Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
unit. It is obvious that all these programs could find easy adoption to the evolving
situation in southern Iraq in terms of helping to protect the restored marshlands and
their returning fauna.
The RSCN has developed a national plan for protected areas—the “jewels of the
Kingdom,” in Johnson's (1997) parlance—based on the representation of the key eco-
system types of Jordan (Irani 2004). The reason why an NGO in Jordan is in the
business of managing Jordan's nature reserves is due to the fact that when the RSCN
was formed in the 1960s, there was no governmental institution at that time that dealt
with nature conservation and protected-areas management. It is therefore a unique
situation in that the RSCN is not controlled by the government yet does in fact manage
public land. And the government is very happy with this situation since it comes at no
cost to their own strapped budgets. And, as mentioned above, the former director of
the RSCN is now head of the new governmental Ministry of the Environment.
One of the protected areas managed by the RSCN is the Dana Nature Reserve
located near the Dead Sea and billed as the lowest elevation protected land on Earth.
Recently, several plants new to science have been discovered in the area, and the
RSCN is working hard to protect the unique wadi landscape. The Dana story is
important not only for its obvious success in its own right but also through its role
as serving as the school from which the RSCN learned how to adopt an integrated
approach to protected lands. This approach has subsequently been applied to most of
the other protected areas in the country, and by extrapolation could be imagined to
be integrated into future management plans for the Iraqi marshlands.
With its scenery, wildlife, culture, and history, Dana, like the Iraqi marshlands, is
a paradise for tourism. The success of the Dana Nature Reserve has transcended the
local environmental community in Jordan and is recognized internationally through
winning four international awards for sustainable development (Johnson 2007). I (R.
France) first learned about the Dana project not from an environmental publication
but rather from two general guidebooks for tourists, both of which were effusive in
their praise. The
Jordan Footprint Handbook
(Mannheim 2000) describes the site
as being “one of the most breathtaking experiences in Jordan” in terms of natural
beauty, as well as being home to seven hundred species of plants, of which one
hundred are rare and eight are endemic. Further, Dana is “one of the most impor-
tant non-wetland areas for birdlife in the Middle East” with more than two hundred
species being present. What is most interesting is the attention paid to sustainable
development such that the reserve “has become something of a model for integrated
conservation and development projects. A strong emphasis has been placed on mak-
ing the nature reserve of tangible economic benefit to local people, on the basis
that this is the only way of giving conservation efforts any long-term prospects of
success” (Mannheim 2000). And in an easily understood parallel to the present-
day situation of empty villages along the edge of the Iraqi marshlands, the Dana
ecotourism efforts have been instrumental for local regeneration by renovating the
abandoned Dana Village such that one-time inhabitants have now returned and are
again harvesting and selling fruit from their orchards.
The second tourist guidebook, the
Rough Guide to Jordan
(Teller 1998), is
equally filled with praise about Dana, calling it “unique in the Middle East, a posi-
tive, visionary programme combining scientific research, social reconstruction and
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