After reading Ecology and Equity by Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, a hard-hitting eye-opener on human-nature interactions, I went on a reading spree of nature-themed novels. Soon, I was in a picturesque town in the Himalayan foothills with my old friend Rusty, and his childhood friends—I was reading The Hidden Pool by Ruskin Bond. It was his first book for children, published way back in 1966. I then proceeded to read all of Bond’s books. Reading them again now as an adult, I found myself being pulled back to reality, rather than being drawn into a different world and living among the characters between the pages. Bond’s stories continue to resonate with current happenings, such as floods in many parts of India, COP26, the coal crisis, and conflicts with wildlife.
The Hidden Pool is a refreshing read. The simple writing is warm and welcoming. Laurie (aka Rusty) is an English boy who comes to a small hill station in northern India with his parents. There, he befriends Anil, a local boy, and Kamal, an orphan who sells odds and ends, hoping to attend college one day. While traipsing through the forest, Laurie comes across a “deep round pool of apple-green water”, replenished by a small waterfall. They name it “Laurie’s pool”, and decide to keep it a secret, known to no one but the animals in the jungle. The hidden pool becomes the cornerstone of their friendship, despite their many other adventures, where they come across beautiful birds, brazen bears, and charming villagers, listen to frightening folklore, and trek up the Pindari glacier.
But soon, it is time for Laurie to leave for London with his parents. The boys promise to meet at the pool when they are older. After a month, Kamal writes Laurie a letter saying, “The stream has changed its course and gone another way, and the bed of our stream was dry. There was no pool, only sand and rocks”. Anil muses that since the pool was Laurie’s discovery, it had disappeared after he left. He believes that the stream would start flowing again once he returns.
Thus, The Hidden Pool ends with a twinge of bittersweet hope. But before I closed the book, I had a nagging doubt which made me flip through the pages to the first chapter. There, it was mentioned in passing and enclosed in parentheses, that Laurie had come to India as his “father had taken a job with a new hydroelectric project”. Was this a hidden message that the hydroelectric project that Laurie’s father had worked on was responsible for Laurie’s pool running dry? After all, the hydel project’s completion, Laurie’s family’s departure, and the hidden pool’s disappearance coincide.
Today, this reminds the reader of the disputed hydel power projects in the Himalayas, seven of which were given the go-ahead in October despite protests. As reported by The Hindu, “The Uttarakhand Government has for decades, envisaged hydroelectric projects as the way forward to power the State, premised on the region’s undulating topography.” The floods in Uttarakhand in February this year killed at least 200 people, and ironically, damaged two hydel projects. Over five decades have passed since this short novel by Ruskin Bond was published. How much more time must pass before we realise that hydel projects are ravaging the Himalayas, the consequences of which range from the loss of a rendezvous point for fictional friends to a slew of human-made natural disasters in the real world?
Speaking of floods, of which the world saw more than 200 during the pandemic, Angry River, published in 1972, is another Bond classic. The story revolves around Sita, a young girl who lives with her grandparents on a tiny river island. Her grandfather is a skilful fisherman, and Sita makes delicious fish curry. Their life is one of subsistence, and all three of them are illiterate. Her mother is long dead, and her father has gone to work in a factory in a faraway city. These snippets of information very subtly tell a story of their own: the lack of access to education in remote, rural areas and the increasing volume of internal migration (which is now projected to rise due to recurring natural disasters).
When Sita’s grandmother falls gravely ill, her grandfather decides to row her across the river to the hospital at Shahganj, leaving Sita alone on the island. He instructs Sita on what to do if the river rises, for although it was only mid-July, there had been an unexpected surplus in rainfall (by comparison, 2021 saw a monsoon deficit in July, followed by a surplus). Sita notices the water level rising steadily. She sees people’s belongings and dead cattle being carried away by the muddy river. Although the story has a mythological flavour to it, it is extremely touching and relevant. Sita receives no official warning, and despite living in a precarious region, her family is not evacuated. She survives only because of her resourcefulness and a little timely help. But had she been alive today under the same conditions, she could easily have been one of the nearly 7000 people killed in floods in the last three years.
Ruskin Bond’s writing transports us into the lives of ordinary people, and explores their livelihoods and interactions with nature. If Angry River assumes a wet and rainy setting, Dust on the Mountain is a story of dryness and drudgery. “Winter came and went, without so much as a drizzle. The hillside was brown all summer and the fields were bare.” Here again, the protagonist is a child, a 12-year-old boy called Bisnu. He lives with his mother and sister, and tends to their small plot of land. The plundering of the hills and their ecology is shown deftly through their eyes. Trees are cut by the hundreds, and man-made forest fires leave the mountains scarred. Quarrying is rampant. When the monsoon fails and food becomes scarce, Bisnu goes to Mussoorie to find a job. He sees destruction in the name of development throughout his bus journey there. An old man strikes up a conversation with Bisnu and says between his coughing fits, “Rich men from the cities come here and buy up what they want—land, trees, people!”
Bisnu starts working at a tea shop in Mussoorie. When the holiday season dies down, he is again on the lookout for a job. He is employed as a cleaner by a truck driver. The truck had been deployed to carry limestone rocks from the quarries to the depot. Since this story is thrilling, I will refrain from dropping spoilers. But here is one line: “It’s better to grow things on the land than to blast things out of it.” It ends on a note of hope and course correction but not before highlighting the serious consequences of environmental degradation. Even the old man’s racking cough could have been an occupational hazard of working at the quarries. Forest fires, internal migration, child labour, class conflict, and loss of biodiversity as well as livelihoods—all just relevant now—are beautifully depicted in Dust on the Mountain.
Ruskin Bond’s writing is evergreen, but the verdant places he has written about are not. Here is an excerpt from his poem, Dirge for Dehradun:
People in the Global North often envision big, charismatic mammals—like lions, rhinos, or elephants—only belonging to countries in the Global South, such as in parts of Africa. But if you stepped into a time machine set for 10,000 to 50,000 years ago—a blink of an eye, evolutionarily speaking—you would find these animals, and many more, in parts of Europe and North America. Traditional conservation typically chooses to look back only 500 years ago as a reference point for understanding where plants and animals belong—the same time period Western Europeans began colonising and documenting environments globally. But with our biodiversity crisis severely worsening, a global deep-time perspective broadens our understanding of where big mammals also naturally belong, opening opportunities for big mammal restoration far beyond just the Global South.
If we think about environmental restoration as a global effort, having big mammals belonging only to countries in the Global South holds ethical and political baggage. People living in these frequently poorer countries are expected to coexist and tolerate conflicts with big mammals in their own backyards, all while facing social and economic precarities that far exceed those of the Global North. The Global North does indeed send significant financial support to the Global South for conservation, restoration, and human-animal coexistence. Yet still, big mammal protection and restoration remains dangerously underfunded. All of this creates an unfair restoration burden that holds poorer countries ultimately responsible for large mammal populations. But this unfair burden—anchored in the idea that large mammal restoration can only happen in the Global South—is being rethought.
To explore the relationships between where big mammals were in the deep past to present day disparities between the Global North and South, Sophie Monsarrat and Jens-Christian Svenning from the Center for Biodiversity Dynamics in a Changing World, Aarhus University, created four maps of the globe. These maps show where large mammal restoration is distributed today compared to where this restoration burden would be if a reference point of 500, 6,000, or 10,000-50,000 years ago is used instead. They then overlaid these maps with three types of global data by country: financial abilities to support restoration; human development, such as education levels and life expectancy; and governance indicators, such as stability and corruption. Comparing these four maps gave them very interesting results. First, using a reference point of 500 years ago for where big mammals belong concentrates restoration for these animals in the Global South. Second, there is enormous potential for wealthier countries in the Global North to support big mammal restoration back home. According to Monsarrat, “on a global scale, there is an unfair restoration burden happening, and these maps show the hypocrisy taking place”.
Overall, Monsarrat and Svenning’s study tells us that where big mammal restoration happens is a consequence of what reference point in time is arbitrarily chosen, carrying with it ethical and political implications. Choosing a reference point of just 500 years ago removes responsibility from countries in the Global North and places a hefty restoration burden on countries in the Global South and the people who live there. The UN has called 2021–2030 the decade for ecosystem restoration, and one-sided responsibilities need addressing now for the decade’s success. In terms of big mammal restoration, wealthier countries in the Global North need to strengthen efforts in the Global South—and also take responsibility for restoring and rewilding big mammals in their own backyards. Anything less will only continue an unfair and unjust restoration burden.
Further Reading
Monsarrat, S. and J.-C. Svenning. 2021. Using recent baselines as benchmarks for megafauna restoration places an unfair burden on the Global South. Ecography. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecog.05795
Introduction to the Current Conservation special issue on African Conservation
Rapid social, technological and environmental change are reshaping conditions for human societies all around the world. Over the past two years, the COVID-19 pandemic has amplifed the pace of change with an unprecedented scope of disruption, and, in many cases, social trauma. For conservation today, the watchwords of our time are urgency, scale, and entrepreneurship. Conservation efforts need to creatively address enormous challenges on a large scale, if they are to step up to address the realities of the unfolding climate and biodiversity crises.
Nowhere are these realities more pressing than in sub-Saharan Africa. With by far the youngest and most rapidly growing human population, widespread economic poverty, and relatively young political systems with fragile democracies, African societies face an additional suite of challenges. And with economies and large rural populations that are heavily dependent on natural resources and healthy ecosystems, the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation are particularly pressing across this region. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, disease has become a more prominent direct and indirect threat to the conservation of great apes and other species that generate signifcant tourism revenue, and which supports conservation efforts on the ground.
This puts conservation in a critical position in relation to social, economic, and even political futures across Africa. It demands, as a recent paper published in Science by a leading group of African conservationists (and summarized in this issue of Current Conservation) puts it, “a paradigm shift toward sustainability, meeting peoples’ needs, and equity” in how conservation is conceptualized and pursued. It also makes the ‘old’ ways of doing conservation—top-down, centralized, focused on pristine nature and wilderness, and with a strong bias towards the biological sciences—increasingly anachronistic in a context where human livelihoods and land use practices have been intertwined with ecological systems for longer than anywhere else on earth.
In this context, new ideas and approaches to conservation are indeed fourishing across the region, creating new possibilities. Just as African countries have taken a vanguard role in pioneering new technologies and business models in felds such as telecommunications and fnancial services, the region is fostering pioneering conservation models and practices in felds such as human-wildlife confict mitigation, ecotourism, community-based conservation, protected area management, and One Health approaches.
This special issue of Current Conservation attempts to capture some of the new directions that are reshaping African conservation today. It features a range of perspectives that touch on many of the key themes and trends in conservation from across the region.
One highly innovative and entrepreneurial organization working to reshape African conservation is the African Leadership Group, helmed by its founder and CEO, Fred Swaniker (originally from Ghana). In establishing the School of Wildlife Conservation as part of the ALG network in Rwanda, and creating the Business of Conservation annual conference, Swaniker often talks of wanting to change conservation in the region from an ‘old social cause’ to an ‘engine of growth’ and development. Here, African Leadership University’s Director of Research, Susan Snyman, reports on the key findings of a major new study ALU has carried out over the past year on Africa’s ‘wildlife economy’, and how developing new economic opportunities tied to wildlife and wild landscapes are key to conservation efforts.
Relatedly, David Obura, a Kenyan marine scientist and leading global expert on coral reefs, recently led the authorship of a prominent article by a group of African conservationists in Science that provides an African perspective on global conservation models and targets. Calling for a greater focus on ‘shared landscapes’ that support people and biodiversity, Obura and colleagues ground the ambitions of the 2030 global conservation dialogue in African realities and priorities.
The special issue includes two perspectives on community management, indigenous knowledge and land use systems, human-wildlife co-existence, and locally led collaborations from East Africa: one on the Northern Tanzania Rangelands Initiative by Alphonce Mallya and one on the South Rift Valley of Kenya by Peter Tyrell, Peadar Brehony, and John Kamanga.
The Saharan and Sahelian region is often overlooked in conservation efforts, but some of the most notable efforts at rewilding and restoration of endemic wildlife, and development of locally suitable management systems, is taking place in countries such as Chad. John Newby, of the Sahara Conservation Fund, provides an overview of these efforts.
Building the capacity of African scientifc networks and institutions is important to the long-term effectiveness of conservation in the region. Inza Kone and colleagues describe how the African Primatologist Society is helping to build African leadership in conservation science and action. Lastly, the special issue showcases some of African conservation’s new voices and emerging leaders, who are driving change and innovation in their communities and their countries.
Conservation in Africa today continues to be strongly shaped by economic realities. For conservation to succeed, it needs to contribute to reducing poverty and uplifting the economic aspirations of a rapidly growing population with huge demand for employment and upward mobility. Conservation efforts also must face the reality that many wild species—particularly the region’s iconic large mammals—create real costs that are imposed on local people living alongside wildlife. Fortunately, Africa’s wildlife resources also have immense economic value and are one of Africa’s greatest actual and potential sources of competitive economic opportunity. This value is, however, poorly understood and largely not taken into consideration in decision-making, policy development or in practice.
59 percent of Africans live in rural areas and are heavily dependent on natural resources for subsistence and livelihoods. Local and national economies also rely heavily on natural resources, the sustainable use of which is crucial for ensuring economic resilience and a prosperous future. However, these resources are rapidly declining in the face of various, mostly human-induced threats, with serious implications for conservation, human welfare, and the wildlife economy. African countries must effectively manage their natural resources for them to deliver a sustainable fow of benefts, and to harness the value of wildlife for conservation in both protected areas, as well as on private and community lands.
State of the wildlife economy in Africa
The old adage ‘you can’t manage what you don’t measure’ applies equally to the value of wildlife. It was a key impetus for the African Leadership University to develop a State of the Wildlife Economy in Africa report. An understanding of the wildlife economy and the value of these activities to local, national, and regional economies is essential for encouraging greater investment in wildlife—the asset base of the wildlife economy—so that governments will see wildlife as a key strategic asset, as well as a key growth opportunity. The hope is that by encouraging a ‘growth mentality’ and identifying opportunities, governments, private sector, and all stakeholders will invest more in sustaining the region’s natural assets (i.e., in long-term conservation as a key pillar of Africa’s economic development).
For many years, the focus of the wildlife economy has been on ecotourism. However, COVID-19 and the catastrophic impacts of the pandemic on the ecotourism industry have starkly highlighted the need to diversify the wildlife economy, as well as ecotourism itself, to build resilience and reduce risk. Other important activities with scope for further growth include wildlife ranching, carbon credit projects, film and photography, wildlife estates, non-timber forest products, and fsheries. The report includes detailed information on all of the above aspects of the wildlife economy, as well as the potential challenges and opportunities related to each. Some of the key regional trends highlighted in the report are summarized below.
Key regional trends
Most African countries engage in a diversity of wildlife economy activities, at varying degrees of intensity and scale. Ecotourism is by far the largest activity in most countries, especially in eastern and southern Africa. Yet, despite its ubiquitous nature, detailed data on ecotourism was found to be inconsistent. Forest products are of widespread importance across the subcontinent. However, a large part of the market is informal and, therefore, not accounted for. There is also a signifcant amount of illegal trade and unsustainable use, especially charcoal, which remains the most important source of household energy in most African countries. At the same time, this extensive use highlights the high level of demand for forest products and the huge potential of legal market opportunities.
Wild meat is one of the most valuable forest products in Africa, after timber. Wild meat hunting is largely legal in central and western Africa—where consumption is more prevalent due to strong wild meat-eating cultures and traditions—although it is poorly regulated. Conversely, it is illegal or heavily restricted in many east and southern Africa countries, where wildlife has high tourism value. Wild meat hunting is a key driver of species decline across Africa and African countries need to improve monitoring and research related to it.
Trophy hunting is practiced in a number of countries, and in some, such as Cameroon, Namibia, and South Africa, comprises a large part of local and national economies. There is, however, a lack of comparable data related to hunting, most of which is outdated. And wildlife ranching is prevalent in southern Africa—Namibia, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe—because of enabling legal conditions and policies that provide secure private and, in some cases such as Namibia, communal user rights over wildlife. As a result of COVID-19, many other countries are looking at this as a key activity to diversify the wildlife economy—for example Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania.
The report found that the carbon market in Africa has great potential, in terms of the revenues that can be earned and as a means to support conservation, but it is largely untapped. This is due to a combination of policy and legal provisions—relating to property rights surrounding carbon and forests, which would give communities and the private sector rights and, therefore, incentives to engage in the carbon market—as well as a lack of awareness and/or understanding of the carbon market. Where communities have rights to beneft from carbon projects, it has been shown that there can be considerable positive fnancial impacts.
Finally, wildlife film and photography is underdeveloped in almost all countries. It should be seriously considered as a future opportunity for employment and revenue, both locally and nationally. The same holds for wildlife- or ‘ecoestates’, which can provide a mechanism for integrating housing development in natural landscapes in a way that conserves biodiversity, but also provides innovative fnancing for conservation of these landscapes through land purchases, rentals, levies, etc.
Examples and case studies
At a national level, the report includes many examples that highlight the positive impact of different policies and institutional arrangements for unlocking the potential of the wildlife economy. For example, in South Africa, the Game Theft Act (1991) provides certain ownership rights to landowners over wild animals held in adequately enclosed areas. This has provided incentives for a major shift in farming activities, with the sale of wild meat in South Africa now generating approximately USD 56 million annually.
In Rwanda, the Rwanda Development Board (RDB), which was established in 2008 out of a merger of eight government institutions, is a government institution with a mandate to accelerate the country’s economic development by being a ‘One Stop Centre’ for business and investments, and thus providing an enabling environment for the private sector to invest. The government of Rwanda also revised the investment law, in order to facilitate the growth of new sectors and attract new investments, by means of various incentives. The establishment of such a supportive, enabling environment is important for attracting investors in the wildlife economy.
In Namibia and Kenya, community conservancies have been supported and established on a large scale to create formal, legal mechanisms for communities to beneft from wildlife enterprises and uses. In Namibia, over 80 conservancies now generate over USD 10 million in annual revenue and income from tourism, hunting, and other natural resource uses. In Zambia, a new institutional framework for community forest management uses legislation to vest rights to forest products, including carbon, in community forest managers, thereby allowing communities to beneft from their forests in new and important ways.
Strengthening the wildlife economy
Some key recommendations in the report include the need to raise awareness and increase knowledge related to different wildlife economy activities. This is because many stakeholders, especially local communities, are not aware of alternatives or how and where they can get involved. The overall strengthening of policy, legal, and regulatory provisions governing natural resources—particularly property rights over wildlife, forest, and fsheries—is critical to unlocking the potential of the wildlife economy. There also needs to be an improvement in overall governance and the business environment, including institutional arrangements for beneft-sharing, to ensure greater inclusiveness and equity and to garner support from local communities. Essential to the long-term sustainability of wildlife and wildlife economies is investment by government, the private sector, and communities in the conservation of wildlife—the asset base of the wildlife economy.
The pandemic has highlighted the importance of collaboration and strategic partnerships at all levels, as well as the need for a government strategy to provide direction, guidance, and structural coordination to all stakeholders. The wildlife economy includes a diverse range of stakeholder groups across several sectors. Hence, strategic direction is important to avoid overlapping mandates, a lack of role clarity, and conflicting policies and actions.
In addition, broader diversifcation of wildlife economy activities and products is important in order to reduce risk, build resilience and engage more stakeholders, sharing benefts more widely. The establishment of systems and protocols for data collection and analysis for Africa, at all levels from the community to national, is also critical to promote data-driven decision-making going forward.
Ultimately, we need to change the narrative about wildlife to drive investment and conservation outcomes. Wildlife is a key strategic asset contributing to African development and livelihoods and we need to grow this asset and invest in it.
Further reading
Snyman, S., D. Sumba, F. Vorhies, E. Gitari, C. Enders, A. Ahenkan, A.F.K. Pambo et al. 2021. State of the Wildlife Economy in Africa. African Leadership University, School of Wildlife Conservation, Kigali, Rwanda.
Snyman, S., F. Nelson, D. Sumba, F. Vorhies, C. Enders. (2021). Roadmap for Africa’s Wildlife Economy. A summary of Snyman, S., D. Sumba, F. Vorhies, E. Gitari, C. Enders, A. Ahenkan, A.F.K. Pambo et al. 2021. State of the Wildlife Economy in Africa. African Leadership University, School of Wildlife Conservation, Kigali, Rwanda.
In 2021/2022, the Global Biodiversity Framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity will finally be adopted by the 198 member states at the Convention’s 15th Conference of Parties in China. A vast increase in effectiveness will be needed, compared to the last decade, to succeed in its ambitions. Conservation efforts have focused on the most intact natural locations, in Africa and across the globe, but tend to neglect the places where many people need it most—around their farms and homes. It is in these ‘shared spaces’, such as agricultural, fishing, and pastoralist systems, that a new paradigm is needed for conservation action, which is both nature-positive and people-centered.
In a recent article in Science, a group of African conservation leaders call for conservation to fully take on a human face. Legacies of inequitable impacts of protected areas on local and indigenous communities have made many countries in the Global South and varied communities distrustful of global conservation targets and initiatives, which they feel are thrust upon them and fail to address their local needs and contexts.
The ‘shared earth, shared ocean’ framework provides guidance for consolidating and upscaling existing conservation successes, through focusing on the local context. This framework will help put local communities in charge where they live, recognize their local conservation practices, and link their efforts and resource needs to national and global networks. For example, new recognition of ‘other effective area-based conservation measures’ as a complement to formal protected areas, will strengthen overall conservation efforts. This is in large part because of the legitimacy and commitment that full involvement of local people and institutions will bring to decision-making on conserving nature.
In many ‘shared spaces’, restoration of natural areas will be essential to both meet peoples’ needs and to reach new global conservation targets. In cities and intensively farmed areas, a smaller proportion of area under natural habitat may be all that is possible, focusing on values of green spaces to people in densely populated areas.
The study builds on a wide scientifc literature, both on conservation and meeting peoples’ needs, and mirrors the structure of the new Global Biodiversity Framework and its foundations in the Sustainable Development Goals. The authors describe three preconditions for success. First, the commitment of the full level of fnance and material support needed, from both public and private sources, to avoid the insufficient impact of conservation to date. Second, the unsustainable economic and societal production and consumption practices that have driven nature to its current state must be transformed to circular or zero impact models. Third, climate and other global changes are transforming the planet, and these need to be minimized to assure the local conservation commitments made under this framework will have the best chance of success into the future.
Original paper
Obura, D., Y. Katerere, M. Mayet, D. Kaelo, S. Msweli, K. Mather, J. Harris et al. 2021. Integrating biodiversity targets fromlocal to global levels. Science 373: 746–748, DOI: 10.1126/science.abh2234.
The wildlife of the Sahara and bordering Sahelian grasslands are some of the most threatened on Earth. Drought, desertifcation, habitat loss and, above all, over hunting, have reduced many species to the verge of extinction. Animals such as the addax (Addax nasomaculatus), dama gazelle (Nanger dama), and cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus hecki) have disappeared from over 95 percent of the territories where they were found earlier. One of the region’s most iconic species, the scimitar-horned oryx (Oryx dammah), became extinct in the wild in the 1980s, and several others are severely threatened over large parts of their range. This includes species such as the Barbary sheep (Ammotragus lervia), dorcas gazelle (Gazella dorcas), slender-horned gazelle (Gazella leptoceros), Cuvier’s gazelle (Gazella cuvieri), striped hyena (Hyaena hyaena), ostrich (Struthio camelus camelus), and Nubian (Neotis nuba) and Arabian (Ardeotisarabs) bustards.
Over much of the Sahel and Sahara the fate of these unique species is being played out against a dramatic backdrop of climate change, unsustainable land use, political instability, and armed insurgency. Despite this daunting situation, efforts led by the Sahara Conservation Fund (SCF) over the past 20 years have achieved important milestones, including putting Saharan conservation more frmly on the global conservation map. Working with diverse partners in Chad and Niger, efforts are underway to save the remaining wild populations of addax, dama and dorcas gazelles, to restore the scimitar-horned oryx, and to reinforce populations of the almost extinct addax.
Unlike many endangered species today, the oryx’s disappearance was largely due to overhunting rather than habitat loss. Up until the early 1960s, the species was still relatively common over much of its Sahelian range, from Mali in the west, through Niger and Chad, and into Sudan. Always a target species for traditional hunters, using dogs and horses to hunt them, the impact on population size was probably quite low and highly seasonal. As pastoral development opened up the hitherto waterless and largely uninhabited grasslands used by the oryx, the impact of traditional hunting increased, as did the number of all-terrain vehicles and modern firearms.
With virtually no protection or law enforcement, oryx numbers rapidly plummeted and by the end of the 1970s the species was confned to a couple of populations in eastern Niger and central Chad. At that time, the wild population almost certainly numbered less than 5000 individuals, with most of these in the Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim Game Reserve in central Chad. In 1979, civil war broke out in Chad, wiping out much of the larger desert wildlife in the Ouadi Rimé reserve and elsewhere. The last oryx was reportedly shot in Chad in the late 1980s. Fortunately, oryx held in captivity were quite numerous.
Today, although the oryx’s native grasslands of central Chad are impacted by serious overstocking of livestock, overgrazing and bushfres, wildlife still has access to large areas of suitable habitat. Recognising the opportunity and with encouraging support from regional governments, the Sahara Conservation Fund began collecting data to develop a plan to reintroduce the oryx from captive-bred sources into a suitable site. Meetings were held in 2010 and 2012 and the selected reintroduction site was the Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim reserve in Chad—the oryx’s previous stronghold.
Following a feasibility study carried out in 2015, March 2016 marked a major milestone for regional conservation efforts. 25 oryx bred in captivity were fown from Abu Dhabi to Chad to seed one of the world’s most ambitious reintroduction programmes. From this founding population, 218 oryx have been reintroduced into the wild to date and by mid-2021 these had grown to a free-roaming population of around 380 animals. There have been setbacks, including deaths from disease, calf predation, and possibly malnutrition during hard times, but the overall trend continues to be very positive.
Bringing back the addax
In the neighbouring Sahara, the addax population has been following an inexorable downward decline for many decades. Today, the entire remaining wild population of a few dozen animals is confned to the Tin Toumma desert of eastern Niger. Two decades ago, the addax population had stabilized at around 300–400 animals. But with the discovery of oil in eastern Niger and the fall of the Ghaddaf regime across the border in Libya, new threats to their survival emerged in the form of massive disturbance from oil exploration, an infux of arms and four-wheel drive vehicles from Libya, and uncontrollable poaching by the armed forces sent to protect the oil workers.
The extinction of a species, either locally or globally, is not simply the loss of a unique plant or animal amongst many others but often the disappearance of a key element in a complex local web of life. For species like the addax, it is also the loss of innate and learned behaviour that, in addition to physical and morphological adaptations, permit the animals to survive and thrive in one of the world’s most hostile environments. Reintroduction may be able to bring back similar animals biologically, but it can never replace the intrinsic knowledge and culture of the animals that lived, learned, and evolved in that place over countless generations. Preventing, at all costs, the extinction of wild populations of animals, however small their numbers, is essential.
Encouraged by the results of the efforts to restore the scimitar-horned oryx, the Government of Chad, the Environment Agency of Abu Dhabi, and the Sahara Conservation Fund decided to include the addax as part of their reintroduction programme. In 2020, the frst addax were released into the wild and today they total over 50 animals. Plans are also underway to supplement populations of the critically endangered dama gazelle, a magnifcent Sahelian species now reduced to four tiny, isolated populations in Chad and Niger. In association with African Parks Network, ostriches from southern Chad are also being reintroduced into the Ouadi Rimé and Ennedi reserves.
The need for long-term conservation
While the reintroduction of the scimitar-horned oryx, and more recently the addax, has posed a host of logistical challenges, the longer-term conservation of these species will depend on the successful management of the large arid landscapes in which they reside. Much has changed across the grasslands of the Sahel since the 1990s. Land that was largely unoccupied for most of the year is now dominated by livestock and the consequent impacts of competition for natural wet season waterholes, overgrazing and loss of preferred plant species, disturbance, bushfres, and the spread of cattle-borne diseases. In Chad, at least, hunting is under control for now, but could become a major problem should insecurity and civil unrest occur. Human activities apart, there is also the impact of habitat loss through long-term climate change and desertifcation. Coming to terms with this new paradigm is far more challenging than simply controlling poaching.
Created in 1969, the Réserve de faune de Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim allows the pursuit of traditional forms of resource use, including grazing, use of dead wood, and access to natural waterholes and wells. What this arrangement failed to recognize was the vast increase in the numbers of people, livestock, and wells. Other rules and regulations are also completely out of date, necessitating a major overhaul of the reserve’s decree and limits, not only to bring it up to date, but also to permit management of space and natural resources for the long-term beneft of both humans and wildlife.
While most of the local people in and around the vast Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim reserve are genuinely happy to see the return of the iconic and truly impressive addax and oryx, they currently have no real vested interest in their long-term conservation. Direct benefts are few and indirect ones—such as improved rangeland management, bushfre control, and the potential of future tourism development—are largely intangible. In the long term, improved rangeland management and the restoration of currently degraded grazing resources could be strong incentives.
To achieve long-lasting results in the social and environmental context of a largely mobile pastoral society requires not only working at a larger scale—the Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim reserve is twice the size of Belgium—but also in a way that truly incorporates social needs and priorities with those of conservation. The two are not incompatible, but even if they were, the realities of today dictate the pursuit of cooperation and cohabitation. Exclusion of the human element from landscapes so critical to the survival of people with virtually no viable alternatives is neither just nor practical. The promising growth in delegated management and private-public partnerships over the past decade is highlighting what can be achieved using new models of protected area administration. Thanks to support from the European Union, an experiment in management of the Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim reserve with full participation from the local population is underway. The development of an effective and sustainable conservation model in the region will hopefully emerge, beneftting the interests of both people and wildlife while providing a valuable example to other protected areas in the Sahara and the Sahel.
A rising generation of new African conservation leaders are creating innovative solutions to conservation challenges across the region. They are developing new people-centric organisations that will determine the future of the continent’s most critically important natural landscapes.
Daniel Sopia – As the CEO of the Maasai Mara Wildlife Conservancies Association (MMWCA), Sopia has been integral in the evolution of communityled conservation efforts in the Maasai Mara, one of Kenya’s most vital ecosystems. MMWCA is the umbrella body representing the landowners who have pulled together their individual parcels to form big, contiguous areas for wildlife and tourism now known as group conservancies, that protect the land surrounding the Maasai Mara National Reserve.
Paine Makko – Ujamaa Community Resource Team (UCRT) is Tanzania’s top land rights group that has helped secure more than one million hectares of community land, empowering communities to own, manage, and beneft from it. As the Executive Director, Paine combines her experience as a pastoralist and background in development to create solutions that work for both people and nature through UCRT.
Maxi Pia-Louis – Maxi is the Director of the Namibian Association of CBNRM Support Organisations (NACSO), and has greatly contributed to Namibia’s success in community conservation. She coordinates NACSO’s three thematic working groups and ensures collaboration and learning between its nine non-proft member organisations. She also facilitates communication and partnerships between NACSO, the government, and other partners.
Moreangels Mbizah – Moreangels is the Founder and Executive Director of Wildlife Conservation Action, Zimbabwe, an organisation that aims to build the capacity of local communities to protect and coexist with wildlife. A conservation biologist by training, Moreangels has worked in wildlife conservation for more than a decade, focusing on the preservation of large carnivores, such as lions and African wild dogs, as well as human-wildlife coexistence.
José Monteiro – Jose is an experienced Forest Ecologist skilled in land-use practices and management, including natural resources governance for development. His particular area of focus is communities living in rural Mozambique. As the Coordinator, José has played a critical role in facilitating the establishment of the Community Based Natural Resources Management Network in Mozambique (R-GCRN), aiming to empower communities to build robust governance systems to improve their decision-making over land use and management of their natural resources.
Tiana Andriamanana – Tiana is the Executive Director of Fanamby, an organisation that works across a portfolio of half a dozen protected areas spanning more than 500,000 hectares of Madagascar’s diverse forests and ecosystems. Madagascar is one of the most critical countries globally, with most of its plants, mammals, and reptiles found nowhere else on earth. Tiana’s experience in business engagement has shaped her approach to natural capital management in Madagascar.
Thandiwe Mweetwa – Thandiwe Mweetwa is a Project Manager at Zambia Carnivore Programme. She is a globally-renowned ecologist and educator whose work focuses on carnivore conservation on human-impacted landscapes in eastern Zambia. Thandiwe is a champion of community-centric conservation, including finding innovative and sustainable ways to promote human-lion coexistence.
Sam Shaba – Honeyguide works to develop ecologically viable and fnancially sustainable Wildlife Management Areas in Tanzania. They accomplish this by advancing the business side of community conservation. As a Program Manager, Sam is integral to Honeyguide’s leadership, helping steer the team’s strategy, including inventive thinking in how technology and businesses can support conservation outcomes.
Natural history documentaries set in East Africa’s iconic savannah landscapes abound with enchanting scenes of wildlife and wilderness. But something critical is generally missing from this archetypal savannah scene: people and their livestock living alongside wildlife. This idea of wilderness, a wild place without people, doesn’t not exist.
Conventional conservation thinking—in Africa and around much of the world—tends to hold that livestock ruin the land through overgrazing and are bad for the planet. Cattle release greenhouse gases and large swathes of the Amazon forest have been cleared for ranching. There have been harrowing stories of livestock invading national parks and herders spearing lions and elephants. But in East Africa’s rangelands, wildlife is found in areas that have been created by pastoralists and managed principally for livestock. Maintaining livestock and finding solutions to the challenges faced by livestock herders can also help us to conserve wildlife. Here’s how.
Going beyond protected areas
Partitioning off vast protected areas from people and their livestock has been the mainstay of conservation practice for over a century. Protected areas now cover at least 15 percent of Earth’s land surface. And at the recent World Conservation Congress in September 2021, members of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature approved a motion to protect at least 30 percent of land and ocean by 2030. However, many conservation researchers and practitioners believe that continually expanding protection by creating spaces that are devoid of people is impractical and misguided. Instead, habitat conservation should value rural people, and include them, their land and livelihoods within conservation projects that span entire landscapes. Indeed, despite increases in the area designated as protected in countries like Kenya and Tanzania, wildlife populations are still declining, and much of the remaining wildlife and biodiversity are found outside of protected areas.
In this vein, research from a number of rangeland scholars shows that sustainable livestock rearing can help conserve the world’s remaining rangelands, which make up an incredible 40 percent of the world’s land area. Rangelands are defined by low and erratic rainfall, yet they host large herds of migratory animals, like bison and wildebeest. But in places like the North American prairie and the savannas of East Africa, most animals are domestic livestock, who also extensively graze these areas. These livestock are cultural and economic centrepieces of these landscapes and must be at the heart of any conservation solution.
In East Africa today, conservation is largely focused on finding ways to ensure that extensive rangelands, including savannah ecosystems, remain intact and deliver value for people, their livestock, and wildlife, who move widely across the boundaries of different protected and unprotected areas.
Threats to livestock are threats to wildlife
Understanding the ecology of rangelands in East Africa is crucial if we wish to protect the wildlife living there and foster more effective and resilient conservation strategies.
Patterns of rainfall in East Africa’s rangelands are inherently erratic, with wide oscillations around annual means, and a relatively predictable long dry season running from June to October. When rain does fall on the rangelands, several species of large mammals generally migrate hundreds of kilometres for the fish of vegetation that follows. During droughts, these animals search out the last patches of vegetation and remaining trickles or puddles of water. In the Mara-Serengeti ecosystem this leads to the world-famous migration of over 1.5 million wildebeest and zebra each year, covering nearly 1000 km in their annual round-trip migration, chasing rainfall and pulses of vegetation.
Likewise, resilient livestock management requires large-scale mobility for the ecological and economic benefits it brings. Herders and livestock move to access resources, while also resting other pastures, allowing vegetation to recover, and acting as reserves during long periods of droughts.
But space for wildlife is now rapidly shrinking across rangelands. From East Africa, to Tibet and Mongolia, urban areas are growing, land is being subdivided into individually-owned units, agriculture is being mechanised, and fences are springing up to demarcate ownership. If other land uses are perceived to be more profitable, financial and political pressures lead to the transformation of previously wildlife-friendly pastoral landscapes. Therefore, areas with the highest potential land value are likely to experience land transformation, if the opportunity cost cannot be met. For instance, recent research from southern Kenya demonstrates that land prices are increasing astronomically as urbanisation continues and speculators buy up parcels of land. This has led to large-scale fencing of landscapes, with around 40,000km of fencing in southern Kenya—enough to encircle the earth—further limiting the migration of wildlife between the remaining patches of intact habitat.
Importantly, these threats to wildlife populations are the very same threats that are experienced by herders and their livestock. As the space for these herders and their livestock shrinks, the health and number of livestock decrease, the rangelands degrade, and people’s livelihoods suffer.
As a result of these twin challenges, conservation efforts in East Africa’s rangelands today are increasingly focused on addressing the problems of subdivision, fragmentation, and range degradation, by generating incentives for pastoralist communities to maintain healthy, connected, communal rangelands.
Opportunities for wildlife conservation by overcoming threats to livestock
Before colonial changes in livestock policy, the Maasai in southern Kenya managed their livestock over vast areas using principles they call “eramatere”. The rules on where to graze, and for how long, were enforced through close social ties that tightly linked people and their extended families together. It’s much harder to break the rules when it jeopardises the well-being of a close friend or family member. This compelled individuals to make decisions that benefited the whole community.
But cultures are changing, and so too are these principles. It is now vital to understand how we can support or rekindle indigenous management practices as a way to sustain landscapes that support both wildlife and livestock. For instance, in Kenya’s South Rift Valley, communities are working with the South Rift Association of Land Owners (SORALO) to overcome these challenges by adapting and improving traditional governance systems, and reinforcing social ties all across multiple scales. This improves the ability to manage livestock at a landscape-scale and, consequently, preserves rangeland health. In doing so, the communities are indirectly preserving the resources and mobility that wildlife too needs to survive.
To achieve this, SORALO works with local governance bodies to map, plan, and monitor the foraging of livestock. Spatial planning helps communities to plan the future use of their land and balance the tradeoffs with competing interests of agriculture and urban development. SORALO also supports traditional governance institutions to adapt to the modern legal systems and gives them the rights to support their management choices. They support networking and planning with neighbouring groups of herders and their governing bodies. At a time when there is increasing pressure to stay in one place, these efforts help to ensure that the crucial mobility to follow rain and resources can continue.
In doing so, decisions made about livestock grazing beneft the entire community, not just certain individuals. Grazing can happen at a scale that is large enough to access erratic vegetation and water, and to rest those patches of grass which have been overgrazed or that need to be preserved for prolonged drought. This means that people have healthier livestock, which are less likely to die during droughts.
Indeed, research from southern Kenya’s rangelands shows that a combination of effective traditional livestock management, which includes mobility and access to wet and dry season grazing areas, can help to maintain resilience and ensure that a diverse and abundant wildlife community can coexist with people and livestock in these landscapes.
Healthy rangelands with livestock and wildlife also allow for the possibility of supplementary and diversifed revenue. This includes equitable eco-tourism partnerships, payment for ecosystem services— like the Chyulu Hills Conservation Trust’s carbon credit project, which pays local landowners to manage and restore their rangelands—and sale of rangeland products, such as plants, honey, and other food. All of these can increase the economic value of livestock-wildlife landscapes, and thus help to reduce the threat of land degradation, fragmentation, and conversion to urban development, crop agriculture or land speculation. And by generating suffcient economic returns, people may not feel that they need alternative income streams to support their families. In all this, livestock—the most valuable product in rangelands—are key, and conservation efforts need to be founded on improving rangeland management and productivity, which will in turn beneft wildlife.
Building conservation from a community world view
By focussing on the potential of livestock, communities can preserve rangeland health, prevent rangeland fragmentation, and build pride in their landscapes, an approach we have termed “inside-out” conservation. In other words, by improving the cultural, economic and ecological sustainability of livestock production systems in rangelands—including both traditional and commercial production systems—wildlife can also benefit. Best of all, this approach doesn’t require large sums of money to incentivise landowners to change their livelihoods or lifestyles, and it doesn’t require governments or conservation NGOs to impose top-down rules and regulations on herders that can lead to conflict. By drawing on lessons from the past and from current systems that function well, such an approach reminds us of the possibility of coexistence across landscapes.
Although these approaches are critical to the future of East Africa’s rangelands, they still face challenges. Livestock and their products are the most important revenue generator in rangelands. We need to find more ways to generate greater economic returns from them. We need to do more to ensure that benefits from ecotourism or payments for ecosystem services are equitably distributed and reach the people who are doing the most to conserve their living resources. And beyond economics, we need to ensure that the rights, knowledge, and experiences of people living and managing these rangelands are recognised as vital in any conservation activities. We need to do more to maintain or restore the cultural pride of healthy landscapes, livestock, and wildlife. Without the “place” for wildlife in people’s lives, the “space” created for them may not matter.
Further reading:
Russell, S., P. Tyrrell and D. Western. 2018. Seasonal interactions of pastoralists and wildlife in relation to pasture in an African savanna ecosystem. Journal of Arid Environments 154: 70–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaridenv.2018.03.007
Tyrrell, P., S. Russell and D. Western. 2017. Seasonal movements of wildlife and livestock in a heterogenous pastoral landscape: Implications for coexistence and community-based conservation. Global Ecology and Conservation 12: 59–72. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2017.08.006
Western, D., P. Tyrrell, P. Brehony, S. Russell, G. Western and J. Kamanga. 2020. Conservation from the inside-out: Winning space and a place for wildlife in working landscapes. People and Nature 2(2): 279–291. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10077
Not long ago, I was walking in a place that I have visited many times before in northern Tanzania—the Randilen Wildlife Management Area. This is a community-owned and run conservation area that forms a key refuge for wildlife during seasonal movements between Tarangire National Park and Lake Manyara National Park, two of Tanzania’s most famous protected areas. It is used by elephants, zebras, wildebeests, giraffes, lions, and several other animals that move across the park boundaries onto surrounding lands.
But that day in Randilen was my frst time spotting six lions all together in that area. I had never observed lions there before, but now suddenly I was seeing six in a single place, and on foot no less. It was a thrilling encounter and a marker of real conservation progress on the ground. Randilen is just one example of wildlife population recovery thanks to local action and leadership, supported by collaborations at the landscape scale. Moreover, the return of wildlife is happening alongside improvements in well-being and economic security for the local communities.
For the Northern Tanzania Rangelands Initiative (NTRI), a collaboration of different organisations working across the landscape, this is what successful conservation is all about. NTRI works to support local leadership and forge stronger links between different organizations around a shared, common vision for the landscape. In Randilen, community management efforts are being supported by two NGOs—The Nature Conservancy and Honeyguide, an innovative Tanzanian organization that specializes in improving local management and business planning so people can beneft from their wildlife and resources.
A threatened landscape
The northern Tanzania rangelands are witness to some of the world’s largest mammal migrations, including thousands of zebra, wildebeest, and other species that migrate between famous protected areas like the Ngorongoro Crater, Tarangire National Park or the Mt Kilimanjaro National Park. The rangelands are also home to the Maasai pastoral communities that have resided here for countless generations. Their lifestyle and norms guided them to use natural resources sustainably, meaning that there was a healthy balance between levels of resource consumption and regeneration.
Now with development pressures increasing across the landscape, including the construction of new roads and power lines, major towns like Arusha have spread into surrounding rangelands. Consequently, these areas have started to witness an influx of people and increasing competition for natural resources. This has created many conficting resource interests: more people need land for farming and settlement, others need pasture to graze livestock, and occupying the same space is the wildlife that supports a billion-dollar tourism industry in northern Tanzania. As resources decreased, we began to see an increase in conflict.
Working together to achieve big changes
To tackle this problem, local conservationists began to think about optimising existing efforts to work with communities, with the help of additional resources, increased coordination, and collaboration. For example, local organizations like Honeyguide, the Ujamaa Community Resource Team (winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2016), and Tanzania People & Wildlife were already working to develop new approaches for promoting coexistence between people and wildlife. Meanwhile, international conservation groups like Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) were supporting these efforts as well as working with the government.
Given the range and scale of conservation challenges, it became evident that an individual or an organisation could not hope to address them alone. We began to view the landscape as one large system, with wildlife moving from one national park to another through communal lands and farmed areas and settlements. Thus, we realized the need to operate collectively at the landscape level, while acknowledging that most organisations at the time were operating independently in silos.
Those insights led to the formation of the NTRI in 2011. It is a consortium of ten organisations: Oikos, Tanzania People & Wildlife, Carbon Tanzania, Honeyguide, WCS, Dorobo Fund, Ujamaa Community Resource Team (UCRT), Pathfnder International, Maliasili, and TNC. We are united around a common goal and vision, with different backgrounds, skill sets, and resource access, coming together with a common strategic approach to work with indigenous peoples and local communities in the rangelands to tackle these challenges.
NTRI partners pursue several key strategies to address conservation challenges in the landscape. A key one is to help the communities with land use planning as well as securing ownership of their land and rights to its resources, in order to protect both the land and people’s rights, and keep the landscape connected to allow livestock and wildlife to continue moving freely across it.
Second, we support and strengthen management and governance strategies that address the drivers of habitat degradation and fragmentation. Third, we work to add economic value to livestock and wildlife enterprises to incentivise sustainable land use and promote equitable sharing of benefts.
Working as a consortium brings many advantages. For example, in addition to the conservation organisations, one of the partners, Pathfnder International, brings expertise in addressing health and environmental conservation in an integrated way, further enhancing the group’s ability to bring in expertise, experience and resources from different angles.
Working as a consortium has also allowed us to support innovative approaches to beneft both people and nature in the landscape. Makame, another community-owned and managed Wildlife Management Area (WMA), has weathered the total loss of tourism earnings caused by COVID-19 because it has a new and growing revenue stream selling carbon offsets.
Multiple efforts from multiple angles are needed for a project like that to succeed: law enforcement to protect the community’s assets, in this case the vegetation storing the carbon; community buy-in to conserve a portion of land and avoid deforestation in that area; strong governance and management; revenue to carry out all the necessary carbon assessments, and a partner who would enable the communities to access carbon financing. Collaboration between NTRI partners such as Carbon Tanzania, UCRT, TNC, and Honeyguide has been key to this pioneering initiative that is now helping restore and protect over 350,000 hectares of rugged woodland and savannah.
The combined impact of all our partner organisations working together is greater than the sum of its parts. Through the NTRI partnership, over 900,000 hectares are now under improved natural resource management, with a little over 15 percent of degraded rangelands already in a better condition, and the functionality of two crucial wildlife corridors maintained, giving wildlife access to 440,000 hectares of connected habitat. By sustainably managing rangeland resources, two WMAs and 48 villages have improved their ability to adapt to challenges resulting from climate change.
Approximately 47,000 people have beneftted from various conservation activities, including beekeeping, leather crafts, village game scouts, crop protection, rangeland monitoring and management, holistic grazing management, and early work for invasive species control and management. We have helped establish 80 COCOBAs (community savings banks) in 21 program villages with 2,221 members who have a total benefit share collection to date of more than $500,000.
Lessons learned
The NTRI partners have learned many lessons so far about how to develop and sustain collaborations amongst different types of organizations in a complex, dynamic, and changing landscape.
First, for effective cooperation between multiple stakeholders at different levels, there must be an acceptance of collaboration as a way forward, guided by effective and concrete ways of engaging them. There must be tangible benefts to the collaboration for all the parties involved.
Second, developing a common vision that everyone buys into is key for working towards shared objectives.
Third, partnerships succeed when, in addition to shared goals, plans, data, and other information, partners deliberately align or adjust their actions to achieve mutually agreed on objectives.
Finally, it is important to recognise that organisations work at different paces as well as value individual contributions, regardless of the magnitude. Every partner has a role to play as a piece in the puzzle, and diverse pieces are needed to solve the challenges of landscape-scale conservation in East Africa today.
As this special thematic issue of Current Conservation was being fnalized in late October, we received news of the passing of Professor Marshall Murphree at the age of 90 in his home country of Zimbabwe.
During the past year, one of the foremost themes in conservation has been the marked surge in support for what are now termed ‘IPLC’ (Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities) conservation efforts. In the African context, no individual had a greater infuence on the thinking around community management and governance of natural resources, and the implications for conservation policy and practice, than Marshall Muphree.
Murphree became a key fgure, with ultimately a global infuence on conservation, starting in the 1980s when Zimbabwe was pioneering new ideas and feld-level management experiments in wildlife management. From his academic home at the University of Zimbabwe’s Center for Applied Social Sciences (CASS), which he led starting in 1970, he provided much of the key design thinking behind Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE (Communal Areas Management Programme for Indignenous Resources). CAMPFIRE’s aim, drawing on earlier experiments with devolving ownership of wildlife on private ranches in Zimbabwe, was to create a new paradigm of community-driven conservation, based on community-level ownership of wildlife and the resource’s economic value.
These new ideas and management experiments in Zimbabwe would ripple throughout Africa and indeed the world during the 1990s, largely because Murphree was able to connect academic theory, particularly in the new feld of common property scholarship (then also being pioneered on a wider global scale by future Nobel Laureate, Elinor Ostrom), with practical management realities in African rural communities. His work provided rigour to the emerging ‘new paradigm’ of community-based conservation, as well as fueling a growing community of scholars and practitioners from across southern Africa, many of whom studied at CASS and collaborated with Murphree on a profusion of papers and research projects during that time. By connecting southern Africa with parallel ideas and initiatives taking place elsewhere, through new networks such as the International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASC) and the IUCN Sustainable Use Specialist Group, which Murphree helped found, these efforts had a huge role in changing global conservation in ways that are only today seemingly coming to fruition.
Murphree’s work was both highly collaborative and politically charged. At the heart of his work was recognition that community-based conservation was not primarily about wildlife, but concerned with the political dimensions of shifting power to marginalized rural communities.
He said what few other conservationists were able or willing to state: that community-based conservation ultimately was tied to “a potential agrarian revolution” and “ a largely unrecognised struggle over property rights in rural Africa.” To put it more plainly, it could be said that ‘power to the people’ was the underlying theme of all of Murphree’s work and conservation agenda. Murphree fully recognized that the community conservation experiments of the 90s had only just started to make headway in this larger, critical political project. He used the memorable phrase ‘aborted devolution’ to describe the limitations that government figures tended to place on reform efforts, often undermining the key tenets of community conservation.
Are conservation efforts in Africa and around the world now finally starting to overcome those vested interests and put more meaningful rights in the hands of the local communities and Indigenous Peoples who live on the land? Time will tell, but Murphree’s ideas and vision will continue to provide a core foundation for the efforts of activists and scholar-practitioners for years to come.
Further Reading
Murphree, M. W. 1993. Communities as resource management institutions. International Institute for Environment and Development.
Murphree, M. W. 2000. Boundaries and borders: the question of scale in the theory and practice of common property management. Eighth Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property. Vol. 31.
Hulme, D. and M. Murphree. 2001. African wildlife and livelihoods: The promise and performance of community conservation.James Currey Ltd.
The African region (including Madagascar) has the highest concentration of nonhuman primate diversity on Earth. In all, the continent is home to 42 percent of the world’s 713 primate species and subspecies and more than half of all primate genera. Five of the top 12 countries on Earth for primate diversity are African— Madagascar, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Cameroon, and Nigeria. Madagascar alone is second on the world list and has the highest number of endemic primate taxa of any country on Earth. Also of considerable interest is the fact that we continue to discover new species and subspecies of primates. 97 species and subspecies were described for the frst time in the past two decades, and more than half of them are from Africa—50 lemurs from Madagascar, and three prosimians (two galagos and a potto) and four monkeys, including a new genus, Rungwecebus (the Kipunji), from mainland Africa.
African primates play an important role in our research on numerous aspects of human biology and the cognitive sciences, as well as in understanding the threats of emerging diseases. Arguably more fundamental and critical is their role in sustaining the healthy ecosystems vital for human livelihoods and in their presence in the cultures and folklore of many African societies. Sadly, as is the case in all other parts of the tropical world, the primates of Africa, and Madagascar in particular, are severely threatened. The latest IUCN Species Survival Commission Red List assessments carried out between 2012 and 2016, showed that 63 percent of all primates worldwide are threatened—the highest degree of threat for any of the larger groups of mammals— and with many of the Critically Endangered species literally on the verge of extinction.
There are several reasons for this decline in primate populations. Foremost is habitat destruction and fragmentation, mostly as a result of logging, large-scale mining, and agroindustry (notably oil palm and soy plantations), but with many other factors at play as well. In West and Central Africa, for example, bushmeat hunting is a major cause of primate declines, and the same is true for Madagascar. Primates are also killed for medicinal purposes, for the ornamental use of various body parts (for example, black-and-white colobus, geladas), and as crop pests (for example, baboons, vervets). Outbreaks of major diseases in Africa can also be of serious concern, both for nonhuman primates and humans, with recent Ebola outbreaks having killed large numbers of gorillas and chimps in certain countries (such as Congo-Brazzaville).
In recognition of the importance of primates in Africa and to further stimulate the development of concerted domestic efforts to curb the threats to their continued survival, a number of African primatologists worked to advance the establishment of a primate-focused group—the African Primatological Society (APS). This group would provide a platform for sharing data, information, tools, and technical assistance to support Africa’s preparedness and domestic efforts in primate research and conservation,as well as to encourage greater participation and leadership of African primatologists. This initiative began as a genuine attempt to increase the robustness of African involvement in international primatological meetings and in decision-making bodies; enriching their capacity to engage and influence stakeholders and policies within their home country; and improving the quality of their scientific inputs and roles in major dialogues or activities relating to African primates.
The APS was formally established during an inaugural Congress in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire in July 2017. The congress brought together about 150 experts, including aspiring primatologists, researchers, conservation practitioners, tourism stakeholders, and policy makers from 22 African countries, along with a few dozen people from other countries across the globe.
Two years later, the second congress of the APS was held in Entebbe, Uganda in September 2019. The event was a resounding success, bringing together over 300 primate experts to discuss the theme ‘Challenges and Opportunities in Primate Conservation in Africa’, and to fnd ways to promote active participation of native African primatologists in the international primatological arena. With 250 out of 312 delegates hailing from 24 different African countries, the APS more than achieved its goal of providing an accessible platform for African primatologists to collaborate, network, and discuss pressing challenges and issues, opportunities, and potential solutions towards protecting Africa’s primates and their habitats.
The two congresses benefitted from the avid support of various stakeholders in academia, non-governmental organizations, civil society groups, national and local governments, funding agencies, public and industry scientists, local, national and international media, and delegates from all regions of Africa (North, West, Central, East, Southern Africa, and Madagascar).
The added value to the congresses was the deliberate inclusive approach, which involved students from African institutions working on primates for their dissertations. This bottom-up or ‘catch-them-young’ initiative will help us also focus on prospective primatologists across age and gender. It was also gratifying to see how we were able to mobilize the international community and governments to play their role to advance and support the goals and objectives of African primatology at large.
One main recommendation that was emphasized during the congress was for members to not only have a greater level of commitment to the new society, but also to promote public dialogue and effective policy advocacy within their own sphere of influence. Genuine inclusivity was also highlighted as a way to boost the participation of all primatological expertise and interests on the continent.
The congresses have underscored the following action points and agenda to inform the work needed to be done for the effective conservation of African primates and for the development of African primatologists in the wake of the establishment of the African Primatological Society:
Africa-based training programs needed
In general, African countries are faced with major challenges concerning the lack of adequate resources, equipment, dynamic institutions, and governance. A well-designed training program and infrastructure will play an important role in enabling many African primatologists to learn from best practices of peers, and to obtain continuous input on their performance. The turnout of African participants at the congresses has shown that the region has a high proportion of people conducting research on or working for the conservation of African primates. However, to promote growth, enhance the quality of their work, and increase the level of their involvement in primatological communities, there must be some structural training and environment that will empower them. To achieve this, leadership-based training that is grounded in a robust scientific curriculum is required to build and equip both experienced and upcoming primatologists.
Strengthen regional and global integration of African primatologists
Regional and global integration is needed to overcome the limitations of Africa’s small but growing mass of primatologists, and also to give the continent a stronger voice in the conservation and management of its primates. Until the birth of the APS, many African primatologists and primatological groups, such as the Groupe d’Etude et de Recherche sur les Primates de Madagascar (GERP) and the Primate Ecology and Genetic Group (PEGG), South Africa, have been working in isolation from the rest of the larger community of Africans and non-Africans working on primates. The African Primatological Consortium (APC) headquartered in Uganda is an excellent example of regional integration to create a forum for a collaborative research community for primatologists in Africa. The impact of these fragmented communities or individual primatologists on the conservation and management of primates has, however, been limited in addressing many of the conservation development issues on the continent. Active and increased African participation in international primatological meetings should also be encouraged so as to promote global integration.
Develop a red colobus action plan
Certain groups of African primates besides the great apes—man’s closest living relatives—are of particular concern. Of these the red colobus monkeys of the genus Piliocolobus are a prime example. 18 species and one subspecies are currently recognized and all are threatened, with seven being in the Critically Endangered category. Workshops were organized during the two congresses to develop an action plan for the conservation of these remarkable animals, which involved a large network of red colobus researchers and conservationists. The action plan was launched at the 2018 Congress of the International Primatological Society in Nairobi, Kenya. It focuses on site-specifc activities, but also uses common themes to leverage efficiencies of scale.
Develop and/or revise other action plans
Other primate groups, such as the lemurs of Madagascar, are in urgent need of attention. A lemur action plan for 2013–2016 was successfully funded, but there is much that still needs to be done. A Red-Listing Workshop for Lemurs was held in Madagascar in November 2017, with the objective of updating our knowledge of these species and revising the action plan. Action plans for other taxa and regions are also needed, and a major initiative is underway for the 16 mangabeys and mandrills, 13 of which are currently threatened.
Finally, it is vital that African primatologists engage in a multi-sectoral approach to promote conservation efforts that include governments, local communities, the private sector and NGOs.
References
Estrada, A., P. Garber, A. B. Rylands, C. Roos, E. Fernandez-Duque, A. Di Fiore, K. A. I. Nekaris et al. 2017. Impending extinction crisis of the world’s primates: why primates matter. Science Advances 3: e1600946. DOI 10.1126/sciadv.1600946.
Imong I., R. Ikemeh, I. Kone and D. Ndeloh. 2016. The Birth of the African Primatological Society for the future of African Primates. African Primates 11(1): 49-50.
IUCN SSC, PSG. 2021. Primate Specialist Group taxonomic data base. A. B. Rylands and R. A. Mittermeier. 13 October 2021.
Entomophagy, or the practice of eating insects, is not something that has been adopted only in recent times. In India’s Northeastern region, it is part of a culture that has been around for as long as anyone can remember.
Lobeno Mozhui has identified as many as 106 edible insects that are consumed by local communities in Nagaland alone. Among these, the Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) is one of the most expensive and sought-after, and Naga tribes are the only groups known to rear them for consumption. Adult giant hornets are also consumed but it is the larvae that are considered a delicacy.
A fire is made at the entrance of the nest and the smoke is driven into the nest.
In November 2019, I found myself in a village called Maikhel in Manipur, inhabited by the Mao, a major Naga tribe. Dipen and Seela, two other Green Hub Fellows, were with me to film the giant hornet harvest, as part of our internship program with the Bangalore-based Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE).
After around 5 hours of intense labour, when everyone else in the village is asleep, Lorhü proudly presents a fraction of the night’s harvest.
Harvesting takes place around 4–5 months after a giant hornet nest is relocated from the wild to a rearing site. By October–November, there are thousands of workers foraging, feeding the grubs, and guarding the nest. The harvest is usually carried out by the second week of November, before the grubs can metamorphose into adults.
Harvesting takes place at night. Water is sprinkled at the entrance of the nest, driving the sentry hornets inside—a natural response to rain. The entrance is then blocked with burning twigs. Indian wormwood (Artemisia species) leaves are fed into the fire and smoke is driven into the nest with a blower. Wormwood smoke is believed to knock the hornets out quicker. Once the sounds of distressed hornets inside the nest stop, the nest is dug out, and the combs containing the larvae are collected for consumption.
After a late night’s work, freshly harvested hornet larvae is brought to the market early in the morning.
The following day, the night’s harvest is sold to a middleman at a wholesale rate. These are then sold at rates as high as INR 30,000 in the local market. Despite a high demand for giant hornet larvae, the cost is inhibitive, and only the elite and the rearers themselves are able to consume them.
People here believe that giant hornets are a healthy substitute for conventional meat, especially for people with high blood pressure. Insect farming is an efficient and sustainable source of protein, requiring zero to minimal energy and inputs. This makes it an attractive alternative to the large meat farms seen in the West.
From being an egg to metamorphose into a full adult, it takes 2 weeks.
A plate like this would cost around INR 500/- and most older folk prefer it over red meat.
With an estimated rise in human population from 6.8 billion to 9.1 billion by 2050, efficient methods of producing protein are critical and edible insects are an effective solution. However, western diets, which have long been alienated from entomophagy, are only just beginning to accept the advantages of insect protein over conventional meat protein. They are now looking to indigenous communities to learn about edible insects, which are aptly called the food of the future.
Photo essay by Photo essay by Thejavikho Chase, Fellow at Green Hub
Whenever I hear the name Rivaldo, I think of Brazil; I relive the 2002 World Cup, and replay memorable matches of the legendary footballer in my head. The popularity of that name has traveled farther than Brazil, as I discovered. It was given to an enormous 30-year-old tusker who wanders through the forests of Masinagudi and Mudumalai Tiger Reserve (MTR) with a monitoring collar around his neck.
With support from WWF-India, Rivaldo the elephant was collared to record and track his movement and habits. I had the opportunity to visit Mudumalai in August, and while there, it so happened that Rivaldo went “missing” for about five to six hours. My colleague, Ravikumar, and I had been visiting a forest campsite in the buffer zone of MTR that morning. On our return around noon, we travelled back towards Masinagudi town to assist in scouting out the wayfaring absentee. As per his last recorded location, Rivaldo was not too far from the town, and had lingered around the area of Vazhaithottam. We parked the jeep at the forest checkpost and made our way down a snaking stream, until we espied a group of Forest Department staff holding aloft a drone-shaped antenna.
A brief discussion was followed by an inspection of the seemingly faulty radio device that was emitting a consistent barrage of static crackles. This proved confusing at first because it indicated two contradictory things: either that the elephant had vanished into thin air, or that he was omnipresent and approaching us from all sides. But Ravi anna (elder brother in Tamil) expertly adjusted the numbers on the screen, and tweaked the various knobs. Soon enough, we started receiving a short, and increasingly frequent blip that grew in intensity as we moved closer to our target.
We made our way through an open field before reaching a thorn-covered patch of bamboo. Ever so often, we would halt, and with the antenna held high, correct our course by a few degrees, before moving forward again. We advanced in a single file and—despite getting myself caught in the nettle and thorn of the scrub with the inexperience and clumsiness of a newcomer—made steady progress. Small groups of chital (spotted deer) scurried past at the sound of our approach. We eventually emerged from this patch on to the banks of a boulder-filled stream. The blip was starting to spike; Rivaldo was not very far. Once again stopping to track the proximity of the elephant —and for me to catch my breath under the suffocating embrace of my face mask—we trekked another furlong. The Forest Guard surveying ahead informed us that he had spotted Rivaldo asleep.
This explained the curious case of the missing tusker. As the elephant lay down, the GPS tracker on the collar might have swiveled downward and under his great bulk, thereby jamming and jumbling the signal. As we inched closer to Rivaldo through dense thickets of thorn-covered undergrowth, each step seemed an eternity, and the crunch of dry leaves underfoot could have awoken the slumbering giant. Stories of treacherously close encounters with elephants whirled through my head. Suddenly, I heard a loud thunderous snore and what sounded like the snap of a leather belt. Rivaldo lay on his side, fast asleep. His ears flapped mechanically, hitting the collar with that belt-snapping sound, while his trunk gathered the surrounding sand and sprinkled grains overhead, reminiscent of a gentle exfoliating massage. He moved his front foot up and down, as if walking in a dream.
After ten minutes and several overly cinematic what-if scenarios rushing through my head, we started to make our way back. It was extraordinary to think that a full-grown tusker lay so close by, and that without the aid of a monitoring device, one wouldn’t have had a clue. A short while later, as we took a water break and chatted, Rivaldo awoke and wandered further afield, adjacent to a large open expanse. We quickly followed, staying parallel to him. We then cut across, reached the field first, and stood waiting for him under the shade of a tree. If he emerged from the forest and into the open, he would come into view about 40 metres away. I waited with bated breath. The leaves began to rustle and out came the object of our rapt attention. Rivaldo walked slowly, his trunk sniffing and exploring the shrubbery directly ahead of him. He came closer to where we stood. By then, we had ventured away from the tree and were standing in the sun, in plain view of our companion. Rivaldo placidly observed us.
We froze. Ravi anna was crouched over, clicking photos. I was transfixed, fumbling to keep my phone camera on my chest. We remained rooted to the spot, as his massive bulk and lumbering presence dominated the landscape. His curiosity soon waned, and with a casual side glance, he swayed to the left and walked away to forage. We circled around and continued to watch him through binoculars. With the Nilgiris in the backdrop, the hungry giant came to a halt. Using his front foot he scraped the soil and loosened the grass. Then, with his trunk, he neatly bunched and gathered the vegetation, encircling it with the dexterous coiled instrument that was in fact his nose. As if using a fork and spoon, Rivaldo bundled the grass in his trunk and secured it with the assistance of his front foot. Finally, with a single fluid motion, he ingested it all. Rivaldo indulged us for a good half an hour before returning to the dense scrub.
Later that evening, Ravi anna asked if I had been frightened as I stood in front of Rivaldo. I would be lying if I said I had felt no fear or trepidation. Yet, we were fortunate to have encountered him when he was of a gentle disposition, perhaps soothed by his afternoon siesta. However I might choose to rationalise his mild behaviour that day, our wordless exchange made an indelible impression on me.
The realities of climate change are forcing conservation practitioners around the globe to take a closer look at how they design nature conservation strategies and actions. Business-as-usual approaches are at risk of failing over time. For example, rising seas can drown out coastal conservation easements and refuges intended to protect salt marsh ecosystems and species. Ignoring these climate-related risks could lead to wasted conservation investments at a time when awareness of humanity’s dependence on healthy ecosystems—to support people’s livelihoods and well-being, stabilize the climate system, and protect against pandemics—is ever increasing.
As conservation practitioners and funders begin to accept this new reality, they are faced with the challenges of how to make their investments “climate-smart”. In our new paper, Rapid assessment to facilitate climate-informed conservation and nature-based solutions, we present an accessible framework for addressing the question of what, if anything, do we need to do differently about conservation work to be effective in a changing climate? Our framework prompts users to consider the common refrain of “What, When, Where, Why and Who”—or the “5Ws”—to determine if strategic adjustments in these dimensions of a conservation project will increase the likelihood of desirable outcomes as the climate changes.
“What” refers to the need to consider modifying current actions or taking new actions to ensure their long-term effectiveness, for example by re-designing culverts and road crossings to allow for fish passage during larger flood events that are expected to become more frequent. A project might adjust the “Where” by selecting implementation sites that are projected to remain suitable for a target species or support specific ecosystem services into the future. The “Who” of a project can relate to how climate change might alter with whom the work needs to be conducted, who is likely to benefit, and who might bear potential unintended harm or tradeoffs.
The 5Ws rapid assessment emerged from a decade of climate-informed conservation grantmaking through the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Climate Adaptation Fund. Since 2011, the Climate Adaptation Fund has invested over $21 million in over 110 conservation projects across the United States that have designed their goals and actions to address climate risks. This portfolio offers numerous examples of conservationists shifting the paradigm of conservation practice. Over time, a clear framework for making climate-informed modifications emerged as altering the What, When, Where, Why, and Who of their work.
As climate change accelerates, the need for proactive, climate-informed conservation action in ecosystems across the planet is imperative. By translating lessons from these funded projects into a rapid assessment tool, we aim to provide a practical entry point to help newcomers to climate adaptation get started on the path to safeguarding conservation investments from a changing climate.
Further reading
Oakes, L. E., M. S. Cross and E. Zavaleta. 2021. Rapid assessment to facilitate climate-informed conservation and nature-based solutions. Conservation Science and Practice
We would like here to restore the balance of affairs and put trees in their proper place, which, lets face it, is just about anywhere on the planet. The Earth may be molten in the middle, but Gaia is wooden at her core. Trees are the highest life form. The fact that evolution did not stop there was the result of truly selfish actions by some renegade genes which are now profoundly sorry for their misbehaviour. There is only one rule for tree-planting: if it’s a tree, then plant it.
To avoid confusion, we’d like to define what we mean by ‘tree’. (And you know how bad a debate is when you have to write such a sentence). A tree, to be clear, is a tall plant with a trunk and branches, and generally woody. Amongst other things, it is not a human. It does not cut itself down. A tree is a thing which a human isn’t. And, ergo, if you can see a tree occupying a space then a person is not in that same space. They are mutually exclusive (despite what we may have said in a previous column).
It follows from this (we are almost somewhat certain) that places with lots of trees should not have people. ‘Forest-dwelling people’ is, therefore, an oxymoron, and has as little chance of succeeding as a proton and an antiproton sharing a motel room. All this talk about talking to people about where forests should grow just proliferates a myth that is nothing like true forest at all.
To avoid confusion, we would like to direct readers to recent welcome attempts published in the highest quality journals, including the Great One whose ‘I’s we are not worthy to dot, which have begun to hint at the true miracles that might be possible were we seriously to get serious about tree planting. Indeed, the only thing wrong with these authors’ plans is that they do not go far enough. They omit a host of places where trees could, and should, be planted in order more effectively to sequester carbon. These are:
1.Trees in lakes, and trees in seas: If you look at any map of the world then the obvious constraint to a world covered in forests is that far too much of it is covered in water. And the obvious, and if we may say so, ingenious, response to this is to plant trees which are more water and salt tolerant. It won’t be too difficult, we just need taller mangrove trees. We have recently patented the idea of crossing a mangrove with a redwood and expect to be planting forests right up to the edge of the continental shelf.
2. Antarctic trees: Antarctica is a huge wasted tree-planting opportunity. It’s a massive continent which has shown a rather lazy preference to grow ice, when it should be growing trees. Fortunately, current global warming trends mean that we should be able to get a healthy plantation of Scots pine growing their fairly soon. A bit of gene splicing with polar bears or penguins (Ed – which is the one that lives down there?) should make them more tolerant.
3. Trees in space: We have been lax about terraforming nearby planets to house us in due course and trees are obviously the best way of doing this. And think how much carbon the moon could absorb once we worked out how to get it there.
4. Trees on trees: The prevailing philosophy seems to be that once you’ve planted a tree and it is growing, then your job is done. But what about all that extra space created by trees when they grow? Again, with appropriate gene editing other trees could be encouraged to plant themselves on each other and grow sideways of their fellows. We’d just need to make sure they were evenly positioned for balance. Currently trees themselves are being rather selfish about this. They tend to dominate space, and compete for light, rather than sharing it. But with a bit of group therapy for the aggressive species, and new thermal powered, LED UV ground-lighting, forests could be lit from anywhere, and tree space extend some 2–3 kilometres into the sky.
5. Trees in motion: One of the main problems with trees is that they simply refuse to move. An evolutionary glitch in an otherwise excellent conception. Once again, through appropriate gene therapy, we believe that trees that can shuffle around the neighbourhood, and occupy football fields and vacant lots when they are not being used. Why, some could learn to fly, flapping away with large leaves— imagine a flock of trees soaring above, munching away at all that Carbon in our atmosphere.
Conservation is sometimes accused of inventing the landscapes and places it wants to exist. Conservationists conserve their idea of what things should look like, rather than the living, evolving landscapes that exist.
And what a load of cobblers that base and foolish accusation is! As should be plainly apparent in our wise words above, conservation is about restoring things that were lost back to their proper state. We could not be more confident that when trees once more rule the planet—as in the great golden Carboniferous age, before the Mesozoic came along and ruined everything—then we will have restored the greatest forest ever to have ruled.
The gift for mimicry fills me with awe—the ease with which artists mimic the voice, expressions, and mannerisms of another individual. In the Animal Kingdom, most of us have heard of social birds like parrots and mynas, which are capable of mimicking human speech in captivity. But there are other mimicry artists out there in the wild. Have you ever seen the greater racket-tailed drongo in action? It is a highly vocal bird with black plumage that has a wide distribution across Southeast Asia.
Although I had seen this species several times around my home in Kannur, Kerala, I learnt more about their peculiar behaviour only when I started birdwatching during my postgraduate course in Wayanad. What began as a hobby soon became the focus of my research. Drongos are relatively easy to identify and amongst them, the greater racket-tailed drongos stand out with their beautiful, wiry tail streamers, which end in small racket-shaped feathers. With such fancy tails, their flight is indeed a stunning sight. This species is famous among birdwatchers for its incredible vocal mimicry.
I never failed to record sightings of greater racket-tailed drongos on my daily campus birding sessions. One day, as part of the fieldwork for my Master’s project, my friend, Nithin, and I set out for birding in a nearby coffee plantation. A particular spot, that was usually full of bird activity and filled with calls, was relatively silent that day. We kept walking, ducking below and clambering over branches of the trees and coffee shrubs, careful not to disrupt tenacious spider webs and shrugging off leeches that had crawled their way up our clothes. All the while, we kept our hopes up. All of a sudden, we heard a loud, repetitive, familiar call. We stopped in our tracks and listened. Soon we identified it as the call of the crested serpent eagle, a common raptor in the area—one of the first bird calls we learnt and memorised. We then started walking towards the source of the sound. This call, however, was coming from a fixed position, unlike the typical call of serpent eagles, which slowly fades as they soar away. I told Nithin that the bird was definitely perched somewhere close by. I got my camera ready to get a picture. We walked slowly and carefully before stopping at a location where the call sounded close.
We were surrounded by tall trees with thick canopies. We looked around, peering through branches, twigs and leaves, trying to locate a large bird. The call was repeated several times while we tried to locate it. A sudden movement at the end of a branch 10–12 meters away caught my attention. I zoomed in with my camera to check, and there it was. A drongo! Out in the open, nicely perched on a branch, tail streamers swaying in the cool breeze. There was no sign of a crested serpent eagle.
As happy as I was to see the racket-tailed drongo, something struck me as odd. We could still hear the eagle and I could see the drongo’s beak moving. Confused, I started recording a video to be completely sure that what I was hearing, seeing, and thinking at the time made sense. Soon after, the drongo flew away and the eagle’s call stopped as well. We then observed a small nest with two hatchlings, which we later identified as belonging to the greater racket-tailed drongo. It took me some time to realise that we had witnessed a perfect mimicry of the crested serpent eagle by this talented avian artist, and that I had fallen prey to its clever deception. Since then, I have been fooled by the drongo’s vocal tricks several times in almost every birding session.
Greater racket-tailed drongos are known to mimic almost all birds, mammals such as the Malabar giant squirrel, and even inanimate objects, such as camera shutters or the reverse tune of a car! Studies suggest that vocal mimicry is used by drongos to invite other species in their habitat to form groups. These are known as mixed-species flocks or mixed hunting parties, a type of group behaviour by which individual birds obtain benefits in the form of increased foraging opportunities and protection from predators. However, mimicking calls of predators is observed mostly during the breeding season, near their nests. Hypotheses suggest that predator mimicry near their nests provide an environment where the young ones can learn sounds that are connected with danger, or it could serve to distract perceived threats away from the nest. Mimicry could also play a role in attracting mates and is also known in other species, such as lyrebirds, as well.
Such complexities of bird behaviour make birdwatching all the more interesting and leads me to wonder whether the term ‘bird brain’ should be taken as an insult. Birding brings me immense joy. And it is even more thrilling when a greater racket-tailed drongo is around because who knows what it might be up to!
Further Reading
Goodale, E. and S. W. Kotagama. 2006. Vocal mimicry by a passerine bird attracts other species involved in mixed-species flocks. Animal behaviour 72(2): 471-477.
Goodale, E., C. P. Ratnayake and S. W. Kotagama. 2014. The frequency of vocal mimicry associated with danger varies due to proximity to nest and nesting stage in a passerine bird. Behaviour 151(1), 73-88.
Pakke Tiger Reserve is located in the Pakke Kessang district of Arunachal Pradesh, a state in India’s Northeast. It covers an area of 862 sq. km and is surrounded by Papum Reserve Forest in the east, Nameri National Park to the south and southeast, Doimara Reserve Forest and Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary in the west, and the Shergaon Forest Division in the north.
One November morning I received a call from Rajen Tachang, a Green Hub Fellow based out of Seijosa, in Arunachal Pradesh, asking if I would like to join him on an expedition into the core zone (core zone is where the actual forest exist and is given maximum protection by the forest department) of Pakke Tiger Reserve. A few weeks later, I met Rajen at Kandra bhaiya’s home in Seijosa. Kandra bhaiya was a member of the Special Tiger Protection Force (STPF), who was assigned to accompany us, and had been working with Rajen on planning the trip into the Reserve.
Forest guards like these work on a meagre salary, risking their lives daily, to protect and preserve our natural world.
We set out on two motorbikes the next day. I fell off my bike countless times as we rode through impossible terrains and rivers. One of the most exciting moments of the trip was on the first day as we were crossing the buffer zone (buffer zone is the area around the core zone which is open for restricted and regulated human economic activities like tourism), on our way to the core zone. Kandra bhaiya and I found, what according to him was, a very fresh pugmark of a tiger; and to make things more exciting, he said he was still able to catch the scent of the tiger! But when I tried sniffing the air, I could only smell our sweat and nothing else.
Unexpected rain meant wet boots for the whole trip, but we were able to pause and take in the beauty of the rainbow.
After a whole day’s journey from Seijosa, we reached the Panchali Anti-Poaching Camp, around 23 km inside Pakke. That evening, from our front yard to a drop of around 60 feet below, we bore witness to several animals (like wild boar, monitor lizard, sambar deer, barking deer, porcupine and also many pug marks of leopard, tiger, and bear), who came to the stream for a drink.
Every night, we would sit by the fire and exchange stories.
From Panchali Camp, it took two days of continuous trekking to reach our destination, a place called Champing Pung—a salt lick. As we zigzagged across deep rivers, we were rewarded for the tough trek by scenes of beautiful fish swimming past in the crystal-clear water.
Kandra bhaiya and Laguna bhaiya observing two wild elephants at the salt lick—Champing Pung—early one morning.
Early on the third morning, as we were about to reach our destination, Kandra bhaiya, who was leading, suddenly pointed towards the top of a waterfall. It was then that I spotted a beautiful creature called the Himalayan serow. We also managed to get the first photographic record—other than from camera traps—of the Himalayan serow in Pakke Tiger Reserve.
We caught a glimpse of a Himalayan serow. Aside from camera trap images, this is the first photographic record of the species in Pakke Tiger Reserve.
What an adventure it had been! From riding through a thick forest on a motorbike as well as on elephant back, and from stumbling upon wild elephants and wild boars to my first-ever sighting of a Himalayan serow, my time in Pakke Tiger Reserve was special. I treasure those memories not only for the thrilling experiences, but also for the amazing people I had the privilege of connecting with.
Photo essay by Thejavikho Chase, Fellow at Green Hub
There’s mischief outside my window — a little black bird pretending to be a fish! Like a wave, she drifts through the sky, dives straight down and moves just as quickly upwards to startle the wind. Like the weight of a breeze on my palm she is hardly there, twisting mid-air to the sounds of general living. Her tiny wings just two strokes of paint, her beak, a single dot, her chirps as loud as the wind swooning by; I am yet to see her feet, her fine tail runs seamlessly from the length of her body. She is like a punctuation mark chasing an incomplete sentence. To call her a bird would be prosaic, she is a poem in the sky.
I am going to tell you how the last of the wild corals were born.
Corals were capable of building reefs for 500 million years, until the temperature of the sea began to soar. When the myth of rising temperatures soon turned real, scientists began to realize that it was too late to save the world’s biggest reef. The Great Barrier, had been reduced to small fragmented mounds, devoid of life, and far from the thriving ecosystem it had once been. Last November the sea surface temperatures in Australia averaged above 34 degree Celsius, making it almost impossible for any rehabilitation effort to succeed. The only living representatives of the once abundant corals were now maintained in aquariums under thermostatic conditions at Reef Headquarter, Townsville – one of the largest reef aquariums in the world.
Coming back to how the last of the reef building corals were born in the wild, it was a surprise in every way. I never imagined having the privilege of observing the phenomenon first-hand. It could have easily gone unnoticed. It had been over 14 years since the world had given up on searching for corals in the wild. I was once a researcher interested in coral reproductive biology, but massive bleaching events wiped the reefs clean from the world’s oceans. Hence, I had moved on to study algal blooms and ocean warming. The probability of being in the right place at the right time, to observe and document the birth of wild corals, still makes me wonder.
The last corals were not the massive gigantic boulder corals that guarded barrier reefs. In fact, they were nowhere near the barrier reefs. In an atoll far away in the Arabian sea, in the deepest depths of a lagoon, stood the last stand of wild coral – the delicate staghorn coral.
Maybe it was because of the monsoons (characteristic of the region) that had given respite from the scorching summers, which had bleached all the other reefs dead, or maybe it was the shelter of the lagoon, which allowed that stand to survive. Whatever the reason, it was the last ideal place in the ocean for a coral species. Leading research on coral had centred on the reefs of Australia, America and other regions where environmental science and climate change research was well-funded, but many countries with more pressing matters to attend to, had forgotten to record the parameters of many of these important pockets of resilience.
What I saw felt like a dream! I’d anchored my boat in the back reef of the atoll and was sampling the water with my husband, when slowly, tiny pink eggs broke the surface to form a reasonably clear pink slick. I initially refuted the idea, but the pinkness of the slick looked undeniably like that of coral eggs.
We dived down to a surprising depth of 20 m. This was unnaturally deep for a lagoon. There, in the shadow of a ridge made up of towering dead boulder coral, existed a silent garden, fish flitting in and out of the delicate branches. Almost uniformly sized bushes stood still in the dull moonlight. As I switched on my torch, yellow eggs like spangles floated towards the surface, leaving the blue-tipped branches of their parents – the last surviving corals in the wild. We recorded the event and hurriedly returned to collect the spawn slick, which we cultured into planula larvae. We shipped them to every major coral aquarium that we possibly could. The ‘last stand’ was all over the news.
I had no idea that after all that hype, it would be the last time we would see the stand. The next monsoon, a storm collapsed a section of the already dilapidating reef. This might have made the staghorn coral vulnerable to the temperatures of the open sea. We were too late to react. The last stand had died.
Thanks to overwhelming support, we have currently patched up and reinforced the collapsed sections of the reef with scrap metal from a decommissioned merchant ship. Debris and rock now hold the scaffolding firmly intact, thanks to a team of architects and engineers. Marine life around has gradually returned. Two aquaria have been generous enough to contribute live coral fragments of the same species that we lost. We were also able to transplant fragments from adult coral, grown from the spawn we collected years ago at the same location. However, these cultivated corals would not stand a chance without the protection of the reinforced reef.
The last wild stand of coral is gone, and no reports of coral in the wild have resurfaced to date. Our only hope lies in genetically modified, temperature resistant corals. However, with sea temperatures now rising to irreconcilable levels, is it too late not just for sensitive corals, but for all marine life?
I am known by many names. When woody trees abound and I resemble a forest, I am a swamp; when I’m not too deep and grasses thrive, I am a marsh. If you spot me along the coast, and you are a keen observer, you would notice plants neatly arranged in zones. This is because the ones that can tolerate salty sea water moving in and out of their root zones, tend to be arranged closer to the shore. Those that have trouble adjusting pitch a tent safely inland.
I may have you confused at times, especially in the summer. You would be quick to question my very character. But regardless of where I am or what I’m called, two things define me: I’m saturated with water and the plants that grow in and around me love it! Water almost entirely covers my soil all year round and the plants that call me home thrive in flooded conditions. I am known by many names, but you may call me wetland.
Provider par excellence
I am a refuge for life forms, from microscopic organisms that elude the human eye to mighty beings that soar across the skies. I provide a safe space for them to feed and breed. I satiate the birds with snakes and frogs and the frogs with insect larvae. Many of the roots, leaves, and fruits I nurture are used by humans and animals alike.
Scaly-breasted munias and mynahs visit me regularly. Feeding on mosquitoes and dragonflies is their thing, as is pecking at the cattail reeds from time to time to refurbish their nests. Toads and frogs join me in welcoming the monsoons with their incessant croaking. The boisterous bullfrogs and green frogs congregate in my waters and the females populate me with their spawn soon after.
If you happen to be in the city of Chennai, a tapestry of colours is what you will see in winter. Greater flamingos colour me pink, feeding leisurely on my shrimp and molluscs. Did you know, flocks of pintails and garganeys fly thousands of miles all the way from Europe to escape the harsh winters there? They vacation in style, while I keep their bellies full with spotfin barbs and carps that they share with the brahminy kites and ospreys here.
I not only provide but also help regulate. I am the receptacle that keeps neighbourhoods and cities from flooding when it rains cats and dogs. And in doing so, I also help preserve soil by filtering, collecting, and retaining sediments that come my way. Furthermore, in slowly letting the water I hold pass through the soil, I systematically help replenish the underground water bank.
Wetland or wasteland?
Deities guard me; people celebrate me.
Yet, despite the reverence, I am severely misunderstood. As water levels dip, my worth is aggressively questioned, threatening my very existence. Would I be more “useful” if I were to metamorphose into a housing complex overnight? Or maybe I would serve people better as a garbage dump, instead? Strangely enough, roads cutting right through me seem acceptable to people, even if it means disorienting flocks of birds that fly thousands of kilometers specifically to nest and feed in my waters. And when I am allowed to remain, my integrity is rarely intact. What harm can a little untreated sewage do, right?
They say streams and rivers remember. When rain falls over a landscape, water finds a way to reach every gully it ever gushed through and depressions it filled up in the past. Water finds me even when I’m altered beyond recognition. Haphazard walkways and streams of sewage may come at me menacingly. Against all odds, I will survive.
I am a wetland.
Illustrations by Anisha Murali and Denver Pereira (u:i:make)
u:i:make is a design practice that concerns itself with making- to reveal processes and stories emerging from simple observations and studies of nature, materials and handwork embedded in a place.
“Nothing better than a grey, gloomy rainy day!” thought little Jhanko (pronounced ‘Django’).
He swirled around waving his little fins, swaying to the rhythm of the raindrops drumming on the surface of the pond. It was cold and hazy—that time of the year again, promising a new adventure.
“There you are!” his mother said as she spotted him, fear and sadness reflected in her eyes. Jhanko was a teenage paradise fish—greyish brown, with a long wavy tail. Black spots that ran from head to tail and his body had a reddish tinge. . His mother, being an adult, had bands on her body instead.
“Ma, why don’t I have bands like you?” he had asked once.
“You will get them when you grow up,” she replied.
“Jhanko, look here, son… It’s time for me to go…” she said to him now, “and you are not yet old enough to join me.”
Jhanko sniffled. He swam up and embraced her tightly, not wanting to let go. He would see her again only after a year, in the following rainy season.
His mother was off to Paradise Land, a place she had described to him vividly in bedtime stories.
“When the first rains of the season come, our home—this shallow, flooded rice field—will be connected to Paradise Land through new streams that will be formed!” she would exclaim.
“In Paradise land, you will make new friends—different kinds of fish from other places. But beware the vicious cranes who will be waiting to snatch you out of the water. Show them your tail and swim away swiftly, until you lose sight of them.”
“There are mosquito larvae and insects for you to eat there. But the best part is the paper boats!” she said.
“Paper boats?” Jhanko was curious now.
“Human children make them. They float on the water. It’s such fun to swim around them! Oh, Jhanko… Paradise Land is a large pond. It’s much deeper than this pond and you have to be careful.”
“It’s time to go, Jhanko,” his mother repeated, as she patted him on the head with a fin. He watched her swim away, through the hazy waters, until she disappeared from sight.
Jhanko dreamed of Paradise Land every day. He dreamed of swimming freely in the large pond, playing with the paper boats, relishing the mosquito larvae, listening to the croaking of frogs, waving his fins to the human children, and showing off his beautiful bands.
A year passed. He missed his mom. Jhanko flaunted his new bands and colours. “Rain, rain, come again,” chanted the fish, as they waited for the first shower of the season. Jhanko gazed at the sky all day. When lightning first streaked across the darkened sky, the fish were overjoyed.
“It’s time to go,” Jhanko said, as he waved his fins, mimicking his mother.
But something was wrong.
Swimming towards the stream in his Ma’s stories, he was shocked to find a huge concrete wall in front of him. Humans had erected it to stop the stream from flowing further.
Where was the large stream in Ma’s stories that connects the paddy field with Paradise Land?
With the way to Paradise Land was closed off, Jhanko’s dreams shattered—all he wanted was to see his mother. The other paradise fish were also clueless and could not guess what had happened.
“Whom should I ask for directions to Paradise Land?” poor Jhanko wondered in confusion.
“Paradise Land was a lie,” he thought, gazing tearily at the dark sky.
Suddenly, Jhanko heard a distant splash. He swivelled around to see a bright yellow thing floating above on the shallow surface. He couldn’t believe it! His eyes sparkled with joy. “It’s… It’s a paper boat!” he shouted.
He saw many more coming down the little stream, all of different colours. He waved at the human children who followed the boats along the stream, trying to draw their attention.
“Hey, this little fish is waving at me,” gasped a boy, waving back at Jhanko. “They must be trying to get to the big pond on the other side of this wall. I have seen a lot of paradise fish moving freely to the pond during the rains before.”
“Poor fish. They are… trapped here,” said another child. “Yeah, you are right. There was no wall here the last time. They are definitely trapped here,” he added. He then ran back to his house and returned with a scoop net.
The children soon started to scoop out the school of fish and released them in the larger pond on the other side of the wall.
Jhanko felt joy and relief, as he waved thanks to the children who helped him and his school. He was finally in the Paradise Land of his dreams. It was bigger than he imagined. The frogs croaked, there were larvae wriggling near the surface. Further ahead, he saw schools of other fish approaching. And at last, he saw his mother waving her fin at him. She darted towards her son and embraced him with joyful tears.
I would like to acknowledge Harshitha Ramamoorthy (researcher at Bombay Natural History Society) for her support in writing this story.
In the midst of the pandemic, an all-too-pervasive piece of evidence of human impact on the natural world, ‘Wild and Wilful’ hit both virtual and quarantined bookshelves. The book—authored by Neha Sinha, a conservation biologist based in Delhi—is a collection of fifteen essays that discusses the building plight of some of India’s most vulnerable and misunderstood species. She divides up her book into four elements—‘earth’ (leopards, rhesus macaques, great Indian bustards, cobras, Asian elephants and tigers), ‘sky’ (tiger butterflies and Amur falcons), ‘water’ (Ganges river dolphins and marsh crocodiles), and ‘heart’ (rosy starlings). These species, carefully selected for their often contentious relationships with people, form the media for her arguments for why people’s ownership over wilderness needs to dissolve into coexistence. This is, however, easier said than done, and some of the challenges of achieving such human–wildlife harmony are highlighted through Sinha’s narrative.
As a rather avid writer of environmental issues, Sinha has highlighted case-specific instances where people’s actions towards endangered wildlife have seemed unwarranted or illogical, through well-documented events from India’s recent past. There is an underlying tone of frustrated indignation, clearly advocating for the concerted preservation of these species. This is especially evident in her accounts of leopards in urban areas, cobras at the hands of “pedestrian bacchanalia”, elephants traversing across roads and railways, and river dolphins navigating through thinning, trafficked waters. Stop-gapped through these laments, Sinha finds beauty in these species, and argues that they are gentle, intelligent and harmless creatures—particularly when unprovoked.
While the book speaks of the wild, striving against odds to make it in the Anthropocene, each essay is, in essence, a reflection of the human condition juxtaposed with shared spaces where people and animals find themselves. Sinha speaks of how people perceive these wild animals in different settings—in the forest versus an urban space, for instance—and comments on how the value of some of these endangered species is lost on the human populace that considers them to be an inconvenience or actively dangerous. Further away from the urban elite, culture and tradition find their way into human–animal interactions, vividly portrayed in the essays about elephants, snakes, and birds. Stories of genuine loss seep into the picture with regard to leopards, tigers, crocodiles, and elephants, felt both by the people and the endangered species. This breadth of topics is ambitious ground to cover, owing to situational differences in on-ground realities across species and landscapes. Sinha has attempted to combine species ecology, the human perspective, scientific voices, known incidents of human–wildlife conflict, and personal experiences to paint a holistic picture of the conservation challenges being faced in India. She manages to do this with varying levels of success as the book progresses. The most insightful are her pieces about tigers, dolphins, and starlings, which reflect her personal involvement and expertise in these landscapes.
Wild and Wilful reads like a book that was written with a well-intentioned sense of urgency. The ecological battles being fought at present across the country highlighted through this book are relevant, and a quick-read such as this one is needed to communicate them to a wider audience. The book aims to touch upon burning topics in the field of conservation in a comprehensive manner—ranging from the wanton translocation of wild animals and frequent deaths of endangered species along railway lines or busy roads, to human deaths caused by large mammals and wide-scale hunting. However, I found that the book often fell short of achieving these goals, and left me craving a more meaningful engagement through the pages.
Neha Sinha’s writing changes voice—at times precise, and at others, verbose. This can be tedious to read, especially in the midst of a riveting anecdote. Serious accounts of conflict and loss give way to tangential metaphors drawn from personal introspection in each chapter. While occasionally poetic and well-placed, they distract from the narrative’s focus, and I found myself having to retrace my steps as a reader. This may, however, be merely a matter of personal preference, with others taking delight in these interspersed ponderings.
Apart from the writing style, the book contains a few factual inaccuracies and sporadic typos which are hard to ignore. In her first essay, Sinha writes, “The Leopard, like all wild animals, had a deep, resonating distrust of people.” Statements like these could drive home a single-sided narrative of wild animals and, by extension, their lives among people. Less problematically, lines like“(The rhesus macaque’s) brown, furry face, its clever fingers and its long, flexible tail are symbols of mischief.” make for fun imagery, despite rhesus macaques having rather short, stubby tails.
Further, a more well-rounded perspective of how human–animal interactions unfold could have added an extra dimension to each essay. Sinha makes some strong statements with unwavering certainty, which make me sceptical of whether those stories are truly as black-and-white. “But relationships between the forest department and villages have never been good…” writes Sinha, in the context of tigers going locally extinct in Sariska Tiger Reserve, a place where she also claims that, “The sole cause for extinction was poaching.” I fear that the lack of multiple perspectives and the singular representation of human versus animal could cultivate a polarized view of on-ground realities in her readers. The reasons for why people feel and behave the way they do towards animals were reflected upon purely in passing, biasing the reader to empathize almost exclusively with the animals in consideration. Or, perhaps, this was the intention all along—driving home the need for urgent action deeper still.
I was occasionally uncertain as to whether Neha Sinha was recounting popular opinion, stating facts or voicing personal beliefs. Concrete statements about animal behaviour and ecology too felt extreme in some cases, for instance,“(The rhesus macaques in Delhi) have lost the one thing that made them wild: they no longer know how to look for food, because they have forgotten how to do so.”
Speckled along the way, Sinha deviates from her deep descriptions to succinctly sum up the dire situations that both wildlife and people find themselves in. Some of these made me smile, while others caused me to pause and think before moving on. She speaks of the Yamuna by saying, “When the river floods, it joins hands with the wetlands in the park, pushing forward a nursery of fish, molluscs, gastropods, hydrophytes, and hope.” The painstaking battle of conserving the great Indian bustard is summarised with, “The mind’s eye has already made a fossil out of a being that is still alive.” Perhaps the most simply, yet powerfully, articulated line from her writing of how people treat wild animals lay buried in her essay on the Asian elephant, “…they are a who, not a what.”
At the end of the day, Wild and Wilful is a book that advocates for India’s wildlife through emotional, impassioned and strongly-worded arguments. By picking species representative of nearly every habitat this country has to offer, and the various circumstances under which people impact their environments, the book provides a fundamental anthology, especially for the uninitiated. Neha Sinha’s first book aspires to educate readers of the several injustices and challenges faced by India’s simultaneously immense human population and teeming biodiversity. While the manner in which it’s been written might not be suited to every reader’s liking, the overarching message that she sends is an important and unavoidable one—“We are part of (the world at large), not owners of it.”
Pangolins, consisting of eight species distributed in Africa and Asia, are one of nature’s most unique creatures. Surviving off a diet of only ants and termites, their tongues can be nearly as long as their bodies, and they roll into a ball when feeling threatened. This provides a third dimension to the flight or fight response—rolling! The most impressive characteristic of pangolins is that they are the only mammals to have an armour made out of keratinous scales (the same material as our fingernails), which likely evolved as a defence mechanism against predators. However, this very characteristic has now become the biggest threat to their survival, as pangolins continue to be illegally traded for their scales (and other body parts) at record levels, primarily for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Around 180,000 pangolins were seized annually by authorities across the globe in the last three years. This, coupled with their recent (and false) link to the COVID-19 pandemic, has resulted in pangolins achieving an iconic status as important species that need to be conserved.
To effectively conserve a species, conservationists need to identify knowledge gaps, think of ways to raise public awareness about their plight, and tackle the major causes of their decline. Yet, since pangolins were practically unknown to many a few years ago, little has been done to address these important aspects for their conservation. We looked at these aspects in our review, where we analyzed pangolin-related publications since 1865, data on accepted patents, online news trends, and societal interest.
We show that there are significant gaps in our knowledge about pangolin immunology, education, and implications of trade or poaching for populations. The conservation research effort is also unequal with a lot of studies on captive breeding and the volume and nature of pangolin trade, but limited research on the rehabilitation of rescued pangolins, the implications of this trade on pangolin populations, other causes of population decline, and people’s perceptions of and levels of awareness about pangolins. The biases do not stop there as some species and geographic regions (i.e. African countries) have received less research attention than others. This begs the question—do we know the full extent of the plight of pangolins, and how do we fill these important knowledge gaps?
The news of an erroneous link between pangolins and COVID-19 is responsible for the largest spike in public interest in pangolins since 2004. However, one wonders whether the public interest in a species—during a time when it is seen as the cause of the pandemic—would result in a “vermin-like” (disease risk) public perception or as a species of conservation importance? Peaks of interest other than COVID-19, such as shocking imagery associated with the trade, documentaries, and interactive Google Doodles on important days of the year like World Pangolin Day, were also identified. However, news of record-breaking seizures of up to 30 tons of pangolins did not elicit as strong a reaction as the aforementioned avenues. Thus, choosing appropriate avenues to elicit public interest may help pangolin conservation.
Many of the patents related to pangolin products are driven by their use in TCM. However, medicinal patents were seemingly not driven by science, which questions the efficacy and danger of the medicines manufactured. The argument for using TCM-based products and patents is that they are supposed to be based off of TCM pharmacopeia, which is an amalgamation of thousands of years of practice in perfecting medicines for various illnesses. We found examples of medicinal patents claiming to cure hepatic fibrosis, cancer and even AIDS, yet these do not align with what is suggested for pangolins by the TCM pharmacopoeia. This not only goes against the reasons for using TCM products but also suggests that there may be another driving force for pangolin patent production—possibly profit. However, more research is needed to confirm these links, and the role of traditional medicine in illegal trade.
From these three lines of information, namely research, popularization, and commercialization, we provided a holistic set of guidelines that we hope will help in the conservation of these unique creatures.
Further Reading
Heighton, S. P. and P. Gaubert. 2021. A timely systematic review on pangolin research, commercialization, and popularization to identify knowledge gaps and produce conservation guidelines. Biological Conservation 256: 109042.
Snakes are everywhere. They live in forests, grasslands, deserts, mountains, oceans, lakes, and rivers. They also live in backyards, dumpsters, drains, apartment complexes, neighborhood parks, and school campuses. Is their presence cause for alarm or celebration? My experience with these shy, misunderstood creatures makes me believe the latter.
After spending thirty years living in Delhi, I shifted to a conservation and research station on a small coconut plantation in rural Karnataka. Let’s just say the move was not entirely smooth. The first hurdle in my new life came in the form of spring onion stalks. I could not tell them apart from grass and may have stomped on one or two. Or a thousand. The next issue to become apparent was that I was not in the habit of watching which tree I was standing under. It took over a year and a near miss with a hefty coconut to shake me out of that inattention. Finally, my life in the city had not taught me to check for snakes before putting my hands and feet where I could not see them. While I had underestimated the trees, I thankfully possessed a very healthy respect for snakes. Learning to live with them became top priority. But not before asking ‘why?’
Why live with snakes at all?
It seems perfectly logical that when we find snakes in our homes, we should send them back to theirs. And ‘their homes’ are, of course, forests far, far away. Right? This means dialing the nearest rescuer to have our scaly intruders relocated would be better for all involved. Except that it isn’t.
Scientists around the world have studied the relocation of snakes by inserting radio trackers and following them around to observe their behaviour. What they discovered was quite shocking. Most snakes die when they are relocated. They stop feeding and move long distances, possibly looking for familiar surroundings. Eventually, they starve to death, which could be a matter of weeks or even months. Not only is this cruel, it is also senseless. When a snake is removed from an area, the prey base (rodents, frogs etc.) increases. This creates improved conditions for one or more snakes to move in. In fact, removing a non-venomous snake is particularly ill-advised because its replacement may turn out to be venomous!
The bottom line is, there is no known way to clear a space of snakes long- term. And this is not a bad thing.
Scaly Encounters
After five years of sharing a space with 18 different snake species I can now vouch for the fact that they make excellent neighbours. A common sand boa (Eryx conicus), lived in a burrow under our front porch for nearly a year. We named him Eryx Clapton and would look forward to seeing him every evening—usually just peeking his head out, occasionally emerging fully for a stroll. Checkered keelbacks (commonly known as the Asiatic water snake), wolf snakes, and trinket snakes are also spotted almost every night around the farm. The onset of the monsoon brings out hundreds of baby checkered keelbacks in our ponds. For us this means hours of entertainment. Imagine tiny, slender hatchlings with disproportionately large heads chasing and clumsily trying to catch fish. It’s hard to look away!
One of the most memorable mornings at home for me was when we saw a pair of spotted owlets repeatedly dive bombing a large spectacled cobra. It managed to get away and climb up a hedge only to find itself directly under a branch where two parakeets were having a tête-à-tête. The curious parakeets leaned over to inspect the cobra until the branch they were perched on suddenly snapped! This resulted in squawks that stretched parakeet vocabulary before they settled down on a higher branch and continued their banter. We were able to stand just a few feet away and watch the entire drama unfold.
Snakes do, of course, play a vital role in maintaining an ecological balance, but they also enrich our lives and homes. This sentiment is easy to relate to when it’s attached to birds and other animals. Once you move past the fear and know how to be safe, snakes are really no different.
So, how do we safely coexist?
The presence of a potentially dangerous animal does not mean there will be conflict. It was hard for me to believe that the key to living with snakes was the simplest of secrets—to spot them before getting too close.
Crevices, holes, piles of construction material and leaf litter are perfect habitats for snakes. At our farm we’ve created them especially to allow their populations to thrive. But, we make sure that walking paths are clear. In spaces where children play, the grass is always cut short, leaf litter is swept away, and there are no dense hedges that start from the ground. It is second nature now to prod tall grass with a stick before stepping into it. We never put our hands or feet where we can’t see them. Noone walks in the dark; using torches is non-negotiable, even on the brightest of nights and on the most familiar of paths. This allows us to see a snake before we invade its personal space. When we do come across a snake, we simply stop and watch from a distance. There is not a single snake that will chase a human being. In fact, in interactions with us, they are never aggressive, only defensive. So the only times we move a snake is if the situation poses a risk. For instance, if it has somehow made its way inside the house, then it needs to be placed outside, to go and find shelter elsewhere.
While we have opted against it, it’s also very possible to reduce the number of snakes around houses. Try walking around your compound looking for places they can hide. The number of openings, cracks, crevices, and piles you find might surprise you. And of course, wherever there are humans, there is garbage. Wherever there is garbage, there are rodents. Wherever there are rodents, there are…. you guessed it! It seems we have inadvertently created luxury hotels with scrumptious buffets for snakes all around us.
The solutions are small and simple. Make sure all waste is collected in closed bins. Cover drains, plug holes and fill in cracks and crevices. Move leaf litter and other piles away from walking paths and play spaces. All of this will cut down the number of snakes you come across.
Having said that, for every snake we see, there are many more in the area we may never get the chance to meet. They stay out of our way and even provide an invaluable service as highly skilled ratraps. All we need to do is be aware of their presence and make small adjustments to safely coexist. With more than seven billion people now on the planet, learning to coexist may be the most important wildlife conservation practice of our time.
The giraffe is an icon of the African subcontinent, and yet, there are many gaps in knowledge about giraffes in the wild and how to best protect them. In the 21 countries where giraffe populations are found, their conservation status differs depending on the species, geography, and threats they face. Coupled with the threats of habitat loss, disease, and climate change, the trade of giraffes and their parts has been proposed as a contributing factor to population declines. However, the impact of trade on wild giraffe populations is rather complex and not well-understood. For instance, the reticulated giraffe (Giraffa reticulata) occurs mostly in Kenya, where all giraffe hunting and trade is illegal. Their numbers have declined by about 50 percent over the last three decades, resulting in an “Endangered” listing by IUCN. In the same timeframe, the population of the southern giraffe (Giraffa giraffa) across Southern Africa has more than doubled. Counterintuitively, hunting and trade of this giraffe species is legal in some countries and managed through permits.
There are fierce public discussions around how giraffe trade contributes to their decline. But it is limited by vast knowledge gaps about the prevalence and purposes of the trade. We set out to shed some light on this issue through an Africa-wide assessment for the first time: Are there different types of trade and are these factors the same throughout the African continent?
We gathered knowledge from 75 giraffe conservation specialists, ranging from local to international NGOs, governments, and academics, alongside 161 peer- and non-peer-reviewed literature sources, found through keyword searches in English and French.
Where are giraffe parts sourced from?
Illegal hunting was the highest-ranked source of giraffe parts (including tails, skin, bones, and meat) in Central and East African giraffe populations. In contrast, legal hunting was ranked as the most common source in Southern African countries. Prominent illegal hunting was reported in Central, East, and West Africa as a cause for concern as the most threatened giraffe species occur in these regions.
Are giraffe parts traded within and across international borders?
Across Central, East, and West Africa, illegal local-scale markets are the primary sinks for giraffe products. In contrast, the predominantly legal trade of giraffes in Southern Africa occurs both domestically and internationally. Though some media sources asserted that giraffe trophies from Southern Africa have negatively impacted wild populations, this association was not supported by data from peer-reviewed literature or our survey of giraffe specialists. Instead, those two information sources highlighted regional differences in the trade and offtake of giraffes with few indications of unpermitted international trade from Southern Africa.
Who is using giraffe parts and for what?
Evidence of use for artisanal crafts, meat as food, traditional medicine, and trophies were prevalent to varying degrees relative to country and region, domestic and international scales, and legal versus illegal trade. Due to this complexity, conservation policies and strategies need to reflect conditions specific to an area and cannot adopt a one-size-fits-all approach. Countries such as Kenya, Niger, Tanzania, and Uganda have developed national giraffe conservation plans that take into account the multiple uses and users of giraffe parts. This approach should be rolled out Africa-wide for each country and each giraffe species.
What are the impacts on wild giraffe populations?
When asked about the occurrence of trade in different giraffe parts, giraffe meat was listed most frequently, though only by a limited number of specialists. Similar uncertainty was reflected in the reviewed literature. The multiple sources, scales, and uses of giraffe parts across range countries, along with the varied approaches to regulate hunting, create a challenging set of conditions to determine the impacts on wild giraffe populations. Moving forward, it is critical to look at each species and country independently rather than apply a cookie-cutter approach.
This assessment is the first step to integrate knowledge about trade into effective conservation policies that protect giraffes in the wild. Instances of international legal giraffe trade will now be monitored due to the 2018 listing of the giraffe in Appendix II of CITES. However, our findings highlight that an enhanced understanding of illegal giraffe hunting and trade within a domestic (national) context is essential so that appropriate conservation management plans can be developed and implemented.
Associated recent conservation publication:
Dunn, M.E., K. Ruppert, J.A. Glikman, D. O’Connor, S. Fennessy, J. Fennessy, & D. Veríssimo. 2021. Investigating the international and pan-African trade of giraffe parts and derivatives. Conservation science and practice. https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.390.
Positionality Statement:
The authors are practitioners based in Europe, North America, and Southern Africa and have conservation and research interests in numerous countries in Africa. The recognition of the lack of knowledge regarding the levels and effects of giraffe trade triggered the interrogation of the research. From their base in Namibia, JF and SF currently facilitate conservation research and management of all giraffe species in 16 African countries. Together, they have a collective experience of over 40 years in Africa. DO’C has been involved in giraffe conservation for over a decade and currently supports collaborative giraffe conservation and research programs across nine countries from a US-based NGO. MD and DV are based in Imperial College London and Oxford University respectively and have conducted research on illegal wildlife trade in several countries. JAG. and KR worked at San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, a US-based NGO, during this project. Their work as social scientists has been enhanced by relationships and knowledge from colleagues in Kenya, where their collaborations centre on human–wildlife interactions.
Wildlife health assessments provide important information for managing threats to endangered species. In our review, we wanted to understand the trends in study design and methods, and suggest future directions to improve conservation efforts. We found that these assessments are similar to those at a general health check at the doctor: a physical examination, blood analysis, and some weight and height measurements. A faecal analysis is also at the top of the list. But performing these procedures in the wild is not that easy, especially when the target species is very difficult to find.
We, therefore, wanted to know: Are researchers from different countries collaborating to study threatened species, and are they sampling enough individuals and in the right locations, to best understand how to protect and manage them?
To answer these questions, we explored 261 studies on wildlife health assessments in the field over the last 30 years. We learned that most studies sampled fewer animals than statistically recommended, which may be related to restrictions in funding, permits, and logistics. Low sample sizes may reduce the accuracy of reference ranges determined for physiological parameters in individual species. We were surprised to find that countries with high and threatened biodiversity were greatly underrepresented. Almost half of the studies were conducted by researchers based in the U.S., and most of the time within their own country. European and Australian studies were also well represented. On the other hand, Asian, African, and South American countries were scarce. We found that international collaboration was rather uncommon, and that it was established by only one third of the researchers. International collaborations are especially important for protecting migratory animals, which often cross jurisdictional boundaries.
Based on our review, we provided a conceptual framework to improve design, data acquisition, and analysis, as well as species conservation planning and management implications. The framework was based on our findings and the existing guidelines for species conservation. We were especially interested in highlighting the following points: (1) What background information is needed before starting a health assessment study; (2) What logistics and resources should be considered; (3) What data and how many samples should be collected and analysed; and (4) How can this information benefit conservation management?
We advocate boosting conservation efforts where they are most needed, and establishing more strategic international collaborations. We suggest following standardized approaches, as well as examining enough individuals to draw impactful conclusions. This way, informed decision making can support healthy wildlife populations and ultimately protect biodiversity.
Further reading:
Deem, S. L., W.B. Karesh, & W. Weisman. 2001. Putting theory into practice: wildlife health in conservation. Conservation biology 15: 1224–1233.
IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) – SSC (Species Conservation Planning Sub-Committee). 2017. Guidelines for species conservation planning. Version 1.0. Gland, Switzerland.
Kophamel, S., B. Illing, E. Ariel, M. Difalco, L.F. Skerratt, M. Hamann, L.C. Ward et al. 2021. Importance of health assessments for conservation in non-captive wildlife. Conservation biology. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13724.
Panelists: Sharon Guynup, Antony Lynam, EJ Millner-Gulland, Milagre Nuvunga and Kartik Shanker
While most people would quickly agree that conservation is an important practice, many might struggle to define what, exactly, it is (for instance, how it differs from preservation), what sorts of activities it involves, how we know to pursue those techniques and not others, and why such efforts are helpful.
These details might arise from expert studies, but they affect us all — which means that we rely on researchers to effectively translate their knowledge into a format that can be widely understood and applied. This is not something that academics typically have a great reputation for doing often or well, but it is an area that has seen steady improvement.
Current Conservationhas long aimed to support this shift, encouraging an increase in the quantity and quality of conversations between scientists and the rest of society. To further this goal, the magazine recently partnered with the Society for Conservation Biology to foster creative, dynamic science communication by conservation researchers to a diverse international audience.
To celebrate this collaboration and provide aspiring writers with a few tips, the two organisations brought together a panel of veteran conservationists with expertise on science communication. Their thoughts on the intersection between science, communication, and conservation are shared below.
Written by – Caitlin Kight and Eduardo Gallo Cajiao
PANELISTS
Sharon Guynup (National Geographic Explorer and a Global Fellow with the Wilson Center in Washington DC.)
Scientists can be powerful agents for change. But as researchers, you’re trained to write for peer-reviewed journals that use acronyms, jargon, and technical language that make your findings inaccessible to many outside your field. The result: Important research often remains locked away in scientific journals.
It’s critical to share your work in a broader, more accessible way so it can have a real impact. People need to understand why your research matters.
How do you engage a wider audience and inspire people to care about important issues when already bombarded with news and social media? It comes down to basic human communication: storytelling.
You need to start by identifying your audience: is it the local community, the general public, policymakers? Distill your message down to the main findings and hone it to your target audience. A news hook related to your work –– a new initiative, an event, or legislation –– helps gain media attention.
Style is another important consideration. Media outlets use an engaging, descriptive, narrative style that avoids acronyms and jargon and uses specifics rather than broad statements. The structure leads with the conclusion, then outlines significance; describes the research, history, context, national or international legal implications; and has a compelling ending. Don’t forget the power of photographs or video. It is also important to consider that, amidst a daily torrent of disturbing news, we all need to hear success stories.
You might want to try writing opinion pieces for newspapers or pitching stories to media outlets that cover science, natural history, or news. That requires a few-paragraph story pitch. “Explorer” grantees from the National Geographic Society’s grant program get a lot of attention. Consider writing a book or working with a film crew on a documentary.
Awareness sparks public understanding and support for conservation of species and ecosystems, and it brings funding. To spark awareness and change, science needs to reach the general public and policymakers.
Now, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, many have been made aware that wildlife, ecosystem health, and human health are deeply interconnected. With this new appreciation of how our wellbeing is inextricably linked with that of the planet, ears are open, offering unique opportunities for impact and change. Share your work!
Tony Lynam (Wildlife Conservation Society, Center for Global Conservation, and SCB’s President-elect)
The Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) is a global network with around 3,500 members, including students, academics, practitioners, and policymakers. Our mission — which we often pursue by partnering with other institutions and organisations that share our values — is to advance the science and practice of conserving Earth’s biodiversity. We do this through supporting our members, publishing journals (Conservation Biology, Conservation Letters and Conservation Science and Practice), providing fellowships and training scholarships, and holding conferences.
It is the last of these that I would like to focus on here. In particular, I’d like to address two questions:
How important are conferences in bringing together academics, practitioners, and policymakers to communicate about science?
If conferences are important, how can we ensure access and participation to those events?
We know from surveys that our members value conferences as opportunities to network and communicate the findings of research and conservation. SCB conferences — global and regional — have been historically well attended. Talks, speed talks, poster sessions, panels, and interactive workshops all offer ways for members to engage with and communicate science. We also offer short training courses at our conferences.
One issue that requires thought and planning is conference location. A study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution found that 40% of conservation and ecology meetings over the last decade were held in places which were perceived as not welcoming to all. If a substantial number of members feel unsafe attending, they might avoid conferences, so we as organizers need to consider ways to ensure access to all.
Our global conference, the International Congress for Conservation Biology (ICCB), provides an important opportunity for participants to join together to communicate an important message on a topic of special interest. For example, at ICCB 2019 in Kuala Lumpur, we issued a Declaration on the Species Extinction Crisis. ICCB participants called on SCB members to urge their organisations, including government agencies, research institutions, non-governmental conservation organisations, and the private sector to contribute to the new Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2021-2030 and support various conservation initiatives.
We are planning to hold ICCB 2021 in Kigali, Rwanda. This will be an opportunity for conservation practitioners to meet and network, and to communicate the important conservation work being done in Africa and around the world.
EJ Milner-Gulland (Tasso Leventis Professor of Biodiversity at the University of Oxford)
I speak as a Professor of Conservation Science in a traditional university. One of the key things to say is that, as scientists, we have to remember that we are part of society and not apart from society. We need to be responding in our science communication to the concerns of our citizens and helping them to empower themselves. I think a lot of what we currently do as scientists instead is to transmit information or to tell people off, to scold them — and people don’t like to be scolded. If you can engage with people on their terms and in their media, then it really helps. In particular, I think we have a responsibility to give hope and resources to people in the wider world about how to make the changes that we all need to make for this to become a more sustainable planet. I think that’s important because people need to feel, in this fairly gloomy time, that there is a way forward.
I’ll illustrate how this works using the example of Conservation Optimism, which I started in 2016 having attended an inspirational talk that Nancy Knowlton of Ocean Optimism gave at the Student Conference on Conservation Science. Conservation Optimism started off as a one-off symposium, but it was brilliant and it was very clear that there was a hunger for this kind of optimism amongst young conservationists — and older ones as well. So here we are five years later and it’s a thriving team of volunteers, an employee and advisors, all of whom are working really closely together to make a difference. Our India hub is now a year old, we’ve just started our UK hub, and we’re hoping to start one in West Africa next year.
Within Conservation Optimism I’ll just point you to one little example that illustrates some of the things that I want to say, and that’s a youth resources section that we have on the website. It started off because during the first wave of Covid-19 in the UK in April 2020, I really felt that teens and young people were suffering and didn’t really understand what was going on, and there was a lot of discussion around wildlife trade in the press. I wanted to give teenagers some information about the illegal wildlife trade and about its relationship to Covid-19; I thought that would be a way to help them.
The scientists in my research group worked to produce some information sheets about the illegal wildlife trade to put on the Conservation Optimism website. The resources were very colourful and lovely, and led on to one of my students doing an Instagram takeover to talk about her work on penguins. It also led to our commissioning a podcast on eco-anxiety from a psychologist. Better still, it then got a life of its own, just self-motivated: For example, some biology students in our university self-organized to make some short videos about how they had interacted with nature during lockdown; the students also shared some of their artwork. We also got a lot of bottom-up content from our broader community.
The lesson which I took from this experience was: It started with something rather traditional, which was the kind of thing that I, as a 50-something-year-old conservation scientist, would want to do. But because there was the opportunity built into the platform for more organic engagement, this starting point blossomed into something that allowed all sorts of people to participate in all sorts of different ways.
Another thing that I and a group of friends started during lockdown is an initiative called Pledge for Our Future Earth, which is a platform helping people to get inspired about changing their relationship to nature, to find resources about how to do this, and then actually commit to changing their behaviour.
I would not say that I am the greatest science communicator. I’m a fairly traditional academic conservation scientist. We all have our limits, but I do feel that over the time that I’ve been in academia, I have learned — I’ve made myself learn — how to communicate better with different audiences, even though I might not have wanted to. I can do better and I am getting there! The other thing is that I’ve been really trying to facilitate the early career researchers in my group (and other people who I come into contact with) to embrace the ‘pain’ of science communication and realize that it’s not so bad. I try to mentor them so they have the confidence to communicate their work and to see it as an integral part of their role as conservation scientists. Then they can come up with novel, more imaginative ways of communicating!
Milagre Nuvunga (Cofounder and Executive Director, the Micaia Foundation, Chimoio, Central Mozambique)
I work in central Mozambique and I consider that my work puts me in that interface between scientific and indigenous knowledge, and common practice. I look at myself as a conduit, in that I facilitate processes that enable communities living in biodiversity-rich areas to make decisions based not only on their own knowledge but also on existing science as well as national and international policies. Most of those areas are targeted for conservation either by the state or by the world, and communities need to be able to negotiate ensuing tensions — to use their knowledge as a basis to translate and interpret scientific information and national policies and legislation, so they can develop strategies that will enable their incorporation into their daily lives.
When asked about science communication for biodiversity communication, I immediately focus on the channels and tools we should have at our disposal, or work on developing, to be able to facilitate communication of scientific research findings and to the wider public. I think it is particularly important to consider interactions with communities living in biodiversity-rich areas — people whose lives and livelihoods could be impacted by research findings, particularly if these lead to the assignment of higher conservation status.
When we engage with communities, we assume, of course, that they have and use indigenous knowledge to inform their life choices (it is an assumption in the case of Mozambique as communities have been displaced several times by wars and extreme climatic events). We assume community life is often based on the understanding they have of the natural systems within or around which they live. As the scientific community brings in different ways of translating that knowledge, of deepening it or even bringing in new dimensions that might challenge existing knowledge, we need to establish how these findings can be shared effectively in order to enable communities to analyze the information for themselves. This could facilitate a process that would enable communities to decide if this new information warrants changes to local resource management and, therefore, the definition of new rules and regulations. This process could help them engage positively with policymakers.
Effective science communication, therefore, can help nature-dependent communities decide how best to use their resources to ensure the sustainability of their lives and livelihoods – for instance, what species to use and how to use them. This is particularly true in areas where there are nature-based value chains that could be affected by new scientific information.
Kartik Shanker (Faculty at the Centre for Ecological Sciences. Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and Founding trustee, Dakshin Foundation)
We largely think about science communication as communicating our ideas and knowledge to different stakeholders. We talk about putting science in language thatis intelligible to policymakers, bureaucrats, civil society, etc. Almost every non-profit has some sort of environmental education program, where we’re trying to communicate to children or youth. And while I think that those are all very important goals, they miss a few things.
First, for true engagement, I think it’s really important to go from ‘communicating science to society’ to ‘connecting scientists to society’. As a first step towards this, we get the scientific community to write for us at Current Conservation, rather than have their work mediated by professional writers.
Going a step further, communication really needs to be a two-way street — and science itself can serve as a bridge. Citizen science may have started out as a way for scientists to collect data at larger spatial and temporal scales, but one of the things that citizen science does really well is engaging civil society with the world of knowledge through the medium of science. Through our work at Dakshin, particularly with fishing communities, we are finding that science is actually a very effective way to bridge communication barriers between communities, the state, and us. I’ve said elsewhere that science is the ‘lingua franca’ of the state – data and graphs and figures and so on. For communities that bear knowledge in a different form, science can become their English, their way of talking to the rest of the world.
Finally, I think it is really critical to use different media for communication, such as art and music and theatre. We need to use all these different bridges to share knowledge with each other, as, actually, humans have done for centuries. It’s like scientists didn’t get the memo. But we have that opportunity now to dig deep and find creativity along other axes, and make science whole by engaging the world in it.
Final remarks
Science communication has been long recognised as a key tool to advance biodiversity conservation. Roles can include shaping attitudes, raising awareness of issues, reducing uncertainty for decision-making at various levels, garnering support for conservation actions, and promoting accountability of publicly funded research. However, barriers may seem to still be present amongst conservation scientists, which can range from issues such the science-advocacy divide, low incentives within the academic system, lack of appropriate training, to insufficient knowledge of editorial processes outside the peer-reviewed system and a lack of networks within the journalism realm.
This great panel on science communication was largely aimed at addressing some of these concerns, yet we know there is a long road to further increase our science communication footprint. By definition, science communication entails the approaches to transmit scientific knowledge to non-scientific audiences. In a conservation context, science plays a key role by helping us improve problem definition and reducing uncertainty for decision making. Considering that decision-making at various levels is what ultimately must change in order to advance biodiversity conservation, we can only hope that conservation scientists take advantage of Current Conservation as an outlet to increase their impact in conservation practice.
Laced along our world’s coastlines are a mosaic of highly productive habitats. Coastal ecosystems, such as mangroves, tidal marshes, and seagrass meadows, straddle the line where land meets the sea and form the foundations of complex and interconnected marine systems. Beyond their beauty and wonder, the ecosystem services they provide are far-reaching. They play a critical role in reducing coastal erosion, protecting shorelines from storms by dissipating wave energy. They aid water filtration and are an important source of building materials and fuelwood. They also protect adjacent habitats, such as coral reefs, from sedimentation and provide habitats that support important wildlife, including many fish species that are essential to the livelihoods and food security of coastal people.
Like their land-based counterparts, the salt-tolerant plants that make up these habitats absorb light and carbon dioxide to power photosynthesis, produce food, and grow. In turn, the carbon absorbed becomes part of their biomass and soils, commonly referred to as coastal “blue carbon”.
Despite occupying only a small percentage of the world’s oceans, coastal habitats sequester and store more carbon per unit area than terrestrial forests, accounting for approximately half of the carbon sequestered in ocean sediments worldwide. If left undisturbed, carbon can be locked away in their soils for millennia, offering a valuable natural solution to mitigating rising carbon dioxide emissions. However, these habitats are being destroyed as quickly as they absorb carbon.
Coastal ecosystems are disappearing at an alarming rate from shorelines every year due to pressure from coastal development, fishing, pollution, and climate change. Once gone, so too will the wealth of ecosystem services they provide, and their role in climate mitigation will be reversed. Experts estimate that the loss of these habitats contributes to 3–19 percent of global emissions produced from deforestation worldwide. At current conversion rates, vast amounts of these habitats could be lost in the next 100 years, with devastating consequences to coastal communities and at a considerable cost to humanity.
In recent years, the excitement around blue carbon and financing the conservation of coastal habitats has grown because of the potential to bring a new level of investment into ocean and intertidal ecosystem conservation. Mitigating the loss of these habitats can be achieved through several mechanisms, including avoided loss and degradation, as well as ecosystem restoration. Mangrove blue carbon conservation projects, such as the Tahiry Honko project in Madagascar and the Mimoko Pamoja initiative in Kenya, have shown considerable promise. These formally certified Plan Vivo carbon credits offer a potential route for communities to reap sustainable long-term finance from the international carbon market. But the certification, which has only very recently started expanding to include seagrass ecosystems, is complex and realistically beyond most communities, without considerable scientific support. Similar, ideally simpler, impact-based initiatives, must be the way forward. This will place the coastal communities, who undoubtedly have the greatest long-term interest in their success, at the forefront of these efforts.
Conservation initiatives that place people at the heart of their strategy can help build self-sustaining models, which diversify incomes and generate capital that can be reinvested back into locally-led conservation efforts. This approach offers a new and exciting opportunity to support the costs associated with managing and restoring habitats. It also empowers communities with the skills and means to protect their marine areas for both local and global benefit.
Building off lessons learnt from restoring and protecting mangrove habitats, eyes are being turned to other carbon-rich coastal ecosystems to explore the opportunities available for financing their conservation and integrating the needs of people into their approach.
Communities must lead the seagrass revolution
Seagrass is found on all continents except Antarctica. Despite only covering 0.1 percent of the ocean floor, it accounts for 12 percent of the total organic carbon stored in the ocean. They are also important nursery grounds for over a fifth of the world’s largest fisheries, bolstering life along our coasts.
Although research interest in seagrasses has grown, gaps in our knowledge about these super plants and their role in carbon sequestration still remain. Worldwide, we know that seagrass habitats are in decline, but site-specific data are virtually non-existent, impeding the conservation of these important habitats across the globe
Spanning five different countries—Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, and Timor-Leste—the Seagrass Ecosystem Services Project aims to improve the conservation status of seagrass meadows throughout the Indo-Pacific, by incorporating an innovative, holistic and community-centred approach. A first of its kind, this project will assess the health, threats, and ecosystem services provided by seagrass habitats, and empower coastal communities through hands-on data collection and locally-led marine management. The information collected by communities will then be used to inform decision-making and help shape policy at local and national levels.
To fund and sustain long-term locally-led seagrass conservation and marine management, this project supports the development of dual-purpose community businesses that offer alternative livelihoods and income streams away from unsustainable extractive practices, whilst directly funding community conservation efforts that protect and restore seagrass and their ecosystem services. Working closely with communities, innovative ecotourism, aquaculture, and blue carbon credit business models are being explored. These models showcase to communities the added value of conservation and the benefits of a healthy marine environment, whilst building community capacity and reducing dependency on fishing as a main source of income.
The future
Models like these hold the potential to achieve something that few other projects have managed. They enable marine conservation to make economic sense to those most reliant on the ocean’s resources. It offers those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate and ecological breakdown, overfishing, and global pandemics, a chance to become more resilient to socio-economic and environmental shocks, whilst empowering them with the skills and resources to safeguard and manage their marine areas. Through this, coastal people can secure a future for themselves and their communities for generations to come. A future that doesn’t come at the cost of the environment and paves the way for a more sustainable and healthy blue planet.
Further reading
Duarte, C. M., Kennedy, H., Marbà, N., and Hendriks, I. 2013. Assessing the capacity of seagrass meadows for carbon burial: current limitations and future strategies. Ocean Coastal Management 83: 32–38.
Oreska, M.P.J., McGlathery, K.J., Aoki L.R., Berger, A.C., Berg, P. and Mullins, L. 2020. The greenhouse gas offset potential from seagrass restoration. Scientific Reports 10: 7325.
Shillanda, R. Grimsditch, G. Ahmed, M. Bandeira, S. Kennedy, H. Potourogloue, M. Huxhama, M. 2021. A question of standards: adapting carbon and other PES markets to work for community seagrass conservation. Marine Policy 129: 104574.
