Protecting wildlife in conflict zones

Eva Fearn BBC Green Room 20 Jul 10;

Research shows that the vast majority of armed conflicts occur in areas rich in biodiversity, says Eva Fearn. In this week's Green Room, she explains how conservationists often find themselves on more than the front line in the battle to save species.

In Afghanistan's Wakhan region, a mountainous area bordered by Tajikistan and China, a herd of ibex deftly climbs a steep hillside.

Across the valley, a man in Wakhi headdress views them through a spotting scope.

His tracking skills are helping my organisation - the US-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) - assess ibex numbers.

Of all the places to study wildlife, why work in a volatile country such as Afghanistan?

Well, Afghanistan holds a surprising diversity of species, from giant flying squirrels to the Himalayan lynx.

Of course, first and foremost, war is a tragedy for humans. But the environmental destruction it causes has also become a concern.

In Afghanistan, the past three decades have seen 50% of the country's forests disappear and wildlife hunted out of many areas.

The connection between conservation and conflict was highlighted by a report published in the journal Conservation Biology last year.

It found that more than 80% of the armed clashes in the past 50 years occurred in countries that contain places of extraordinarily high global species diversity.

In the 1990s, in Africa's biologically diverse Albertine Rift region, civil insurgencies rendered national parks the strongholds of rebels and provided shelter for refugees, causing large mammal populations to plummet.

More recently, instability in other parts of Africa, including Zimbabwe and the Central African Republic, has facilitated increased elephant poaching, which is boosting the world's illegal ivory trade.

So if conservation organisations are to protect wildlife and wild places, they must increasingly operate in conflict and post-conflict settings.

On the front line

Because civil unrest can often result from competition for natural resources, there is another powerful reason why conservation is important in conflict settings: it can help build peace.

The UN Environment Programme (Unep), the World Bank, and the International Institute for Sustainable Development have all found re-inforcing linkages between natural resource management and post-conflict recovery.

As the international community looks for ways to encourage peace and development, some conservation NGOs are taking on a little extra work.

How exactly can a conservation organisation promote political stability? In part, it is by helping to build (or rebuild) natural resource management governance structures.

During conflict, as people flee - and after, as refugees return - traditional ways of managing forests and pastures can dissolve.

Helping to re-establish local governance structures for natural resources has become a key way to manage overgrazing, overhunting, and competition for dwindling resources.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for example, decades of strife have allowed for an explosion in the trade of bushmeat, tropical timber and charcoal.

With funding from the US development agency USAID, WCS staff facilitated multi-stakeholder village committees to target overharvesting and corruption, and to plan for the management of resources.

At three fishing villages near Lake Edward, addressing overfishing involves a participatory process to ascertain why fish stocks are declining and what can be done. It brings together stakeholders, including the military, police, fishing community, local security officials, and park managers to agree on plans for managing the stocks.

People participating in this effort at good governance are building the foundations of new democratic institutions that will be essential to long-term stability and the future sustainability of fishing, their main resource.

Risky business

While wildlife conservation and the promotion of peace are worthy goals, staff safety is a major concern for conservation organisations operating in conflict zones.

In Nuristan, a volatile region of Afghanistan along the Pakistan border rich in species like Asiatic black bear and markhor sheep, conservation work has stalled.

Foreign experts cannot enter this Taliban stronghold, and even local Nuristani wildlife surveyors have been interrogated, their GPS units and binoculars a cause for suspicion.

In DRC, a Congolese conservationist surveying Grauer's gorilla in Kahuzi Biega National Park was recently apprehended (and thankfully released) by a militia group.

For conservation work to succeed through times of conflict, organisations must commit for the long-term. In war-torn DRC in the 1990s, a combination of UN agencies and NGOs continued to pay park guard salaries long after central ministry funds dried up.

Similarly, flexible funders allowed WCS to maintain a presence in Rwanda and Uganda through the years of civil unrest.

Perseverance through times of upheaval is well worth the effort on many fronts.

Often, the conservation of resources and of economically important species can be discussed with relatively little political, ideological, or military pressure, and can serve as a starting point for wider political dialogue.

For example, the creation of a wilderness buffer area along the contested Peru/Ecuador border bolstered a 1998 peace accord between the two countries.

In Africa, there are plans for similar transboundary "peace parks" on the border between Sudan and Uganda, as the two nations emerge from decades of civil unrest.

Because post-conflict states are often pre-occupied and underfunded, international conservation organisations can be called upon to help in myriad ways.

Working to establish and re-establish community resource management mechanisms can help secure food, shelter, and economic stability, while nature tourism, transboundary parks, and scientific training can contribute in other ways to long-term peace.

Conservation "diplomacy" has become an exciting and critically important outgrowth of the work of conservationists.

Eva Fearn is Editor of the State of the Wild series, published by the Wildlife Conservation Society and Island Press. The 2010-2011 volume features a special section on Conservation in Times of War

The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website