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Conservation becomes businesslike in the Amazon
Conservation
Peering at the future
Jun 17th 2004 | SOMEWHERE ON THE AMAZON, NEAR TEF�
From The Economist print edition
Conservationists are, reluctantly, starting to get real
LIKE an aquatic version of Baba Yaga's hut, the Bill Hamilton Travelling Centre for Environmental and Scientific Education floats on a raft through the streams and backwaters of Amazonas state in Brazil, spreading its message to the inhabitants of what is still the world's largest rainforest. At the moment, it is moored outside Tef�, one of the state's oldest towns, and it has just played host to a meeting organised by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) of New York.
The participants came from all six countries whose waters feed the Amazon. They gathered to do two things. One was to examine a nearby conservation area, the Mamirau� Sustainable Development Reserve, and consider what lessons its success held for their own efforts. The other was to ponder how they could make those efforts systematic. As the conference organiser, Andrew Taber, observed in a recent article in Conservation Biology, "Conservationists have not been successful at rigorously measuring conservation successes and in trumpeting them in a compelling way...We are going to have to learn very fast if conservation is going to be regarded by our societies as something other than a luxury good."
Conservation biologists tend to be anarchists in muddy boots, and the idea of working to a clear and pre-ordained plan rather than their own gut instincts is anathema to many. But funding agencies are starting to wise up to the loose connections that often exist between inputs and outputs in conservation projects, where inputs are donated dollars, and outputs are species and habitats actually conserved. They would like to see that their bucks are delivering the appropriate bang. That means a radical change of attitude, both about what it is realistically possible to conserve, and how to go about conserving it. This is where Mamirau� comes in.
Managers in muddy boots?
The Mamirau� reserve, of 11,000km2 (4,300 square miles) of rainforest, was set up a decade ago by Jos� M�rcio Ayres, a local WCS biologist. Its full title is significant, because Ayres, who died last year, had to have both it, and the legal category it refers to, specially created. Before Mamirau�, Brazilian law saw conservation and development as opposed. Protected areas were (at least in theory) off limits to economic activity. Everything else was fair game. Ayres changed that, and Mamirau� is now seen as an almost unqualified success. The fact that it is known to be successful is because its organisers have been rigorous in measuring their outputs.
"Sustainable development" sounds contradictory. But if the question posed is "whose development?", then sometimes the answer can make sense. In the case of Mamirau�, sense was made by focusing the benefits of development on local people, to the exclusion of outsiders. It also worked because a group of animals could be found for which the interests of the conservationists and the locals coincided: fish.
The area's residents have fished its lakes and streams for as long as they have been there. In the latter half of the 20th century, though, outsiders started muscling in. This gave Ayres his opening. Though his principal reason for wanting to conserve the place was to protect its white uakari monkeys (pictured above), that entailed protecting the whole ecosystem. Fish were the key. Although their numbers had been greatly depleted, making local people sympathetic to the general idea of conservation, many of the species in question were capable of rapid reproduction and growth once the pressure was off. To take that pressure off, Ayres did two things. He created a constitution for his new park that forbade outsiders from fishing in most of the lakes, and he allocated the fishing rights in individual lakes to individual villages. He thus reduced the number of fishermen and, at the same time, abolished the problem of the commons (the tendency of people to overuse resources that they do not have exclusive rights to) by creating what were, in effect, property rights in the fishery, albeit rights that were held collectively rather than individually, and that could not be traded.
The flip-side of this privilege was that the locals agreed to certain areas of forest being put off-limits to any exploitation. They also agreed to police the reserve, both against outsiders, and against rogues from within. Internal cheats are punished by receiving smaller or non-existent dividends from the ecotourism lodge that has been set up as part of the deal.
The results, as Ana Rita Alves, one of the reserve's managers, outlined to the meeting, are impressive. There has been a fourfold increase in the population of the pirarucu, an important commercial fish species, and a 25% increase in the average size of the fish landed (rigorous monitoring of catch sizes is part of the deal). Aquatic reptiles, such as terrapins and caimans, are also rising in numbers. The monkeys, though hard to count, seem to be holding their own. "Habitat conversion"�ecospeak for cutting down trees and planting crops�has fallen to zero as people are now being encouraged to re-plant cleared land, rather than felling more trees. Illegal logging (which is easily monitored, since the logs have to be floated out of the reserves as rafts) has also fallen, from 80,000 trees a year to 200. And, crucially, it is not only the welfare of the forest that has improved. Human welfare has, too. During the reserve's existence, average household income has risen by 107% (and that of fishermen by 300%), infant mortality has dropped by 54% and infestation by internal parasites by 27%�far better results than have been achieved in villages outside the reserve. The excluded outsiders aside, everybody is happy.
It remains to be seen how deployable this model will prove. The first real test, explained Ronis da Silveira, one of the people in charge of the project, will be in Piaga�u-Purus, a newly established reserve 300km (200 miles) south-east of Mamirau�. Again, the route to the locals' hearts planned by the conservationists is via fishing. But powerful interests are at stake. Piaga�u-Purus supplies about half the fish consumed in Manaus, a city of 1.5m people that is the capital of Amazonas. Much of this trade is run by outsiders. Obviously, the locals would be delighted to be given a Mamirau�-like monopoly over the trade. The outsiders, hardly surprisingly, are less than ecstatic. Several of them are also rich, with the political muscle that this brings, and also, in some cases, muscle of a more literal sort. Conservationists have been assassinated before in this part of the world. It could happen again.
Thinking anew
Reserves with less rapidly growing, but nevertheless valuable, animals face a more difficult task. In the Madidi national park in Bolivia, and the Yavari-Miri valley in Peru, for example, the valuable, threatened species in question are the white-lipped and collared peccaries. Peccary meat is an important foodstuff. Peccary skin is used to make fine leather gloves. In the case of Madidi, explained Robert Wallace, the WCS's representative at the park, much of the problem is knowing where to concentrate effort. He and his colleagues have therefore developed a so-called geographical information system to produce maps that combine habitat and threat information. This enables them to identify places within and around the park that will survive anyway, places that are already lost, and those where effort needs to be concentrated. As in the case of Mamirau�, establishing property rights is crucial. In this context Dr Wallace's mapping efforts are also helping the locals to claim land titles, which bring the legal right to exclude outside hunters.
In the case of Peru, the rule of law is better established. Here, Richard Bodmer and Pablo Puertas are helping people to improve their peccary-hunting methods (for example, by reducing the use of shotguns), so that the skins of hunted animals are not damaged. That makes them more valuable to glove-makers, and thus means legal quotas yield more revenue.
Both Mamirau� and Madidi have benefited from people thinking hard in advance about what they want to achieve, and involving locals at an early stage. David Wilkie, a conservation biologist at the WCS, took this a step further (and incidentally illustrated how far there is still to go) by introducing management-speak to the assembled conservationists, and outlining the ecological equivalent of a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis.
Dr Wilkie's acronym was GTTI�goals, targets, threats and interventions�and he took the meeting through a management-101 course of boxes and flow charts of cause and effect. Goals, he explained, were big, lofty visions, such as "preserve the biodiversity in such-and-such an area". Targets were measurable results, such as raising the population density of a particular species to its carrying capacity in the environment. Threats were specific obstacles to doing so, for example habitat loss and pollution. Interventions were ways of addressing the threats.
Blindingly obvious, you might think. But there was still some squirming in the audience at this attempt to tie things down in an unambiguous way. And cases of GTTI being put into practice are depressingly thin on the ground. One clear-cut example that Dr Wilkie was able to give was from the Pastaza region of Ecuador, where the target was to restore the local fish population to something near carrying capacity. The threat was the use by local fishermen of pesticides and dynamite as their principal fish-catching tools. These are extremely destructive. The intervention was to revive the use of barbasco, a natural poison which the fishermen preferred, but which had fallen into disuse because local barbasco plants had been overexploited to the point of near extinction. The solution was to plant barbasco gardens. Simple. But until GTTI was applied, no one thought of it. Perhaps management systems do have their uses, after all.
Source: The Economist
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