Villagers in Senegal’s Niokolo Koba park are closely involved in the management of
this biosphere reserve.
Mapping a biosphere reserve
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The world of protected
areas
Under the 1992 Rio Convention, a protected
area is “a geographically defined area which is designated or regulated and managed
to achieve specific conservation objectives”. This broad definition covers all kinds
of situations. The World Conservation Union (IUCN), the main organization working on the development
of protected areas, identifies six situations, ranging from uninhabited reserves
dedicated to scientific research (the Antarctic, for example) to the countless parks
run by local populations.
There are more than 30,000 protected areas worldwide, covering 8.83 per cent of the
surface of the planet. Most of them are no bigger than 10 km2
and are isolated, fragile zones in areas where nature has been subjected to human
needs. A quarter of that total area (3.3 million km2) has been classified as having exceptional value under
several international agreements, including the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (1971),
UNESCO’s
World Heritage Convention (1972), the Statutory Framework of the World Network of
Biosphere Reserves set up by UNESCO
since 1976, and various European Union
directives.
Some kinds of ecosystems are better preserved than others. Grasslands in temperate
zones, as well as lakes, tend to be ignored in the world of conservation in favour
of islands and tropical forests. What’s more, as Iucn says, too many reserves exist
only on paper. This is not really surprising in view of the meagre $6 billion the
world sets aside each year for in situ conservation.
About $2.3 billion more would be needed to adequately protect all the reserves. Governments
could come up with this money, say scientists and ecologists, simply by abolishing
certain environmentally unfriendly subsidies to farmers and industrialists that amount
to more than $1,000 billion annually.
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Protected areas
are the key to conservation policies. But how should they be run? For Seydina Issa
Sylla (co-ordinator for West Africa of the NGO Wetlands International), lack of international
co-operation is the biggest problem
The 1992
Rio Convention on Biological Diversity gives priority to in situ conservation in
protected areas. Why?
The key aim is to conserve all the ecological elements–plants, animals, soil and
water–as well as the interactions between them, which maintain the evolutionary process.
This kind of approach is crucial in poor countries, which rarely have the means to
put together ex situ conservation projects such as gene banks, zoos and botanical
gardens. It also guarantees access to data on natural resources and to the results
of research carried out on their territory.
Why is it a good idea to create physical land links between different parks?
Elephants, for example, migrate from dry areas to wet ones as they need to. If you
try to stop them, you threaten their survival. Protected areas should be linked by
corridors that allow species to move around and also permit genetic exchange between
wildlife from different regions. More and more reserves these days straddle national
borders.
What are biggest threats to protected areas?
Lack of international co-operation and support. African governments, which can
no longer satisfy the basic needs of their populations, have downgraded the importance
of protecting nature. In many countries, decentralization of authority to regional
bodies has complicated park management too. You can’t create new parks in Africa
any more and existing ones are short of everything, especially staff.
Protected areas are also under pressure from populations whose resources are getting
scarcer because of poverty and environmental changes. These people are looking for
new farmland, firewood and animals to hunt. The introduction of outside species like
the sparrow, which was unknown in sub-Saharan Africa before 1978, is another destabilizing
element, because they come to occupy the ecological space of native species and end
up driving them out. Package tourism and urban expansion are other big threats, though
they are less important in Africa than elsewhere.
Why do you campaign for involvement of local people in managing reserves?
Conservation efforts have sometimes failed because it was long believed that nature
could be conserved without involving people. But attitudes have changed over the
past two decades, thanks largely to the influence of the poor countries. Pressure
on resources is constantly increasing, and local people see parks as obstacles to
development. So we have to compensate these people. Instead of investing in the protected
area itself, viable projects must be funded in the surrounding area. Several approaches
have been tested, such as Unesco’s biosphere reserves, of which there are now 368
in 91 countries.
What have been the results?
Mixed, because of lack of money. But two projects in Senegal have proved that
we were on the right track. The Popenguine Reserve, for example, is the first in
the world entirely run by women, who live in eight nearby villages. They maintain
the park, grow food for market, manage stocks of cereals and fuel, organize visitors’
accommodation and act as tourist guides. At the beginning, in 1987, they agreed to
help the government run the park in exchange for permission to continue gathering
medicinal plants there. They worked for 10 years without asking for a penny in payment.
Then in 1997, a three-year $400,000 programme funded by the European Union and the
French Nicolas Hulot Foundation, made it possible to start development projects.
Now the women are independent. They patrol the reserve, looking after its conservation
and benefiting from the income from tourism.
For one success, there seem to have been a lot of failures. Some people are calling
for protected areas to be privatized. What do you think about that?
How can we stop the private sector from trying to improve their own fortunes? The
Fazao Reserve, in Togo, was privatized in 1990. The wildlife there immediately began
to be sold. That’s a serious matter. There’s no alternative to partnership between
the state, conservation organizations and the local population. But we have to go
further in the field of participation.
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Conservation means development
as much as it does protection.
Theodore
Roosevelt,
former U.S. president
(1858-1919)
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