Will money save our wildlife?
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COMMENTS 
The Indian delegation, like many others at the Convention on Biological Diversity, said that lack of funds constrained conservation of biodiversity. Is lack of funds responsible, or lack of political will?
As delegate after delegate at the ongoing 8th Conference of Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) pleaded for more funding to help conserve biodiversity, one was left wondering if money was going to save our wildlife. The Indian delegation too said that lack of funds was a severe constraint. A number of big NGOs agreed.
The CBD commits countries to taking urgent and effective action to halt the loss of biodiversity. One critical step for this is the setting up of protected areas, where wildlife conservation gets high priority, such as in India's national parks and sanctuaries. In 2004, at the 7th Conference of Parties, an ambitious Programme of Work on Protected Areas was framed. This contains actions meant to achieve the following:
- Enhancement of the coverage of protected areas to cover the full diversity of ecosystems and species.
- More effective management and innovative governance of protected areas.
- Full participation of indigenous peoples and local communities with respect for their rights.
- Enhanced attention to funding, building capacity, and research.
The deadlines set were tight, with actions to be completed between 2006 and 2012. By the time COP8 took place in 2006, a number of actions including analysis of the major gaps in protected area coverage and management were to be concluded. Unfortunately, at COP8, it was impossible to gauge progress on this because only 15 countries had reported back on their implementation measures! Several countries who had not reported, offered as a reason the lack of funds.
This is where the funding deficit needs to be nailed as a serious exaggeration. Why should mere reporting on how a country is faring with regard to implementing the Programme of Work require significant funding? Most countries that have systems of protected areas must also surely have a system for information collection, however rudimentary? They could have reported on the basis of whatever information they had.
Is money the main stumbling block?
This is what gives rise to the suspicion that it is not money that is the only, or even main, stumbling block. There are other, more significant, reasons. One is the sheer lack of interest of a large number of governments in issues of wildlife conservation. Even if the delegates who come to the CBD meetings, and a part of the agencies they represent, are committed, the governments they represent have other priorities. Wildlife or forest/environment agencies in most countries are poor country cousins of their 'development' counterparts.
In India, for instance, the Ministry of Environment and Forests gets a tiny percentage of the government's budget, and within it, the wildlife wing gets an even more minuscule proportion. Equally importantly, more often than not, if there is a conflict between giving priority to conservation or to a commercial or developmental project, chances are the latter will get the upper hand. And so, wildlife habitats in India and elsewhere continue to be 'sacrificed' for some development project or other. If wildlife were truly a priority, the impact assessment of a project would place a high value on wildlife, and this, in addition to other environmental costs, would make many a project unviable or undesirable. Unfortunately, impact assessments in India suffer from chronic illnesses, including fraudulent or unscientific reporting, shortcuts in carrying out studies, unwillingness of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) to insist on full and honest assessments, inadequate baseline data to assess impacts, and so on.
The infamous Vedanta project in Orissa was cleared by MoEF on the basis of a laughably shoddy impact assessment report; it was only after an independent scientific report showed that the area to be deforested contained several threatened wildlife species that some judicial attention was paid to it. The impact assessment report for the proposed Lower Subansiri project in Arunachal Pradesh listed only 15 species of birds in the submergence zone, which includes 4,000 hectares of rich rainforest! I can see more than that behind my house in the middle of Pune city...A rainforest such as that in Arunachal should have at least a couple of hundred species. And though they must have known this, and though the Indian Board for Wildlife recommended fresh biodiversity studies, officials in MoEF nevertheless cleared the project without any new assessment.
Resistance to change and power-sharing
Another major issue which has little to do with money is the inability or unwillingness to change the way protected areas are conceived and governed. The CBD Programme of Work strongly points governments towards more participatory conservation. In particular, it specifies that indigenous and local communities need to be involved in the management of all existing and new protected areas, and that they need to benefit from such areas.
The experience of a number of countries that have already experimented with more participatory conservation suggests that this may be a much more cost-effective method of conservation governments going it on their own. In any case, it is certainly more sustainable, as it generates considerable public support rather than the hostility with which a lot of people view protected areas. In the conventional models of protected areas, hostility from local populations has been commonplace, as policies require them to be displaced or dispossessed of their access to natural resources. Effective conservation is impossible in the midst of hungry, angry, desperate people. Unfortunately, such a change in paradigms has been slow in coming, and there seems to be not much further progress since the Programme of Work was signed.
India is one of the worst in this regard. Far from moving towards participatory methods, a series of court and administrative orders in the last two to three years have presented the possibility of 3 to 4 million people, currently living within protected areas, being dispossessed. The Supreme Court in 2004 observed that no state government should order the removal of forest produce; the MoEF and the Court's Centrally Empowered Committee in their zeal interpreted this to mean that no rights should be enjoyed in protected areas, and asked all states to take actions to curtail any such existing rights. In three strokes of the pen, several million people were effectively rendered without legitimate livelihoods. The MoEF does not appear to see the contradiction between what it has signed in international forums, and its actions back home.
Another key failure of many countries is in moving towards alternative forms of protected area governance. The CBD Programme of Work requires countries to consider not only government-managed protected areas, but also those managed by communities or private parties. This revolutionary provision was inserted into the Programme of Work thanks to the effective work done by groups like IUCN's Theme on Indigenous and Local Communities, Equity, and Protected Areas (TILCEPA), which has shown that there are thousands of unrecognised community conserved areas (CCAs) around the world. In India alone, Kalpavriksh has documented over 300, and feels that this is only the tip of the CCA iceberg. If provided recognition and appropriate legal backing, the area under conservation would increase significantly without very much more funding required.
Yet most governments have not yet moved towards even identifying such areas, let alone recognising and supporting them. Perhaps they fear that this would show a truly effective alternative model that might threaten their current political monopoly over conservation. Or perhaps they simply do not know how to handle this new idea.
In India, a protected area category called Community Reserve was inserted into the Wildlife Act in 2002, before the Programme of Work came into being. One would therefore think that India would be way ahead of most other countries. Unfortunately, the provision is so shoddily drafted that it is virtually a non-starter. Firstly, it excludes all government lands, disregarding the fact that most CCAs are in fact on such lands (not surprising, given that in most of India, common lands are mostly in government hands). Secondly, it specifies one uniform management institution to be set up across India, regardless of the enormous diversity of institutions that communities have themselves established. In the last three years since this category came into being, not a single Community Reserve has been set up.
Reverse the incentives
One final critical issue is the need to change what are currently 'perverse' incentives into positive ones. Greenpeace International has in a report released at COP8 shown how billions of dollars go into all kinds of destructive 'incentives', such as tax breaks to industries in 'backward' areas which are inevitably also the ones with high biodiversity importance, subsidies on chemicals that end up damaging wildlife, and so on. If these were converted into positive incentives such as for sustainable natural resource use, organic farming, and so on, it would automatically put more resources into activities leading to wildlife conservation. But again, very few countries are moving in this direction, though slow progress is indeed being made. This issue is as relevant in India as it is elsewhere, what with our government providing all kinds of encouragement to industry to go with few safeguards into 'remote' areas that are also biodiversity hotspots, and with continued heavy subsidies to agricultural chemicals and other destructive technologies.
Conclusion
Participatory mechanisms, recognition of new categories such as CCAs, and replacement of perverse incentives with positive ones, could go a long way in reaching the goals of the CBD Programme of Work. Without billions of new dollars being needed. Once again, this is not to say that additional financial resources are not needed...they are. But countries simply have no excuse not to try out the other measures, even as they demand more money. India, unfortunately, is one of the countries with the longest way to go in all these respects. Our neighbours have in fact tried out more innovative mechanisms in conservation than we have, and we would do well to learn from them and others rather than continue to think that we know best.
InfoChange News & Features, March 2006