We in DGR stand in solidarity with Survival International and support them because we believe that their analysis is correct and the organization is doing incredibly important work in standing up for indigenous peoples worldwide. While we encourage everyone to support Survival International and their very well-made campaigns, as an organization DGR pushes for more radical approaches than writing or signing letters and petitions, begging those in power to act in a different way. Those in power have never been on the side of the masses, the poor, the indigenous or the natural world. Asking nicely will not stop them continuing their atrocities.
At the next Convention on Biological Diversity summit, world leaders plan to agree turning 30% of the Earth into “Protected Areas” by 2030.
Big conservation NGOs say this will mitigate climate change, reduce wildlife loss, enhance biodiversity and so save our environment. They are wrong.
Protected Areas will not save our planet. On the contrary, they will increase human suffering and so accelerate the destruction of the spaces they claim to protect because local opposition to them will grow. They have no effect on climate change at all, and have been shown to be generally poor at preventing wildlife loss.
It is vital that real solutions are put forward to address these urgent problems and that the real cause – exploitation of natural resources for profit and growing overconsumption, driven by the Global North – is properly acknowledged and discussed. But this is unlikely to happen because there are too many vested interests that depend on existing consumption patterns continuing.
Who will suffer if 30% of Earth is “protected”? It won’t be those who have overwhelmingly caused the climate crisis, but rather indigenous and other local people in the Global South who play little or no part in the environment’s destruction. Kicking them off their land to create Protected Areas won’t help the climate: Indigenous peoples are the best guardians of the natural world and an essential part of human diversity that is a key to protecting biodiversity.
In many parts of the world a Protected Area is where the local people who called the land home for generations are no longer allowed to live or use the natural environment to feed their families, gather medicinal plants or visit their sacred sites. This follows the model of the United States’ nineteenth century creation of the world’s first national parks on lands stolen from Native Americans. Many US national parks forced the peoples who had created the wildlife-rich “wilderness” landscapes into landlessness and poverty.
This is still happening to indigenous peoples and other communities in Africa and parts of Asia. Local people are pushed out by force, coercion or bribery. They are beaten, tortured and abused by park rangers when they try to hunt to feed their families or just to access their ancestral lands. The best guardians of the land, once self-sufficient and with the lowest carbon footprint of any of us, are reduced to landless impoverishment and often end up adding to urban overcrowding. Usually these projects are funded and run by big Western conservation NGOs. Once the locals are gone, tourists, extractive industries and others are welcomed in. For these reasons, local opposition to Protected Areas is growing.
“If the jungle is taken away from us, how will we survive?”
Kunni Bai, a Baiga woman, denounces efforts to evict her people in the name of “conservation”.
Why should we oppose it?
Doubling Protected Areas to cover 30% of the globe will ensure these problems become much worse. As the most biodiverse regions are those where indigenous peoples still live, these will be the first areas targeted by the conservation industry. It will be the biggest land grab in world history and it will reduce hundreds of millions of people to landless poverty – all in the name of conservation. Creating Protected Areas has rarely been done with the consent of indigenous communities, or respect for their human rights. There is no sign that it will be any different in the future. More Protected Areas are likely to result in more militarization and human rights abuses.
The idea of “fortress conservation” – that local peoples must be removed from their land in order to protect ‘nature’ – is colonial. It’s environmentally damaging and rooted in racist and ecofascist ideas about which people are worth more, and which are worth less and can be pushed off their land and impoverished, or attacked and killed.
If we’re serious about putting the brakes on biodiversity loss, the cheapest and best-proven method is to support as much indigenous land as possible. Eighty per cent of the planet’s biodiversity is already found there.
For tribes, for nature, for all humanity. #BigGreenLie
Protect Thacker Pass with activists Max Wilbert, Will Falk and Rebecca Wildbear
Activists aiming to stop Lithium Americas’ Thacker Pass open-pit lithium mine – what would be the United States’ largest lithium mine, supplying up to 25% of the world’s lithium – launched a permanent protest encampment hours after the Bureau of Land Management gave final approval to the mine on January 15.
The Green Flame brings you the voices of land protectors Will Falk and Max Wilbert who mean to stay for as long as it takes to protect this old-growth sagebrush mountainside despite winter conditions at Thacker Pass. Rebecca Wildbear, river and soul guide, lover of the wild, joins us in honoring and calling for defense of the Great Basin, Thacker Pass and the whole of wild creation. Many thanks to Green Flame sound editor Iona and to the many non-human voices – Golden Eagle, Coyote, and Greater Sage Grouse – speaking to us in this Protect Thacker Pass episode of the Green Flame.
Morgan describes how biodiverse wetlands are, she asserts we need a change in law to restore them begin to look after and to recreate balance between people, wetlands and biodiversity.
By Morgan Erickson-Davis
Wetlands provide many benefits to ecological and human communities alike, from nutrients and nurseries to flood control and climate change mitigation.
However, as much as 87% of the world’s wetlands has been lost over the past 300 years, with much of this loss happening after 1900.
In response, nations banded together and in 1971 ratified the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, an intergovernmental treaty designed to facilitate wetland conservation and sustainable use around the world.
But 50 years on, researchers say the convention has not led to effective protection and wetlands continue to blink out.
Swamps, sloughs, marshes, bogs, fens; water purification, flood control, wildlife nurseries, nutrient providers, carbon sinks: wetlands have many names and serve many environmental purposes. But for centuries they have been viewed simply as hindrances to human development, obstacles to drain and dredge to make room for progress.
Few have escaped this pressure.
Research indicates the world may have lost as much as 87% of its wetlands over the past 300 years, with much of this loss happening after 1900. But in the mid-20th century scientists started grasping just how ecologically – and economically – important wetlands are, and the global environmental community rushed to protect those that still remained.
The result was the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, an intergovernmental treaty designed to facilitate wetland conservation and sustainable use around the world. Named after Ramsar, Iran, where it was first signed in 1971, the convention today protects 2,413 wetlands encompassing some 2.55 million square kilometers (985,000 sq mi) and has been ratified by 170 countries.
And yet, wetlands are still disappearing. In an article published in the journal Nature earlier this month, researchers Peter Bridgewater at the University of Canberra and Rakhyun Kim at Utrecht University say the convention has not been the protective force it was intended to be.
“Over the 50-year lifetime of the convention, at least 35 percent of wetlands globally have been lost,” Bridgewater and Kim said in a press release.
That number was revealed during the Ramsar Convention’s first-ever Global Wetland Outlook in 2018, which also found that the world’s wetlands were disappearing three times faster than its forests. According to the outlook, the major driving forces behind wetlands loss are climate change, population increase, urbanization and changing consumption patterns like shifts towards a more meat-heavy diet, which requires the clearing and cultivation of larger areas of land.
In addition to supplying vital habitat and “biological supermarkets” for wildlife, wetlands provide important ecosystem services for human communities around the world. They reduce the likelihood of flooding by soaking up excess water from swollen rivers, they filter pollutants from groundwater before it enters aquifers, and they are one of the most effective natural carbon storage systems on the planet. According to the Ramsar Scientific and Technical Review Panel, wetlands store 35% of the world’s land-based carbon – despite covering just 9% of the its surface.
“Without wetlands, the global agenda on sustainable development will not be achieved,” said Martha Rojas Urrego, Secretary General of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, in a statement. “We need urgent collective action to reverse trends on wetland loss and degradation, and secure both the future of wetlands and our own at the same time.”
In their article, Bridgewater and Kim acknowledge the Ramsar convention has achieved positive results such as increasing awareness and attracting membership of most of the world’s nations, as well as establishing a global network of Wetlands of International Importance. However, they say it is not really working as intended.
“One of its major flaws is the Ramsar’s site-based approach,” they said, referring to the convention’s focus on identifying and protecting individual wetlands. All too often this protection exists only on paper, Bridgewater and Kim say, explaining that there is generally little on-the-ground change when a site is officially demarcated as a Wetland of International Importance.
“Clearly, expanding the Ramsar list has not been sufficient to improve the conservation status of wetlands,” they write, “although its absence may likely have produced even worse results for wetland conservation.”
To truly protect the world’s wetlands, Bridgewater and Kim say the convention needs to better connect with other global conservation schemes, shift its focus from simply collecting sites to ensuring that those already established are more effectively managed, and implement a more holistic understanding of wetland ecology and hydrology that considers the influence of the surrounding landscape.
“Some structural change in governance and implementation mechanisms is necessary,” they write. “Only more adaptive and dynamic global governance mechanisms will help take global decisions through to implementation and action locally, nationally and regionally; restoring the balance needed between people, wetlands and the rest of their biodiversity in the Anthropocene.”
This article was written by Morgan Erickson-Davis and originally published on Mongabay on 13th February 2021. You can read the original here.
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Citation: Bridgewater, P., Kim, R.E. The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands at 50. Nat Ecol Evol (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01392-5
This article was written by Malavika Vyawahare and published on the 18 November 2020 in Mongabay. Malavika describes the work undertaken by a community association to improve the health of the ecosystem of a wetland. The organization won the Equator Prize in the category “Nature for Water.”
A community association charged with managing Lake Andranobe in central Madagascar has won this year’s Equator Prize from the UNDP in the category “Nature for Water.”
The association’s efforts, including implementing fishery closures, regulating water use, and reforestation, have led to increased fish catches and helped revive the lake ecosystem.
As in the rest of the world, Madagascar’s wetlands are often overlooked in conservation priorities, despite the fact that freshwater species are even more threatened than terrestrial or marine biodiversity.
The prize highlights the benefits of community-driven management, which often works better than initiatives undertaken by outsiders but also carries considerable challenges.
For centuries, Lake Andranobe in Madagascar’s central highlands has nourished the surrounding communities.
Over the past 16 years, its dependents have come together to restore the ailing lake. Now, that community-led initiative, the organization Tatamo Miray an’Andranobe(TAMIA), has won the United Nations Development Programme’s Equator Prize this year in the “Nature for Water” category.
“I am happy that the efforts of the community have been recognized,” Henri Rakotoson, a fisher and president of TAMIA, said about the award. “The prize gives us hope to go on.”
While the accolade has buoyed villagers, what has sustained their campaign are rewards from the lake itself. Fish catches more than doubled, from 8 tons in 2014 to 20 tons in 2019, according to data TAMIA collected. That has allowed Rakotoson, like many in nearby villages, to send their children to bigger towns for higher education. “One of my sons is pursuing a degree in environmental studies,” the 48-year-old told Mongabay.
Anchoring the future hasn’t been easy.
When the association was formed in 2004, Lake Andranobe was in dire straits. Fish stocks were falling, the lake’s watershed had shrunk dramatically, and vanishing green cover meant water levels never recovered.
To revive the water body, spread over 90 hectares (220 acres), the villagers have had to curtail access to a resource that was once essentially free. They enforced fishery closures and rules on fishing gear and capture of juveniles, and regulated water uptake for crop irrigation.
“Madagascar’s wetlands support an incredible biodiversity,” said Tomos Avent, head of international programs at the U.K.-based Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT), adding that they are disappearing faster than the country’s vaunted forests. Since 1960, more than half of the wetlands dotting the island’s expansive high plateau have vanished.
A wetland is not just a lake;
it is any ecosystem where water dominates and defines the landscape, including mangroves, marshes, and river deltas. These are vital and accessible stores of the Earth’s freshwater, most of which is locked away in remote ice sheets.
Globally, biodiversity is declining in freshwater ecosystems faster than in oceans or forests; an estimated one in three freshwater species is at risk of disappearing, WWF’s 2020 Living Planet Report warns. Over the past century, two out of every three wetlands have ceased to exist, cleared and filled in for farmlands, industrial zones and cities.
For this episode, we speak with Laura Cunningham of Basin and Range Watch about dozens of large solar energy projects threatening the Mojave and Great Basin deserts in Nevada and eastern California. We explore why utility-scale solar built on habitat is not a solution.
From this episode:
Now that I have seen ten years of solar build out. I was opposing the giant Ivanpah solar power towers in Eastern California deserts. That was a beautiful sloping desert next to the Mojave national preserve, full of Mojave yuccas, rare plants, wild flower blooms. We’d find horn lizards, black throated sparrows. cactus rinds, beautiful little slidewater snakes, harmless, just wanting to live in this area. Tortoises, a lot of tortoises. And it all got flattened, graded, run over by heavy machinery. Now it’s just a disturbed weed field with a giant fence around it. I looked about it. The whole of project – I think it was about 400 MW of energy, but it had a natural gas backup. Then we saw others, and others, still others. Tens of thousands of acres of deserts going under the blades of solar panels. I have not noticed a decline in carbon emissions. Of course, this is just one part of the world: the Mojave desert.
But it does make me think more recently: how much solar will it take to cover the desert before we see that downturn in carbon emissions? I think never. It’s this never ending scenario of needing more and more land, but we are not going to reduce our standard of living. I’ve heard different numbers regarding the pandemic: 17% decline in carbon emissions, maybe it was 12. A sort of a gigantic lowering of carbon emission, what we’d been wanting to have. But it took us really lowering our standard of living. Being much more efficient. Not burning a lot of fossil fuels. That’s actually, maybe, what we have to do in a non-pandemic situation: alter our whole way of living on the globe. And it’s a daunting task. Here we are going to build 60,000 acres of photovoltaic projects. Some of them will have Lithium-ion battery bank storage on protected Joshua tree habitats. That, I predict, will not lower carbon emissions one iota.
Our music for this episode is Melodi från Vest-Agder by Tim Eastwood of Dic Penderyn.
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