Conservation should focus on people

Photo by vitrolphoto

Better conservation for the future is conservation that is sustainable. As conservationists, we really want to work ourselves out of a job. We want to be in a situation where we don’t need to intervene because species, ecosystems and ecological processes are running for the long term.

We have to remember, though, that conservation is not just about species, wildlife and nature. That’s the big revelation that students have when they come to our programmes. They come because they love nature and want to save it, but the more time they spend with me and other people who teach conservation science, the more they realise that what actually matters is understanding and working with people.

Sustainability of ecological processes and nature only comes when the people who are living with and around nature do it in a way that allows that nature to thrive. People only act like that if you work with them, so that they see the value of changing their behaviour in ways that reduce the over-exploitation of nature.

The challenges of managing protected areas...

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.

...and some solutions

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.

The conscience of a conservationist

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.

Photo by Nelson Antoine

Places where there is nature conservation include indigenous people’s lands. In certain parts of the world, such as Latin America, indigenous people’s lands are some of the last bastions of wildlife. This is where social justice intertwines because land rights and people’s ability to own and claim their land is the way in which we’re going to get conservation in those areas. Land tenure and land rights are hugely contested around the world, and it’s only when conservationists engage with the fact that people need to have their land rights recognised that we can actually move forward, because then we can work with people who are invested in the land. The only chance of doing conservation for the long term is that you have people living around those areas, and even in those areas, who feel some sense of ownership to that land, to that wildlife and to that nature.

The invisible impacts of global supply chains

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.

Beyond the outdated Western conservation model

Photo by SAKARET

It’s interesting to think about how heterogeneous people’s relationships to nature are. We need to realise that just as biodiversity is varied across the planet, so are human culture and human relationships to nature.

Conservation has traditionally been based on a Western model. It’s been influenced by the way North America set up its national parks, and by how Europe going into places like Africa and Latin America thought about nature and how to protect it. That has been the dominant model around the world.

We need to start thinking about a model that works for the people in the cultures around the world who are actually living with nature.

It’s not just that Europe is exporting an outdated version of conservation to the rest of the world. It’s that Europe is imposing on itself an outdated version of conservation – one that doesn’t recognise the roots that people have with nature, its importance to their sense of well-being and the innovative ways that we can change the way we relate to it. Nowadays, for example, our urban areas could be so much greener. They could be so much wilder than they are. That is something that could bring in local communities who don’t at the moment have the opportunity to engage properly with nature.

Discover more about

Socially conscious conservation

Brittain, S., Ibbett, H., de Lange, E., et al. (2020). Ethical considerations when conservation research involves people. Conservation Biology, 34(4), 925–933.

Roe, D., Dickman, A., Kock, R., et al. (2020). Beyond Banning Wildlife Trade: COVID-19, Conservation and Development. World Development, 136.

Hobbs, R., Higgs, E., Harris, J.A. (2009). Novel ecosystems: implications for conservation and restoration. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 24(11), 599-605.

Designing successful conservation strategies