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.
Featured Speaker
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.
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) and its partners are taking to address it.
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.
Featured Speaker
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.
Law Enforcement Monitoring (LEM) is a site specific way of keeping track of law enforcement efforts. For many years the World Bank/WWF’s “Management Effectiveness Tracking Tool” (METT) has been used as a measure. METT has 12 Threat Areas & 30 Question Fields, however: only TWO refer to enforcement!
With this in mind, WWF-Greater Mekong held two workshops (2011 & 2012) where the following topic was addressed: “…how WWF Greater Mekong is going to measure the minimum acceptable standards for species law enforcement in protected areas (whether these are being delivered by WWF or government counterparts)”… Tested in South East Asia and recently introduced to Central and Eastern Africa, Crispian J. E. A. Barlow and Alain Bernard Ononino, discuss the development of a new suite of LEM tools.
Photo: WWF-Cameroon
About the Speakers:
Crispian J. E. A. Barlow is a Canadian who has been involved in Law Enforcement for almost 40 years. After a career with the Royal Hong Kong Police spanning 13 years and covering Marine police, uniform branch, and Tactical Unit he resigned from the Bomb Disposal Unit to immigrate to South Africa where he pursued a career as a game ranger for the next 17 yrs. Duties ranged from Game reserve management to regulatory services with Limpopo Province’s Department of Environmental Affairs. Crispian then spent two years in Vietnam to assist the Forest Protection Department to set up a national curriculum for their LE rangers. Crispian presently works for WWF Greater Mekong as the regional Law enforcement technical advisor. He has created and introduced several LE monitoring tools and written ASEAN compliant training courses for use within the five SE Asian countries he works. Crispian is presently also assisting WWF-US with policy papers to deal with LE Support by NGOs to Government conservation agencies, ranger welfare, and situational crime prevention. In his spare time Crispian is also on the board of the Ranger Federation of Asia.
Alain Bernard Ononino is a Cameroonian who has been involved in Law enforcement support for almost 10 years. He is a Lawyer who started his career in wildlife law enforcement support and the fight against corruption in 2007 within an NGO called LAGA (The Last Great Ape Organization) and he contributed in establishing the first model of collaboration between an NGO and the government in the fight against wildlife crime. His duties ranged from setting up and managing informant networks, supervising field undercover investigators, supporting field arrest operations and judiciary follow-up of wildlife cases in court. Alain contributed in replicating the LAGA model in four countries (Congo, Gabon, Central African Republic, and Guinea-Conakry), which then became the EAGLE network. After seven years in LAGA, he joined WWF as Law enforcement coordinator for Cameroon. Alain currently occupies the position of head of policy engagement for the wildlife crime programme for the Central Africa region. He has developed WWF Cameroon Office internal protocols for running informants’ networks and supporting law enforcement activities including special procedures to compensate confidential informants and finance field arrest operations targeting high profile wildlife criminals. He also contributed to the development of Law enforcement support documents under the Wildlife Crime Initiative.
Conservancies are evidently as vital as a protected areas system in ensuring wildlife habitat integrity and improved livelihoods for stakeholder communities, supporting the case for conservancy development. The characteristics and the approaches taken towards successful conservancies—the ‘how’—forms the rational for this workshop.
As conservation practitioners, land owners and land managers, how do we ensure conservancies in Africa are viable? This is the fundamental question posed by Kathleen Fitzgerald, Vice President for Conservation Strategy, and the lead facilitator of Africa Wildlife Foundation’s (AWF) workshop entitled Best practices towards development of sustainable conservancies in Africa, held in Nairobi, Kenya on 21st April, 2016.
The meeting included participants form across Africa and featuring ten countries include South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia and Kenya. After formal introductions including opening remarks by AWF’s new President, Kaddu Sebunya, Alistair Pole, Director of Land Conservation, set the stage with a discussion on the raft of conservancy models in practice across Africa.
Conservancy models can be categorized broadly into three groups: (1) community, or communally-based, (2) government entity (reserve-like), and (3) private (sanctuary-like). All involve some contractual agreement to form a legal entity, with a board (of Trustees, Directors, etc.), but beyond that, other aspects including land use and management planning varied remarkably.
Five principles of conservancy structure were discussed by experienced field professionals, including:
Policy Frameworks
Ecological viability
Economic viability
Socio-political
Governance
POLICY FRAMEWORKS:
Discussions revolved around the question on whether a policy framework—national or sub-national—was a pre-requisite for the development of successful conservancies. For countries such as Kenya, South Africa and others, communal conservancies have developed largely without a national policy framework, and thus pioneered the initiative at a grassroots level. Others such as Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Mozambique, have had government frameworks and legislative instruments guiding their development and characteristics. The issue of whether energy should be spent on lobbying government agencies for a policy framework, or taking the grassroots, experimental path to piloting a conservancy program, remains ambiguous as models have thrived within a solid framework, and some without. However, where possible, allowing for piloting and then following with policy makes most sense, as the policy can reflect actual testing and trialing, like in Kenya.
Timing is key: If there is appetite or political will for a conservancy approach then land owners ought to seize the window of opportunity to innovate. This includes strategic targets such as poverty alleviation in rural areas and mainstreaming conservancy adoption as a national development strategy.
Sustainable resource management areas of Namibia. Source: Natural Resource Working Group /NACSO
Showing initiative and innovation on the ground can win a conservancy program substantial support from government. In the case of Kenya, conservancies are arguably supporting a government mandate to protect and promote a national asset, thus it was argued a framework was needed to guide and ensure long term presence of conservancies.A sound mission from conservancies must be developed and outcomes communicated to show their public contribution, especially towards social benefits (e.g. employment, security, bursaries) and environmental benefits (enhanced ecosystem services, heterogeneity) bestowed to the larger community, lest the conservancies risk losing their tax exemption.
Much work remains to be done to harmonize different and sometimes competing government departments that may claim jurisdiction and oversight of conservancies. Reconciling the role of relevant government sectors remains a challenge in many countries, particularly Tanzania that has a complex land and user right structure. One suggestion was to advocate for a community-level integrated structure where government ministries and departments can coordinate efficiently.
Large scale agriculture, lack of clear land tenure and extractive industries; are substantial threats to the conservancy model, issues that ABCG has addressed in past and current projects. Due to the high economic returns of such sectors, governments often trump private and communal rights holders “for the greater good”. One solution is to lobby for the bundling of land tenure and resource rights and afford landholders further security in their land; an issue that ABCG is currently tackling cooperatively between several members.
Further questions explored include:
What Conservancy Aspects should be regulated by policy, or what regulations ought to be legislated for conservancies?
Include checks and balances for community accountability and transparency.
Regulate wildlife user rights appropriately, such as quotas and off-take.
Get government to intervene when there is abuse at the conservancy level, above and beyond self-governance and self-policing.
Government should support resource stewardship on private and communal conservancies in the national interest; similarly, ecological services should be safeguarded.
Standards and ethics on game cropping/hunting/offtake should be established.
ECOLOGICAL VIABILITY
The overarching concern for ecological viability is ensuring the long-term viability of conservancies to support the functionality of species diversity, population sizes and communities of species in a changing world (human population dynamics, economic activity, climate change).
Key questions include:
Does exclusionary zoning work, or is it about integrating multiple land uses for viable economic base?
Climate change factor: How do we incorporate and mainstream into conservancy programming?
Ecological monitoring and adaptive management: How much monitoring is enough, and what tools are appropriate? Can you engage communities effectively in ecological monitoring?
A primary stressor is fragmentation affecting ecological connectivity, largely driven by human activities. Land policies are biased towards artificial systems resulting in arbitrary boundaries as far as ecosystems are concerned, to the detriment of natural processes such as wildlife migration.
Conservancies are shown to mitigate, even enhance biodiversity in their areas. This often benefits adjacent national level protected area systems, but proper mechanisms need to be in place to sustain conservancy co-benefits, such as a payment for conservation services (subsidization). A national policy framework should consider the role that conservancies play in maintaining heterogeneity and biomass production.
ECONOMIC VIABILITY
Conservancies should assume a business approach to operations much like a startup corporate venture. They should seek expert counseling on securing financing; have good transparency and accountability; be able to cover operating costs, generate reasonable returns and sustain effective production; integrate their business model into the broader economic framework of the locality, nationality and even region; and have flexibility in adapting to the vagaries of the economic environment.
Conservancies are arguably more about securing local assets from misguided development or over-investment, rather than for tourism or wildlife sanctuaries. Such an approach facilitates a conservancy to diversify its livelihood and include conservation enterprise, once their collective and basic human needs are met. For example, conservancies in northern Kenya formed primarily for community security against inter-tribal conflict, to mention but one example before a slew of other opportunities were realized.
Land uses particularly agriculture and settlement are major competitive threats to the conservancy model. One answer is the creation of conservation cooperatives between trusts and conservancies, much like an umbrella organization, to combine resources and leverage economies of scale, making it feasible to address such challenges. Otherwise subdivision remains an expensive options that individuals seek as a fail-safe solution to livelihood security and receipt of direct benefits (stopping elite capture), much to the long-term detriment of longer-term and broader scale opportunities.
The Tourism sector including travel agents and tour operators needs to be enlightened on the benefit of including conservancies in their tour circuits. Without significant tourism revenues, wildlife in national parks that ventures to conservancies are at risk from a source and sink situation.
Communities with conservancies have to diversify their business plans and not be entirely dependent on tourism. This will add resilience against such a fickle industry, such as well-branded export products to the same tourist markets.
On the issue of funding sources, conservancies need to push for a paradigm shift that sees aid being applied holistically. Communities generally do not segregate their livelihood development by health, energy, land, education, etc. Thus, funding should be sustained on a landscape-viable scale, both spatially, temporally, and multi-sectoral, to reflect the realities that targeted communities exist under.
SOCIO-POLITICAL VIABILITY
Top threats:
Ownership or lack of strong land tenure rights and resource rights framework.
Inclusivity in the political process at the national and sub-national level.
GOVERNANCE
In northern Kenya, the conservancies of the Northern Rangelands Trust are managed by communities, not private institutions, with elected boards and a management structure. They have instituted a democratic decision-making process and legitimate representation, and enhanced inclusivity. These principles help build social cohesion that promotes the achievement of conservancy objectives. A governance index is a helpful decision support tool to employ in objectively measuring the robustness of conservancy governance. The matrix may include community communications, conservancy satisfaction, board trust, etc. to name but a few parameters.
In addition, customary or traditional governance and authority needs to be integrated, including direct involvement in approval of Board elections and membership.
Governance can be affected by a strong inner strength and identity, such as: (1) Tapping into social capital and social ties in the community; and (2) Leaving room for self-determination (light touch facilitation by external agents). This helps balance a sense of internal purpose with external obligations of running a bona-fide conservancy.
Conservancies best practices participants at AWF Nairobi, Kenya. Source: Peter Chira /AWF
Overall, the workshop was an intellectual and practical discourse. Panelists and participants shared their experiences and views on the approaches they were familiar with, while deliberating on new ideas posed. Community conservation is undoubtedly a practical approach of addressing the needs of biodiversity conservation goals and local development in a viable manner, often in areas where mutual exclusivity of either one would have disadvantageous outcomes for the communities and larger society alike. This is evident by the variety of approaches, and sheer number and growth of conservancies across many regions in Africa.
The workshop confirmed important take-home messages in each of the themes explored. Policy-wise, conservancies benefit hugely from an organized policy framework that secures their land ownership, resource and/or tenure rights; or a combination of these. Ecologically, conservancies are shown to increase the overall resilience of an ecosystem, thus providing a positive feedback to human communities as beneficiaries of enhanced ecosystem services, nature-based enterprises, and corollary multiple benefits. Economically, conservancies are best off when planned and implemented like a well-oiled corporation, with transparency, accountability, diversity and innovative management as pillars of profitable operations. Inclusivity and democratic principles must be incorporated into the governance structure to foster social cohesion at the community level, and integrity beyond.
The Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) is an umbrella organisation that aims to establish resilient community conservancies that transform lives, secure peace, and conserve natural resources in northern Kenya. There are now 33 NRT-member community conservancies, covering 4.4 million hectares of arid rangelands and coastal ecosystems across 11 counties, with a membership of over 550,000 people. NRT is now widely seen as a model of how to support community conservancies, and its success has helped shape new government regulations on establishing, registering and managing community conservancies in Kenya. NRT’s initiatives include the Livestock to Markets programme, a unique value-chain that brings markets closer to pastoralists who manage their grazing well, and the Rangelands Programme, that is building on traditional pastoralist practices with new approaches to planned grazing (bunching, rotation and recovery) and the institutions that govern this in order to improve rangeland productivity and bring peace and stability in the face of increasing climate stress.
World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has been promoting responsible management of forest resources in the Congo Basin since 2000. This is done through sensitization, development of tools and frameworks to guide sustainable forest management, building the capacity of various stakeholders (logging companies, local communities, civil society…), communication on progress made by companies, and research to highlight the positive impacts of FSC certification on local communities and on biodiversity. Support to logging companies includes strengthening their capacities on Reduced Impact Logging, Corporate Social Responsibility, wildlife inventories and conflict management. Support to local communities is concentrated on building their capacity on identifying and reporting illegal logging, negotiating with logging companies and other business operators for more collaboration and contribution to local development. CSOs are trained to better participate in the monitoring and denunciation of illegal logging, and to act as interface between logging companies and local communities in conflict management.
Currently there is 5.7 million ha of forest FSC certified in the Congo Basin. A study by CIFOR (2014) revealed that local communities around FSC certified concessions receive more benefits than those around non-FSC certified. A wildlife inventory conducted by WWF Cameroon in Campo-Ma’an National Park and its peripheries (including FSC certified logging concessions) indicated that flagship species (elephants and great apes) populations remained relatively stable between 2008 and 2014, despite increasing poaching, logging and agro-industrial activities, and a score of big infrastructure projects being developed in the CB.
It is important to mention that WWF efforts as other conservation works in the region is often weaken by some threats and challenges (illegal logging, poaching and wildlife crime, large scale agriculture, slash and burn agriculture, mining and infrastructure development, weak governance…).
The Salonga National Park (SNP) lies in the heart of the Congo Basin in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). As Africa’s largest tropical forest park (33,317 km2), the Salonga shelters one of the world’s largest expanses of relatively pristine lowland rainforest situated at the headwaters of important, productive tributaries of the Congo River system. Lacking support from the international conservation community, this park was virtually a no-man’s-land until the past decade. On one hand, the park’s sheer size has facilitated the survival of the endemic bonobo and a remnant herd of forest elephants within its borders. However, on the other hand, its vastness has impeded its much-needed development, law enforcement, and our understanding of its conservation value. Based on 20 years’ experience in the Salonga’s Watsi Kengo Sector, Dr. Reinartz with ZSM presents a brief overview of the challenges facing the park and highlight areas of progress in safeguarding wildlife populations. She further demonstrates Salonga’s premier importance to bonobo conservation and its potential role in forest elephant survival in DRC. As forests are shrinking worldwide, we are just beginning to grasp Salonga’s ecological and environmental significance, and that it merits our investment. Salonga is too big to fail.
North Luangwa National Park is a pristine wilderness area in Zambia bordered by the Muchinga Escarpment and the Luangwa River, one of the few remaining free flowing major rivers worldwide. Together with surrounding Game Management Areas, the park is part of a 17,500 km2 remote and unspoilt haven for abundant and varied wildlife including the endemic Thornicroft’s Giraffe. The park is also home to the country’s only black rhino and largest elephant populations, and these, despite the rampant poaching that has decimated other areas throughout Africa, have remained stable. However, as other populations dwindle, and anti-poaching efforts elsewhere increase, North Luangwa is facing mounting pressure. For 30 years, the North Luangwa Conservation Program (NLCP), a partnership between the Frankfurt Zoological Society and the Zambia Wildlife Authority, has worked to reintroduce rhinos to the park, and to protect them as well as the park’s elephants and other wildlife. Ed Sayer, NLCP’s Project Leader, discusses why the project’s combination of protected area management, law enforcement and community engagement has been successful, and the steps NLCP is now taking to meet the escalating threat.
Rangelands occupy 41% of the earth’s land area, and have the potential to hold 1/3 of the world’s terrestrial carbon.
rangelands face enormous pressures, not the least of which includes land degradation from poor grazing practices. In spite of this, land degradation affords an opportunity to implement sustainable management of grazing and fire, potentially sequestering up to 20% of atmospheric greenhouse gases. In Africa, rotational grazing can remove one ton of CO2 per hectare each year. Mark’s presentation showcased empirical research across three East African countries, working towards validation for the Verified Carbon Standards, the leading accreditor of land use carbon projects. This development will foster carbon financing opportunities for rural markets and corporate social responsibility.
Naftali came to Congo over seven years ago and has spent most of his time there working directly with law enforcement. The very foundation for the application of law is unreliable and things do not always appear as they seem – so how can we effectively combat wildlife crime in this environment? All too common a question today in areas of weak governance, Naftali will speak about both successes and failures in a discussion of the amalgam of challenges that form the current poaching and trafficking crisis on the African continent.
