashore. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

The 6,600 hectares Tobago Cays Marine Park in St. Vincent and the Grenadines is divided into nine different zones. Included are specifications for mooring different sized vessels and for turtle and seabird reserves. The protected area offers great economic benefits to the population and is a valued part of its social, cultural and environmental landscape.

Soufriere Marine Management Area in St. Lucia, encompassing 11 kilometres of coastline, is divided into five zones. Conflicts between different types of users and declining near-shore catches led to the reserve’s creation.

Many marine protected areas, including Tobago Cays, prohibit fishing, thus allowing sea life in the area to grow and reproduce unimpeded.

Studies have also shown that such no-fish areas help “replenish” fish stocks in other areas, with increased catch sizes and larger individual fish. No-fish zones also protect other sea life that might otherwise inadvertently be caught in nets.

The fishing conundrum

Vince Best, environmental scientist and lecturer at the Antigua State College, told IPS that coral bleaching provides direct evidence of the effects of climate change on reef ecosystems. Scientists speculate that coral bleaching will become an annual event by approximately 2020.

“Another detrimental effect of global climate change,” Best noted, will be the increase in carbon dioxide in oceans that will increase the acidity of ocean water, therefore “reducing the solubility of other compounds…needed by corals in reef-building.”

To this end, he said, administrations in Antigua and Barbuda, as well as other nations with this unique source of life, need to do more to protect their coral reefs.

“Many of the administrations in affected nations have concentrated on economic growth, primarily with little regard to the damage caused to the very resources which allow for said economic growth,” Best said.

For example, “in the Caribbean, we are highly reliant on tourism as the mainstay of our particular economies, yet coral reefs are one of the many resources which attract tourists to our shores.”

And while actual estimates of the direct economic value of coral reefs to Antigua and Barbuda are difficult to obtain, established research has estimated that the communities located in coastal areas, as well as national economies in the general Caribbean region, are likely to sustain substantial economic losses should the current trends in coral reef degradation and destruction continue.

It has been estimated that fisheries associated with coral reef in the Caribbean region are responsible for generating net annual revenues, which have been valued at or above approximately 837 million East Caribbean dollars, or about 310 million U.S. dollars.

Continued degradation of the region’s few remaining coral reefs would diminish these net annual revenues by an estimated 95-140 million U.S. dollars annually by 2015. The subsequent decrease in dive tourism could also profoundly affect annual net tourism revenues.

Meanwhile, one of the Caribbean’s main sources of income is simultaneously causing some of the worst damage to reefs.

“Fishing has historically been recognized as a given to the growth of the Caribbean economy,” Best said. It not only serves as a source of food for the region, but as part of the export market, it also contributes millions of dollars to regional economies.

In the Caribbean, Best said, fisheries are an unregulated “free access resource”. Yet “the location and distribution of the fish are highly predictable,” he added.

While all hope is not lost, Best pointed out that tremendous damage has already been done to reef systems in the Caribbean, and in some cases, he said, damage is so severe that many of the reefs are beyond repair.

But he said there are a number of inexpensive and practical measures, which can be taken to ameliorate the physical status of reefs in the Caribbean. One initiative, the Reefs at Risk project, suggests several possible actions.

They include “the establishment of better management practices to encourage sustainable fisheries, to protect reefs from direct damage, and to integrate the sometimes conflicting approaches to management in the watersheds and adjacent waters around coral reefs”.

“Fundamental to supporting these actions is wider involvement of the public and stakeholders in the management process, as well as an improved level of understanding of the importance of coral reefs,” he added.

(END)