Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 6.5
Integrated Conservation and Development for Bwindi impenetrable
forest
The Bwindi Impenetrable National Park is home to one of the few populations of
the endangered mountain gorilla
Gorilla berengei
. By the 1980s, the area's gorilla
population was threatened by large numbers of people entering the forest for
timber extraction, snaring and mining. An integrated conservation and develop-
ment project was run at Bwindi in 1987-2002 by CARE-Uganda, funded by
USAID and focussed mainly on improving agricultural productivity. The Park
was gazetted in 1991, causing resentment from local people because of their
exclusion from valuable forest resources. This conflict led to the establishment of
zones in the Park where limited resource harvesting was allowed, including
bee-keeping and gathering of herbal medicines and basket-making materials.
This and other initiatives led to better relations between Park authorities and
local people, particularly the bee-keepers (Fig. 6.8). However, the focus on
community-based natural resource use programmes at the edge of the Park,
aimed at bolstering public support for the Park and its role in protecting gorillas,
meant that less time was spent patrolling the core area of the Park. This is where the
gorillas are mostly found, because they avoid human disturbance. Here snaring
rates continued to be high, threatening the long-term sustainability of the gorilla
population. So although the ICDP was successful from the perspective of
improving local support for conservation, gorilla conservation did not benefit as
much as it could have done, because human disturbance and snaring remained a
Fig. 6.8
Beekeepers at Bwindi have benefitted from being allowed into the
Park's limited use zones. Photo
©
Julia Baker.
