Despite the development of many indices measuring human well-being impacts of conservation interventions, the strength of such evidence is still inconsistent and inaccessible. This USAID-funded BRIDGE (Biodiversity Results and Integrated Development Gains Enhanced) project presentation by Samantha Cheng, Ph.D., summarizes recent evidence on the impacts of conservation interventions on human well-being. Â
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Highlights from the first year implementation of the ABCG’s working group on Global Health Linkages to Biodiversity COnservation: Linking Freshwater Conservation and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (FW-WASH) were discussed at this event. The  task aims to generate information on the impacts of infrastructure developments on watersheds in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the impacts of freshwater conservation in meeting WASH goals. By linking freshwater conservation and WASH, ABCG expects reduced watershed degradation and pollution will improve the health of freshwater ecosystems and species. Presentations will include project experiences from South Africa (Conservation International (CI) and Conservation South Africa, CI’s local affiliate) and Uganda (the Jane Goodall Institute) that are building on tools developed previously under ABCG.
Janet Edmond is the Senior Director for Peace and Development Partnerships in the Policy Center for Environment and Peace at CI. Ms. Edmond has more than 26 years of experience managing integrated health, development and biodiversity conservation programs in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. She has more than 17 years technically and financially managing US Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded health, development and environment grants and cooperative agreements and holds a Masters in Public Health from Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.
Colleen Sorto co-leads an initiative at CI to improve collaboration with humanitarian relief and development organizations by forming partnerships centered on integrated approaches to development and environmental conservation. Previously, Ms. Sorto spent five years developing and implementing CI’s global freshwater strategy, with a focus on promoting integrated landscape planning and field-based partnerships with development organizations in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Â
Peter Apell is the Programs Director for the JGI – Uganda. He has over 14 years’ experience in developing and managing multifaceted integrated conservation and development programs in Africa. During his tenure at JGI, Peter has played a major role in seeking alternative and sustainable options that address livelihood-centered conservation threats while maximizing socioeconomic and environmental benefits. Peter holds degrees in Sustainable International Development and in Veterinary Medicine with a focus on wildlife health.
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Watch an introductory video on Conservation South Africa’s One Health program below.
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Conservation has frequently been limited by an inability to secure the financing needed to achieve impact at scale. Local communities and small-scale producers, if provided with the right incentives and enabled to manage their land and natural resources sustainably, stand to be a powerful force in achieving conservation aims and responding to some pressing global environmental challenges. However, conservation action often requires up-front costs with delayed returns, which often are a strong disincentive and hindrance for communities and small scale producers alike.
Simultaneously, it is estimated that about 270 million small-scale producers worldwide (48 million in Africa) and their wider communities are under-served by finance institutions and in need of about $200 billion of financing. In short the world’s small holders are seeking access to the finance they need to advance and improve their farms and livelihoods. This presents an unrivalled opportunity to develop a system of finance that rises to this challenge, while enabling and incentivizing small-scale producers to improve the sustainability, resilience and environmental footprints of their farming, forestry and fishing practices, as a condition of their access to this finance.
On October 17, 2016, Andrew Williams, co-founder of F3 Life share how, together with the Climate Policy Institute and other partners, they are putting together the first phase of a climate-smart lending platform, which will pilot the requisite financing, systems and tools for taking performance-based environmental lending to scale.Â
Featured Speaker
Andrew Williams
Andrew’s conservation and natural resource management career began on Zanzibar where he was part of a team that created Tanzania’s first multi-use national park with community participation baked into the park’s governance and community benefits flowing from a revolving fund. Since then he has been involved in several conservation-related start-ups in East Africa, that have consecutively focussed on collective policy advocacy, organisational development and latterly conservation finance. Andrew currently is a co-founder of F3-Life, a social enterprise that provides the tools and systems to enable environmentally-conditional lending to small holders – working with both banking and community-level savings institutions. This new approach is designed to be highly adaptable and scalable in delivering a more financially effective and sustainable solution towards overcoming large-scale climate and ecosystem management challenges.
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Urbanization is rapidly changing the face of the African continent. While only one in 10 people lived in urban areas in 1900, almost half of all sub-Saharan inhabitants now live in towns and cities. The growing Central African urban bushmeat problem is a direct result of this population shift from rural areas to urban centers and the consumer choices people are making. The Wildlife Conservation Society, and its partners, Endangered Species International, Renatura, and YoYo Communications, are conducting a two-year, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service-funded pilot project to identify the key drivers behind urban bushmeat consumption in Pointe Noire, Republic of Congo, a city of approximately 1 million located on the Atlantic coast about 100 miles north of the mouth of the Congo River and 60 miles south of Conkouati-Douli National Park. Â
The goal of this project is to reduce the hunting threat to wildlife populations around nearby protected areas by developing an approach that raises societal awareness, builds constituencies and support, and uses a first-of-its-kind mass media behavior change campaign to reduce the level of bushmeat consumption. The speakers of this ABCG seminar on October 11, 2016 describe the interdisciplinary framework of the project and present preliminary criminology, social, and market research results which will be used to develop the campaign.
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Feaured Speakers
Dr. Michelle Wieland, Socio-economic Advisor, WCS Africa Program
Michelle Wieland lives in Kinshasa, DRC and has worked across Africa since 1999. She focuses on the people-biodiversity interface, engaging in interventions that secure socially and ecologically sustainable livelihoods, help governments to develop programs to engage people in wildlife conservation initiatives, and contribute to broader program monitoring and local buy-in. Michelle currently works with WCS field teams across Africa to strengthen socio-economic capacity, establish M/E frameworks for wellbeing and governance, improve intervention frameworks, and to build up programs and partnerships for addressing bushmeat threats.
Lucie Escouflaire, Pointe Noire Urban Bushmeat Coordinator, WCS Congo
Lucie Escouflaire completed her Masters’ Degree in International Relations and Risk Management in Developing Countries at the Political Sciences Institute in Bordeaux (France). In 2014, she started working with WCS as a consultant on firewood consumption and the implementation of fast-growing trees’ plantations in the Plateau Batéké Landscape. She then worked for a year as the community development coordinator for this Landscape. Since 2016 she is the Urban Bushmeat Project Coordinator in Pointe-Noire.
Rachel Boratto, PhD Candidate, Michigan State University
Rachel Boratto is a doctoral student in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. Her research interests include conservation criminology, wildlife crime, transnational trafficking, anti-poaching strategy and wildlife management. Â She holds an M.S. in Natural World Heritage Management from University College Dublin, Ireland and a B.S. in Biological Sciences from the University of Guelph, Canada.
Biodiversity conservation in the context of extractives is associated with the collapse of resource regimes, which occurs as a result of increased pressures on resources from new practices or people. It also can be credited to the political and economic insecurity that arises from criminality, patronage networks and generally from conflict/post-conflict conditions. USAID’s Political Economy Assessment (PEA) framework provides the structure for analyzing the power and politics behind resource conflicts across scales and sectors. This type of analysis can help understand not simply how the extractive industries impact conservation goals.Â
A panel discussion on September 20, 2016 presented case studies from Integra LLC, a USAID implementing partner, in collaboration with the USAID Bureaus for Africa; Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance; and Economic Growth, the Environment, and Education to examine three examples of apparently intractable problems in biodiversity conservation linked to extractive industries. They were: Illegal artisanal gold mining in Kahuzi-Biéga National Park, DRC Land use and oil and gas development in the Albertine region of Uganda Unsustainable fishing pressure in coastal Madagascar.
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Moderator: Brooke Stearns Lawson, Senior Conflict and Crime Advisor, USAID Bureau for Africa.  Brooke focuses on transnational organized crime, political economy assessment, conflict, and non-state armed groups such as the Lord’s Resistance Army. Previously Brooke worked at RAND focusing on the intersection of development and security.  Her PhD is in policy analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School and she has a masters degree in international relations from Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po).Â
Intrduction by Julie Koenen, Director of USAID Africa Bureau’s Office of Sustainable Development. Before joining Africa Bureau, Julie she was Deputy Mission Director for USAID/Nigeria, where she helped coordinate U.S. humanitarian, development, law enforcement and military assistance to support Nigeria’s response to the Boko Haram insurgency. She has also served tours in USAID/Colombia, Pakistan, Iraq, and for three years was USAID’s Country Program Manager in Sierra Leone. Prior to joining USAID, she worked 11 years as senior project director for MSI. Her graduate studies were in Public Management.
Claudia D’Andrea, Team Leader for the Biodiversity an Extractives Political Economy Assessment (BEP) Project implemented by Integra LLC. Claudia is a natural resource policy analyst with expertise in PEA, customary property rights, land management, and watershed management issues. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in Environmental Science, Policy and Management.
Hadas Kushnir, Biodiversity and Natural Resources Advisor, USAID/E3/FAB. Hadas works on the intersection between biodiversity and food security, climate change, health, and democracy and governance. This work builds on her experience in USAID’s Africa Bureau as well as two years overseas at USAID/Uganda developing their climate change adaptation portfolio. She completed her PhD in Conservation Biology at the University of Minnesota where she conducted research on human-lion conflict in rural communities in Southeastern Tanzania.
Kyle Rearick, Climate Change and Governance Advisor, USAID/DCHA/DRG. Kyle supports the management and design of DCHA’s Global Climate Change (GCC) Adaptation portfolio, providing Mission support related to the GCC portfolio, supporting the DRG integration agenda including PEA support. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin and an M.S. in Natural Resource Policy and Behavior from the University of Michigan.
Roy Buhendwa, Léonard Mubalama, Marco Lambertini, WWF Director General, Laurent NsengaÂ
In order to ensure the integrity of protected areas, civil society and public institutions all levels must collaborate in developing and implementing conservation policies. On September 13, 2016, ABCG hosted field staff from World Wildlife Fund’s office in Democratic Republic of Congo to share how WWF-DRC is developing a conservation strategy based on a long-term vision of its role in harmony with national conservation policies. Â
Featured Speakers:
Leonard Mubalama, Project Leader, Itombwe
After a career at the Congolese Agency for Nature Conservation covering several protected areas in the country, Léonard has worked with WWF in DCR since 2010. He currently focuses on the management of the Itombwe Natural Reserve. He holds a BS degree in geography and natural sciences, a master’s degree in conservation biology and a PhD in geography and geomatics.
The African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), in collaboration with the Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature, is pioneering an adaptive anti-poaching and ecological monitoring management plan for flagship species in the Bili-Uele Protected Area Complex, Democratice Republic of Congo. Jef Dupain, renowned Primatologist and AWF Technical Director for West & Central Africa, presents highlights of progress made to date, as well as a vision for the future to establish a lasting conservation program.
A major oversight in most assessments of climate change is the inadequate consideration of indirect impacts on biodiversity due to human responses to climate change. On August 1, 2016, Dr. Nikhil Advani, Lead Specialist, Climate, Communities and Biodiversity at World Wildlife Fund- US presented in Nairobi, Kenya on the Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group’s Global Change Impacts working group, which documents coping responses of human communities to climate change in 20 countries across Africa.
Featured Speaker
Dr. Nikhil Advani leads World Wildlife Fund’s work on climate, communities and biodiversity. This includes conducting vulnerability assessments and developing adaptation strategies for World Wildlife Fund priority species, as well as researching how rural communities are being affected by changes in weather and climate, how they are responding, and how their responses impact biodiversity. Based on these findings, his team is developing and implementing projects that help wildlife and human communities persist in a changing climate.
Nikhil was born and brought up in Kenya, and went on to pursue his Bachelor’s Degree and Doctor of Philosophy Degree at The University of Texas at Austin. His thesis focused on gaining a better mechanistic understanding of species response to climate change, using the Glanville Fritillary butterfly as a model species.
Anna Behm Masozera shares her experience of International Gorilla Conservation Programme (IGCP) and the role of mountain gorillas in fostering collaboration for conservation within the African Great Lakes Region.
IGCP was formed to be focused on the survival of the mountain gorilla subspecies, split between two isolated and transboundary populations at the intersection of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda. From sharing information on the threats to these gorillas, to sharing revenue from tourism to habituated groups of gorillas, the collaborations have grown from the grassroots to the national level, recently marked by the signature in 2015 of the treaty on the Greater Virunga Transboundary Collaboration for Wildlife Conservation and Tourism Development. Given the changing context of conservation in the region, IGCP has adapted its role in conservation diplomacy over its last 25 years to ensure that the players continue working together to achieve the shared objectives.Â
Anna Behm Masozera has been with IGCP—a coalition of Fauna & Flora International and WWF—since 2010, and became the Director of the Programme in 2013.
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This presentation by Dr. Tim Wittig is an overview and discussion of the problem of wildlife trafficking in East Africa and internationally and the efforts the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS)Â and its partners are taking to address it.Â
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Currently, ABCG’s Emerging Issues Task has awarded a small grant for a joint WCS-WWF short-term project to devise a scalable approach to engaging Chinese overseas enterprises to mitigate impacts of wildlife trafficking in Africa.
Dr. Tim Wittig is Senior Wildlife Trafficking Analyst for WCS. Prior to joining WCS, Dr. Wittig was a university academic, holding research and faculty positions at Johns Hopkins University, U.S. National Defense University, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where he also received his doctorate. He is the author of numerous publications, including the book ‘Understanding Terrorist Finance,’ a standard academic text in the field.
