Designing successful conservation strategies

I can give you a very good example of what better protection really means, from our work in Uganda. We worked in Murchison Falls and the Queen Elizabeth National Park – the jewels in Uganda’s nature protection crown. They’ve got beautiful wildlife. They also have people living in very close proximity, plus quite heavy hunting and resource use. It’s been a great concern for governments that they have seen a lot of illegal use of wildlife in those nature reserves.

We went in and did a lot of detailed research with the local communities and also with the government agencies who work there. We found massive mistrust between governments and local people and the perception of a lack of sharing of the benefits of these reserves, both of which are very lucrative tourist destinations (or were before COVID).

We found that poachers had previously been asked to hand in their guns and to reform on the promise of alternative sources of income – and they did hand in their guns, but the promised alternatives never came, so they started poaching again. Then the wildlife authorities said, ‘Well, you can’t trust these poachers because they say they’re going to reform and then they don’t. They just start poaching again.’ The poachers said, ‘Well, you can’t trust these government agencies because they tell us there will be alternative livelihoods and then they never come.’ That’s just a microcosm of some of the things that are very widespread around protected areas.

In order to have successful protected areas, you need to have rules and you need to have enforcement of those rules. You need to make sure that the wildlife isn’t being harvested and that the agriculture isn’t encroaching on those protected areas.

The way you do that is to understand why it’s happening. When you understand why it’s happening, you can then have solutions that are about the drivers of change rather than just sticking plasters. Large-scale heavy law enforcement is sticking a plaster on the wound. It’s worse than a sticking plaster because it actually infects that wound and makes it worse while covering it up: you get more and more resentment, and you don’t get a solution.

My vision of successful conservation is one in which you really are tackling those underlying drivers. Sometimes these drivers are about local people not seeing the benefit of reserves, or feeling they’ve been excluded from reserves which were once their land. Some of it is about external drivers. For example, we have long-term projects in Cambodia where we have issues with people who’ve lived there for a long time using the protected areas and expanding their land. But we also have problems with people who are former soldiers from the civil war and who have been resettled in areas where they have to clear the land. We have problems, too, with rich businessmen being given economic land concessions where they are told they’ll be able to grow agricultural plantations. Some of those economic land concessions overlap protected areas, and others overlap local people’s land. You put a massive plantation in a place where once there was protection and local farms. Of course, the farmers have to go somewhere else. They’re pushed off.

So, these large-scale drivers interlink with the local-scale drivers to produce situations where nature is squeezed out, along with local livelihoods. That’s where conservationists have to intervene.

It’s interesting to think about social justice in the context of conservation. Most conservationists choose to do what they do because they love nature and want to save it – not because they’re thinking about people. I think social justice is deeply intertwined with conservation.

To give an example: although much wildlife is preserved in State-run nature reserves, those reserves tend not to be enormously effective. They tend to have people encroaching, poaching and so on. That’s partly because State-run nature reserves are underfunded and unable to enforce the rules, but also it’s because people don’t feel that they have any benefit from those reserves.

It’s interesting to see how governments engage with the environment and with nature. They often see the environment as something that’s “nice”, and that voters relate to, but that isn’t integral to the running of a country – not like the finance ministry or something like that. That’s particularly true if they want to support nature overseas – giving money to save the elephants, for example.

What we’re recognising more and more is that the true conservation issues that governments need to engage with are about our global food and commodity systems. For a country like the UK, or for any developed country, the issue isn’t so much about our own footprint or what’s happening in our own country, it’s about the export of damage, which is hidden to our citizens. We don’t know when we go into a supermarket that the chocolate, the cocoa and the butter that we buy are actually causing large-scale deforestation or land conversion elsewhere in the world. It’s not visible to us and it’s not necessarily visible to governments either.

I don’t completely blame the governments for this because we don’t yet have good estimates of the biodiversity impact of the things that we do. It’s much easier to understand the damage that climate change is doing because you can measure it in a simple unit. Then you can start to see how much travel or using cars impacts the amount of carbon that’s being put into the atmosphere. It’s much harder to understand how this complicated thing called nature, which is very locally defined, is impacted at various points along the whole supply chain. That’s a big question for scientists right now. How do you trace from a consumer in a supermarket right the way back to someone cutting down a protected area in Indonesia in order to grow cocoa or coffee?

In that sense, then, I don’t blame the governments. However, in other senses, I do, because it’s so much harder to have a system-wide change than it is to just protect an area of land. I think that as we get to the end game for nature, we’re going to have to think harder and longer about these system-wide changes, which are going to be really difficult for governments to institute.