Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
problem, and ranger attention was diverted away from the core areas of the Park.
This study demonstrates how important it is not to lose sight of biodiversity-based
indicators of conservation success, particularly those associated with the primary
goal of the intervention (protecting gorillas, in this case), as well as monitoring
social indicators.
Source
: Baker (2004).
The
keys to success
are:
●
Effective
adaptive management
and learning from mistakes are vital in
projects that aim to change people's behaviour towards natural resources
voluntarily, through offering alternatives. This is true for all types of manage-
ment, but often most acute in this indirect conservation approach. We will
discuss adaptive management at length in Chapter 7.
●
There needs to be an
acceptable and viable alternative
available that is finan-
cially, socially and environmentally sustainable and resilient to shocks.
International mass tourism, for example, is vulnerable to civil unrest, while
there may be few alternative options to natural resources as a last resort support
to people's livelihoods in difficult times.
●
The
economics
need to be right. There needs to be a fixed supply of labour, such
that when labour is switched from the unsustainable natural resource use to
another activity, resource use actually declines. In addition, switching to the
alternative should not drive up demand for the resource or enable more efficient
harvesting. Damania
et al
. (2005) use a model to show that investment in
improving agricultural production can potentially increase bushmeat hunting
rates. This happens both because as people's incomes improve, they demand
more meat, so driving up revenues from bushmeat hunting, and because they
are then able to invest in more efficient hunting technology, such as guns. Auzel
and Wilkie (2000) demonstrate this effect empirically; following the arrival of a
logging company in an area, 49% of local villagers' meals contained bushmeat,
compared with 39% in villages further away. This was because of the extra income
that they gained from servicing the logging camp, allowing them to spend more
on food. Most of their income came from supplying workers with bushmeat;
because they had disposable incomes, logging workers' meals contained
bushmeat 76% of the time. Oates (1995) argues that an ICDP in the buffer
zone of Okomu Forest Reserve in Nigeria improved the standard of living there,
leading to immigration to the area and to further destruction of the biodiversity
that the project was put in place to conserve. Sievanen
et al
. (2005) show that the
introduction of seaweed farming had very mixed effects on fishing effort, in part
because it did not fully substitute for fishing as a livelihood activity.
●
In theory, there doesn't need to be an
explicit linkage
between the alternative
activity and conservation for it to work, at least in the short term, so long as the
