Baka hunter-gatherer indigenous peoples in Cameroon forced from their land

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) supports conservation zones on the traditional land of the Baka hunter-gatherer indigenous peoples. According to Survival International Baka wild collectors and hunters are denied access, abused, and even murdered by anti-poaching squads when they hunt, forage or visit their sacred sites. 

Survival has submitted a formal complaint to the OECD accusing WWF of supporting anti-poaching agents to drive the Baka from large areas of their ancestral land. Survival claims that thousands of tribal people have been dispossessed and mistreated through WWF projects.

Cases like these raise the importance of agreements such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and conservation mechanisms such as the IUCN Sustainable Use and Livelihoods group (SULi) to engage communities as an alternative to the increasingly exclusive and militarized approaches toward conservation.

Further reading and related work at IUCN:

Indigenous culture and conservation of nature in Vietnam https://www.iucn.org/content/indigenous-culture-and-conservation-nature-vietnam

Bayesian Networks for modeling conservation impacts https://www.iucn.org/news/commission-environmental-economic-and-social-policy/201702/bayesian-networks-modeling-conservation-impacts

Decision modeling for trees, nutrition, and livelihoods https://www.iucn.org/news/commission-environmental-economic-and-social-policy/201608/decision-modeling-trees-nutrition-and-livelihoods

The Long House Ta Lai Commune

Reading through the Vietnam News I came across this story about a place called 'The Long House'. It is a brand new ecotourism attraction near the ethnic Stieng (Xtiêng) resettlement area in Ta Lai Commune in the Tan Phu District of the southern province of Dong Nai in Vietnam.        

The house is the first community-based tourism guesthouse in the area and was built under a project funded by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to promote community-based ecotourism in Viet Nam's national parks. It should directly benefit the livelihoods of local communities while conserving nature. 

WWF Vietnam Director Tran Minh Hien said. "Ecotourism planning in and around the park is carried out through a participatory multi-stakeholder process and is incorporated into development plans at commune, district and provincial levels". 

According to the chairman of Ta Lai Commune,  Dang Vu Hiep,  the house offers not only cultural meaning but also economic value to ethnic groups living in the region. "Community-based tourism will create stable livelihoods for local people by helping reduce pressure on natural resources, raising people's awareness of environmental protection and promoting cultural characters of ethnic communities".      

       

The Long House will open to visitors in the middle of February. 

Wild Collection Protects Biodiversity; Yangtze Mountains

WWF, IUCN, and TRAFFIC created an initiative in the mountains of China's Upper Yangtze ecoregion as part of the EU-China Biodiversity Program (ECBP) to support organic wild crop harvesting practices and certification procedures, as well as FairWild principles.

Due to a 1998 logging ban and the 2000 "Grain for Green" program, which discourages farming on steep slopes, households were encouraged to  start in more wild collection of medicinal plants in the mountains (home to endangered wildlife, including the Giant Panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) and the Takin (Budorcas taxicolor)). This initiative was designed to support the collectors in making use of native species in the mountains, without destroying the habitat. 

Now this project has won the prestigious Equator Prize as an outstanding local initiative working to advance sustainable development solutions for people, nature, and resilient communities in countries receiving support from the UNDP. The project has also scaled up from one village in the 2008 and 2009 harvests up to 22 villages in the 2011 harvest. A survey of project sites in March 2011 found incomes from medicinal plant collection had risen, thanks to the certification schemes; in one village by almost 18 percent.

        

"This project is proving that local harvesters from villages surrounding the Giant Panda conservation area can successfully implement meaningful sustainability standards," said Josef Brinckmann, VP of Sustainability for TMI. 

Skillful means of activism - Sacred Earth

I just heard Dekila Chungyalpa's very inspiring presentation to H. H. Dalai Lama on Skillful Means of Activism. She spoke about her work with the Sacred Earth program, a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) project to develop partnerships with faith leaders and institutions in order to protect biodiversity, natural resources and environmental services. The program works with religious leaders and faith communities to address ethical and spiritual ideals around the sacred value of earth and its diversity. It supports partnerships with local faith communities, and religious leaders to address conservation issues and look for ways to enrich and transform societal values and aspirations towards a sustainable future. The Sacred Earth program holds that working with faiths is not only an important and critical strategy for conservation but also a way to bring about genuine sustainable development. Most people in the world follow a spiritual faith and the faith leaders can help articulate ethical and spiritual ideals around the sacred value of Earth and its diversity.

It all sarted in1986 when WWF and HRH Prince Philip, then President of WWF, invited leaders of major world religions to discuss the relationship of faith and nature. The resulting Alliance of Religion and Conservation (ARC) and WWF started Sacred Gifts for a Living Planet in Kathmandu made a declaration with a commitment to clean protected Baghmati River in Nepal. Then in 2005, WWF and ARC wrote Beyond Belief, which lists over a hundred sacred places that are rich in biodiversity and can be considered potential "sacred sites", now an internationally recognized term of protection of biodiversity and culture.