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Protecting Parks, Empowering People: Innovative Conservation and Development Projects in Mozambique and Zambia
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Wildlife areas and parks are designed to preserve plant and animal life in biological hotspots, but what about the people who live nearby these hotspots? In many parts of East Africa, communities press right up against park boundaries and people have few alternatives but to draw on the natural resources of protected areas. Conservation efforts depend on these communities’ cooperation and the sustainability – both environmentally and economically – of their livelihoods. [Video Below]
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Wilson Center Premieres ‘Healthy People, Healthy Environment’ and ‘Transcending Boundaries’ at Environmental Film Festival
›Environmental security and international development aren’t typical movie-going fare, but at the 2013 DC Environmental Film Festival, ECSP premiered two short documentaries with unique environmental stories: Healthy People, Healthy Environment: Integrated Development in Tanzania shows how improving health services and environmental conservation can empower coastal communities in Africa; and Transcending Boundaries: Perspectives from the Central Albertine Rift Transfrontier Protected Area Network explores the opportunities for “peace parks” along the shared borders of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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UNEP Highlights Environmental Impacts on Health in Africa
›March 20, 2013 // By Carolyn Lamere
While it can be convenient to think of human health and the environment as unrelated silos, they are in fact closely related. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) recently released a report underscoring this point especially for Africa, where large numbers of people are directly reliant on natural resources for their livelihoods.
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Autumn Spanne, The Daily Climate
Colombia’s Unexplored Cloud Forests Besieged by Climate Change, Development
›December 13, 2012 // By Wilson Center Staff
The original version of this article, by Autumn Spanne, appeared on The Daily Climate.
Five hours by truck and mule from the nearest town, a rumbling generator cuts through the silent night to power large spotlights as botanists crouch and kneel on large blue tarps spread across a cow pasture. It’s nearly midnight, and the team works urgently to describe every detail of the dozens of colorful orchids, ferns, and other exotic plants they have collected that day in Las Orquídeas National Park, one of the single most biologically diverse places on the planet.
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Linking Biodiversity and WASH Efforts in Africa
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Sub-Saharan Africa is a key region both for conservationists and those working for improved public health. Nine of the world’s 34 biodiversity hotspots are in sub-Saharan Africa, as are two of the five most important wilderness areas. This hotbed of biodiversity is also home to many of the world’s most rapidly growing populations and swelling urbanization, which is putting increased pressure on natural resources.
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Peacemakers or Exclusion Zones? Saleem Ali on Transboundary Peace Parks
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“Traditionally, natural resources have been thought of as a source of conflict…but what we’ve been trying to do is look at the other side of the story, which is that natural resources, in terms of their quality, can create that impulse for conservation and cooperation,” said Saleem Ali, professor of environmental studies and director of the Institute for Environmental Diplomacy and Security at the University of Vermont, while speaking at the Wilson Center.
This narrative around peace parks or transboundary conservation areas that are used for peacebuilding is a relatively recent field of research, said Ali. “It’s one thing to have a protected area on a border and have cooperation between friendly parties – like the U.S. and Canada,” he said, “and it’s a totally different thing to explore this in areas where there’s a history of protracted violent conflict.”
Yet, Ali said, we have “a good institutional framework for understanding what kind of parks could potentially be developed.” Cooperation between Ecuador and Peru in the Cordillera del Condor protected area, for example, is an incidence where transboundary conservation was actually written into the peace process between two warring states. Recent tragedies on the Siachen glaciers highlight another case where calls have been made to use peace parks as a way to demilitarize a contentious border over which India and Pakistan have long argued.
Questions remain though about the capacity of conservation processes to sustain peace, and “whether micro-conflicts that might arise through any conservation being practiced can be managed effectively.” Peace parks established in South Africa after apartheid, for example, produced “micro-conflicts between the haves and the have-nots – the classic conflict between conservation as an exclusionary arena versus a more inclusionary vision.”
“A lot of those organizations have learned from those past mistakes and we’re moving in the right direction,” Ali said, “but that’s still an area that requires far more research, and also more applied work, to find the right mix of conservation and economic development.” -
John Williams: Helping People and Preserving Biodiversity Hotspots
›March 16, 2012 // By Schuyler Null“Both humans and the number of species in the world are not evenly distributed across the globe,” said John Williams of the University of California, Davis, who recently spoke at the Wilson Center about his contribution to Biodiversity Hotspots: Distribution and Protection of Conservation Priority Areas. “In particular we find that species diversity is concentrated in what’s called the biodiversity ‘hotspots.’”
Largely in the tropics, Mediterranean climates, and along mountain chains, biodiversity hotspots are “where there’s a real concentration in number of species and also unique species – plants and animals that exist nowhere else on Earth,” he said.
“It’s a very complex relationship between biodiversity and human population, because it’s not necessarily [true] that places of high human population are a threat to biodiversity,” said Williams. Many different factors play a role, “like education, like consumption, like economic development, different cultures – how people interface with the natural world – all these things create nuances as far as what that relationship is between biodiversity and where people live.”
“There are some basic things we can do that are going to be good for human welfare, as well as biodiversity,” he continued. A few are addressing lack of education, especially among girls, in areas of high biodiversity; providing basic health services, including family planning, where rural growth rates are highest; and improving physical access to rural areas to promote economic development.
“We see there’s a direct correlation between each additional year of schooling a girl has and their fertility during their lifetime,” Williams said. “As people climb out of poverty, they also choose to have smaller, healthier families.” -
More People, Less Biodiversity? The Complex Connections Between Population Dynamics and Species Loss
›March 8, 2012 // By Laurie Mazur
“For if one link in nature’s chain might be lost, another and another might be lost, till this whole system of things should vanish by piece-meal.”
~ Thomas Jefferson, 1799This much is clear: As human numbers have grown, the number of species with whom we share the planet has declined dramatically. While it took about 200,000 years for humanity to reach one billion people around 1800, world population has grown sevenfold since then, surpassing seven billion last year.
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