Endangered Species

 Species or People? - no, it's both

By Mark Rowe (for IUCN)

The environment movement has been accused in the past of putting plants before people. But, as IUCN – The World Conservation Union prepares for its Congress in November, there is an increasing recognition that the health of the planet is directly linked to the health of those who live on it. How can the conservation of our forests and other ecosystems tackle poverty?
 

Created in 1948, IUCN -- The World Conservation Union brings together 78 States, 114 government agencies, 800 plus NGOs, and some 10,000 scientists and experts from 181 countries in a unique worldwide partnership. IUCN’s mission is to influence, encourage and assist societies throughout the world to conserve the integrity and diversity of nature and to ensure that any use of natural resources is equitable and ecologically sustainable.

IUCN is the world's largest environmental knowledge network and has helped over 75 countries to prepare and implement national conservation and biodiversity strategies. IUCN is a multicultural, multilingual organization with 1000 staff located in 62 countries. Its headquarters are in Gland, Switzerland.

The Congress is the governing body of IUCN – The World Conservation Union. It is held every four years and represents the world’s largest democratic environmental forum where governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) jointly establish conservation priorities, guide the Union’s policy and approve its Programme.

The 3rd IUCN World Conservation Congress will be held from 17-25 November 2004 in Bangkok, Thailand, under the theme: “People and Nature – only one world”.

Is environmental protection a luxury for poor countries? Conventional wisdom has argued “get rich first, clean up later”. Forests and other ecosystems, according to this argument, will only get the protection they need when poverty has been alleviated and higher levels of economic development attained.

Increasingly, this notion is being seen as untrue. Thinking in development and conservation circles has shifted significantly in recent years. Instead of setting environmentalists and development agencies against one another, there is now widespread recognition that social, economic and environmental issues are inter-related. If used sustainably, forests, wetlands and other natural systems can act as a safety net against destitution and even raise people permanently above the poverty line.

“Each year, forest products generate tens of billions of dollars of income in developing countries ,” said David Kaimowitz, Director General of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) . “Poor people would be a lot better off if a greater portion of that came to them either as direct income or through government services financed by timber taxes. Fortunately, many countries are increasingly recognising the importance and potential of community forest ownership.”

The concept of sustainable development first gained real currency at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. It encourages us to blend environmental protection, social care, and economic development. While economic development has often been driven by unsustainable exploitation of the environment, recent thinking argues that these three elements are not mutually exclusive. In short, forests destroyed upstream result in greater flooding downstream; land cleared for cattle soon becomes overgrazed and eroded; but sustainable use allows their value to be exploited indefinitely.

Conservationists admit they haven’t always got the balance right in the past. According to CIFOR, the well-intentioned policy of closing forests in Nepal to save them from over-exploitation actually ended up hurting charcoal makers who traditionally depended on forests for their livelihood. “In the past few years we have seen the will to move in the direction of a better connection between conservation and sustainable development issues, human well-being and poverty,” said Gonzalo Oviedo, senior advisor for social policy with IUCN. “That’s a fundamental change, even though conservation and development objectives may not always be compatible.”

Extreme poverty, says Mr Oviedo, is often present in areas where conservationists are trying to conserve biodiversity. “Poverty and the environment are not mutually exclusive, as some people in this sector used to think,” he said. “We can’t ignore the implications that conservation has for poverty. It’s impossible to achieve your aims for biodiversity if you don’t address the social situation and vice versa. Poor people in rural areas are those who depend most directly on natural resources and biodiversity.”

So what role do forests play in tackling poverty? Forest can offer health benefits, by protecting the quality and quantity of water supplies. They also provide important defences against sickness for rural families who lack access to formal health care systems. In North Africa and the Middle East , medicinal plants are seen as an important source of income as well as accessible medicine. Many communities that produce medicinal plants to sell do so by taking the plants direct from the forest.

“Hundreds of millions of poor people depend heavily on food, medicines, energy, and the agricultural inputs they get from the forest. Those things won’t make these people rich, but they will make their lives easier until they are able to find some way to really improve their incomes,” says Mr Kaimowitz.

For several years, IUCN has run a project in Laos , focussing on sustainable harvesting regimes for bitter bamboo shoots and wild cardamom in Nam Pheng, a village in the northwest of the country. Before IUCN became involved, drinking and washing water came mostly from a stream passing through the village. Diarrhoea and malaria were prevalent. The villagers’ main source of cash income was non-timber forest products (NTFPs), such as bamboo, which was bartered on a small scale to traders exporting to China and Thailand for clothes and food.

The project supported a village rice bank, which addressed the villagers’ most pressing need of guaranteed food. Other crucial steps were remarkably simple. Villagers were taught to use weighing scales, which gave them more confidence to command higher prices. Bamboo brings each seller an average of 1 million Kip per year (US$93) and accounts for 40% of household income. Following the success of bitter bamboo, a similar regime was set up for cardamom. This raised the price for cardamom from 500 Kip/kg (US$4 cents) to 35,000 Kip/kg (US$3.26). Around 10% of each sale is placed in an NTFP Fund, which has supported community projects, including the construction of a school, the purchase of an electric generator, and interest-free loans. Between 1998 and 2000, 17 million Kip (US$1,586) accumulated in this fund.

The benefits to the villagers are clear: poverty rates dropped by at least 50%; the number of poor households fell by 23%; the number of middle-income houses increased by 10%. Child mortality of children under five was eradicated.

How has this helped the environment? The economic value of NTFPs has provided incentives for villagers to manage forests, including the 515 hectares they have allocated as bamboo forest. Villagers say the project “opened their eyes” to NTFPs, which has meant an appreciation of forests as an economic asset as opposed to the more commonly assumed economic hindrance. It also helped IUCN to build trust among villagers in a conservation project and reduced threats of over-harvesting in forests.

Other ecosystems, such as wetlands, play a similarly crucial role. In many places in Africa , the usual pattern of rainfall means that, for much of the year, water is scarce. For this reason, the capacity of wetlands to retain moisture for long periods, and sometimes throughout the year, makes them a valuable resource for agriculture. In many areas they are inextricably linked to cropping and livestock management systems.

The Barotse Floodplain in Zambia illustrates how poor people rely on wetlands, and on natural cycles, to produce a diverse range of crops and incomes. Barotse covers an area of some 550,000 hectares, almost half of the region’s total wetland cover. The plain is home to 225,000 people. During the dry season, the bulk of local production, economic activity and settlement are focused in the floodplain area. As the plain becomes inundated, most of the population moves to the uplands and plain fringes.

The inhabitants depend on a mixed livelihood, combining crop farming, livestock keeping and fishing. As mono-cultures are extremely vulnerable to collapse and over-exploitation, this diversity is crucial, for it is an effective means of spreading risk. Products include maize, rice, sweet potatoes, sugar cane, fruit and vegetables. The Barotse Floodplain is known to be one of the most productive cattle areas in the country. When the floodplain becomes fully inundated, fish are mainly caught using traditional maalelo traps.

The floodplain population makes use of a wide range of wetland plants, animals and natural resources for their daily subsistence and income. Almost all households harvest grass, reeds and papyrus for use in house construction, thatching, mat and basket production, broom making and fishing apparatus construction. Clay is also important, used for house construction and pottery. Typically, the gross financial value per household of the wetlands is US$417 a year, which is significant when compared to the country’s GDP per capita of US$354. In total, local use of wetland resources in the Barotse Floodplain has a net economic value of some US$8.64 million a year.

“Barotse is absolutely critical,” said Lucy Emerton, head of IUCN’s Ecosystems and Livelihoods Group Asia. “It forms the basis of the people’s food, income, fuel, medicines, building materials, pasture and agriculture. The seasonality of the flooding also dictates their seasonal movements and livelihood activities, where their settlements are and how they are organized.”

But such systems are vulnerable to the increasing pressures of economic and population growth. These threats take us back to that notion that you get rich first, clean up later. Resource over-exploitation, land drainage and encroachment for agriculture, and interference with river hydrology for large-scale hydropower and irrigation. In Pakistan , the inappropriate exploitation of the environment is causing wide-spread concern.

The country’s socio-economic development plans depend heavily on expanding land under irrigated crops. Pakistan , drawing on glacial waters from the Himalaya and the Karakorum that feed the Indus River , has one of the most developed irrigation systems in the world. In the past 60 years, Pakistan has built a network that includes three major reservoirs, 43 main canals, and 89,000 watercourses totalling 1.65 million km. These feed 15 million hectares of farmland, and use up 60% of the Indus ’s water. This has helped large-scale commercial users and driven Pakistan ’s hydropower schemes.

But what about the communities downstream? According to Mohummad Tahir Qureshi, Programme Director for IUCN’s Coastal Ecosystem Unit in Pakistan , some 1.5 million people are dependent on mangrove forests in the Indus delta for fisheries, fuel and fodder. The annual value of catch from mangrove-dependent fish species in the delta is around US$20 million. Shrimps have a domestic value of US$70 million and an export value of US$105 million.

But the vast abstraction of water from the Indus has, says Mr Qureshi, left insufficient flow to meet the needs of downstream ecosystems, in particular the mangrove forests on the coast around the Indus Delta. By increasing the salinity of the coastal waters, fisheries production has been hit, crippling local populations.

Mr Qureshi believes that development upstream actually hinders the long-term development of the whole Indus basin. “Due to the change in ecological conditions, the mangrove ecosystem has been degraded and its resources have depleted at an alarming rate,” he said. “This threatens natural resources and the livelihoods of a large number of fishermen. It’s now becoming clear that the irrigation system is approaching the limit of water exploitation and that this exploitation has had considerable environmental, social and economic costs.”

Mr Oviedo believes political support, at the national and international level, is crucial in order for such policies to change. “It’s fundamental,” he said. “Some countries have a one-dimensional approach to the question of environment. They just don’t see the connection. But if we ignore the environmental element, poverty will increase in the long term.”

Mark Rowe is a freelance writer based in Bristol, UK. This article is provided for reproduction free of charge by IUCN – The World Conservation Union. The article can be reproduced in any way, as long as due acknowledgment is given to IUCN and the author, and the meaning of the article is not changed.

Back to the Endangered Species page