Conservation & Communities

[Matias]

About the @Sully list:

Criterion

Quote:The study classifies 152 countries in a Megafauna Conservation Index (MCI), composed of three elements: the proportion of land occupied by megafauna in a country; the percentage of megafauna habitat that is strictly protected; and the percentage of GDP devoted to financing national and international conservation efforts.

In this list there is a country totally out of the curve - Central African Republic. Dzanga Sanhga together with the lobéké parks in Cameroon and Nouabalé-Ndoki in the Republic of the Congo, is part of the great Sangha landscape, a trinational effort, whose economic effort resulting from tourism is measured by the tireless efforts promoted by the couple who has run Sangha Lodge since 2009, facing extremely difficult maintenance logistics. Another positive point is the Chinko project, managed by the NGO African Parks, the region's largest employer and contributor to the eastern CAR. Its project has recently been extended to the entire Chinko basin - over 5 million hectares. The biggest challenge is transhumance, poverty, security, political instability (the central government only controls 18% of the territory, optimistically). But it doesn't have the major problems of habitat loss that plague conservation in other countries around the globe. It has most of its vegetation intact, without human groupings and other human exploitations. On the other hand, Manovo Gouda, Bamingui-Bangoran, André Félix and other hunting areas are without monitoring or any fauna management, an unknown factor and, as far as we know from André Felix, everyone is "suffering" from the empty forest syndrome. There are no animal counts or conservation projects in progress. There is no rationality to putting this country on this list - it must have been a statistical analysis, or myopic.


@peter 

As you well noted in the countries you mentioned, I would add: South Africa for its strong tourism industry and the amount of land allocated to economic fauna management projects (there are 20 million hectares in the hands of the private sector), only the Kruger National Park receives two million people a year; Brazil for having wonderful biodiversity and has legislation among the best in the world - it suffers from the "burned Amazon syndrome" undermining every conservation effort that the country produces; Kenya with its broad role of tourism in its GDP, supported by the millions of tourists that visit. The big difference of advantage that I see from Tanzania on the list is its realistic policy of promoting the consumption of wildlife - as a consequence, more than 30% of its territory is national parks, WMA, GMA, effectively inserting communities into the wide economic possibilities of use of wildlife. SADC countries have a broad advantage over any others in Africa. Belize and Costa Rica does a wonderful job of conservation both on land and in its coastal areas. My father is very fond of the film Dersu Uzala (1975).

Canada came in strong, because the US does not ... there is certainly a political criterion involved. Amount of unoccupied land? North America's efforts to recover its megafauna are recognized worldwide, with populations fully recovered from wolves, bears, elk, white-tailed deer, lynx, puma and many of these animals have their carrying capacities exceeded - managed through regulated hunting (perhaps the point of contention be politically incorrect).

Many underdeveloped countries are rich in biodiversity, in contrast many rich countries are poor in biodiversity due to the extinction of their megafauna through historical time. Reply