A subsidiary of the San Miguel Corporation, one of the largest companies in the Philippines, has proposed a $500 million hydroelectric project that will overlap with a national park on Panay Island.
Northwest Panay Peninsula Natural Park holds some of the central Philippines’ last stands of intact lowland rainforest, is home to endangered species including hornbills and the Visayan warty pig, and is a vital watershed for Panay and neighboring islands.
The project is still not approved, and a growing coalition of activists and local governments opposes the plan.
Update: On Aug. 10, the village governments of Naboay and Malay publicly released resolutions opposing the hydroelectric project, citing concerns about the project’s potential impacts on the Northwest Panay Peninsula Natural Park, municipal and agricultural water supplies, and the area’s indigenous Ati communities.
This article originally appeared in Mongabay. Featured image: Visayan warty pigs (Sus cebifrons) at a wallow in the Philippines. Image by Shukran888 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
AKLAN, Philippines — Activists and local government officials in the central Philippines have lashed out at a recently announced plan to build a hydroelectric plant overlapping with a national park that’s home to rare and threatened species.
Strategic Power Development Corporation (SPDC), a subsidiary of Philippine mega conglomerate San Miguel Corporation, announced on July 13 its intention to build the $500 million, 300-megawatt pump-storage hydro facility in Malay municipality on the island of Panay. The project would include the construction of two dams and reservoirs, 9.6 kilometers (6 miles) of new roads, and the upgrade of 1.8 km (1.1 mi) of existing roads.
According to SPDC, the planned project near the confluence of the Nabaoy and Imbaroto rivers would consist of a 70-meter (230-foot) lower dam on the Naboay, with a 10.2-million-cubic-meter (2.7-billion-gallon) reservoir; and a 74 m (243 ft) upper dam with a 4.55-million-m3 (1.2-billion-gallon) reservoir extending to the Imbaroto. The company says the plant will provide energy to the regional grid to meet current and future peak demand, will support the local economy, and is part of President Rodrigo Duterte’s 2017-2040 Philippine Energy Plan.
Overall, the company says the complex would cover 122.7 hectares (303.2 acres), including 97.9 hectares (241.9 acres) of forest, of which 24.9 hectares (61.5 acres) are nominally protected land within Northwest Panay Peninsula Natural Park.
Significant biodiversity hotspot
Northwest Panay Peninsula Natural Park, which spans 12,009 hectares (29,676 acres) in the provinces of Aklan and Antique, was established in 2002 via a presidential proclamation. Home to critically endangered Visayan warty pigs (Sus cebifrons) and writhed-billed hornbills (Rhabdotorrhinus waldeni), as well as endangered Visayan hornbills (Penelopides panini), it has been locally recognized as a significant biodiversity hotspot since the 1990s.
The park holds some of the last remaining stands of primary lowland rainforest in the central Philippines, and serves as a key watershed providing potable water to Panay and neighboring islands.
Activists say the hydropower project puts water supplies for local communities at risk.
“The Nabaoy River is the lone source of potable water to nearby Boracay Island and to the residents of Malay,” said Ritchel Cahilig of the Aklan Trekkers Group. Boracay Island, separated from the park by a narrow strait, is a prime beach destination, recording 2 million tourist arrivals in 2019.
“I wonder how will they supply water to the residents especially during construction phase. During construction phase, for sure, large vehicles will be damaging the forest and the company seems do not have a clear alternative on how to restore what has been damaged,” Cahilig said.
The natural park is also home to a community of Indigenous Malay Ati people, who fish in the Nabaoy River and rely on the forests for sustenance.
Activists have also questioned the need for additional electrical capacity in the area. Citing reports from the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines, Melvin Purzuelo of the Green Forum-Western Visayas noted that from July 20-26, Panay Island’s average daily electricity consumption ranged from 345-364 MW, against existing capacity of 480 MW.
“It is clear now that a huge power supply is not needed at this time especially that the world is going through the COVID-19 pandemic,” Purzuelo said during a recent webinar.
Loss of local government support
SPDC’s proposal still requires approval from local governments and the Philippine Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR).
“The Malay [municipal government] have set a coordination meeting with the SPDC supposedly last August 2 to clarify issues involving the project but [the meeting] has been cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Purzuelo said.
Local officials have distanced themselves from endorsing the proposal. In a phone interview, acting Malay Mayor Floribar Bautista said the SPDC had not approached him to discuss the details of the project since he assumed his post in July 2018.
“What I know is the project was endorsed by the previous administration. When I checked the documents, it’s lacking. It seems the project may have [been] railroaded. I could not endorse the project at this time since I do not know how the project would affect our town. All they have to do is to convince me if the hydro dam project is worth it,” he said.
The village of Nabaoy is also reportedly set to cancel its previous endorsement of the project, activists say. No official cancellation had been issued as of the time this article was published; but just as in the case of the Malay municipal government, the previous leadership of Nabaoy village had endorsed the project in the early months of 2018.
Without approval from the current local governments, the project can only push through with special permission from the DENR.
Editor’s note: The Brexit gives the UK the chance to become independent from the very destructive EU agricultural policy. This is the time for UK activists to step up for rewilding.
Featured image: Forest in Somerset, UK. Photo by Deb Barnes
By Lisa Malm, Postdoctoral Fellow, Ecology and Environmental Sciences, Umeå University, and Darren Evans, Professor of Ecology and Conservation, Newcastle University
After a particularly long week of computer based work on my PhD, all I wanted was to hike somewhere exciting with a rich wildlife. A friend commiserated with me – I was based at Newcastle University at the time, and this particular friend wasn’t keen on the UK’s wilderness, its moorlands and bare uplands, compared to the large tracts of woodland and tropical forests that can be found more readily abroad.
Luckily, I count myself among many who are charmed by the rolling heather moorlands and sheep grazed uplands, whose colours change beautifully with the seasons. But my friend had a point – there is something very different about many of the UK’s national parks compared to those found in much of the rest of the world: the British uplands are hardly the natural wilderness that many perceive.
These upland habitats are in fact far from what they would have been had they remained unaffected by human activity. In particular, grazing by livestock has been carried out for centuries. In the long run, this stops new trees from establishing, and in turn reduces the depth of soil layers, making the conditions for new vegetation to establish even more difficult. Instead of the woodlands that would once have covered large areas of the uplands, Britain is largely characterised by rolling hills of open grass and moorlands.
Government policy has long been to keep these rolling hills looking largely as they do now. But the future of the British uplands is uncertain. Regulations and government policy strongly influences land management, and the biodiversity associated with it. In fact, the management required to maintain British upland landscapes as they are now – management that largely involves grazing by sheep – is only possible through large subsidies. And due to Brexit, this may change. A new agricultural policy will soon replace the often-criticised Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
What this will look like remains unclear. There are a range of competing interests in the uplands. Some wish to rewild vast swathes of the land, while others want to intensify farming, forestry and other commercial interests. The rewilders tap into the increased interest in restoring natural woodland due to its potential in carbon uptake, increased biodiversity and reintroduction of extinct species such as wolves and lynxes, while some farmers argue that this will be bad for the economy. The UK stands at a crossroads, and interests are rapidly diverging.
Whatever path is taken will obviously have an impact on the unique assemblages of upland plants and animals, many of which are internationally important. But upland birds and biodiversity have for a long time been on the decline. Whether rewilding is the answer to this or not has long been debated: some claim that we need to stop grazing animals to allow the natural habitat to reassert itself, while others claim that some species, such as curlews, rely on such grazing practises for their survival.
But our new research, published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology, provides the first experimental evidence to our knowledge, that stopping livestock grazing can increase the number of breeding upland bird species in the long term, including birds of high conservation importance, such as black grouse and cuckoo. This is interesting, as it is often argued that land abandonment can result in lower biodiversity and that livestock grazing is essential for maintaining it.
Our research shows that, depending on how the uplands are managed, there will be bird “winners” and “losers”, but overall when sheep have gone the number of bird species returning increases.
A subsidised landscape
Before going into the research itself, it’s important to consider the history of British upland land management. Truly “natural” habitats in the UK are few and relatively small. Deciduous woodland, and to a lesser extent coniferous forests, used to cover most of the British uplands below the treeline. For example, only about 1% of the native pine forests that once covered 1.5 million hectares (15,000km²) of the Scottish Highlands remain today.
These woodlands provided homes for charismatic species such as pine marten, red squirrel and osprey, together with now extinct species such as lynx and bears. But centuries of farming has shaped most of the upland landscape to what it is today: a predominantly bare landscape dominated by moorlands, rough grasslands, peatlands and other low vegetation.
These marginal areas tend to have low financial profitability for those who farm the land. And so a range of other activities, such as grouse shooting and commercial forestry, exist to boost rural community incomes.
Despite their low profitability, however, many grazed areas are considered to represent “high nature value” farming. This seems paradoxical, but basically means they are considered important as habitats to protected species benefiting from open upland landscapes. One such species is the iconic curlew.
Because farming is tough in the uplands and it’s a struggle to make a profit, landowners receive, and often rely on, subsidies to maintain their farms. The form of these subsidies has changed over time, in line with the current perception of appropriate land management for food production. At the moment, the scale of these subsidies are based on the size of the farm, but they also require that the farmer maintains the land in a good agricultural state. This leaves little room for shrubs or trees, except along field edges, especially in England where there is no financial support for agroforestry (where trees are integrated in agricultural land).
But these subsidies will soon no longer be allocated through the EU – and so it’s time to reconsider what kind of land management should be supported. It seems sensible to consider introducing financial support for other land management types, such as reforestation, natural regeneration or wildflower meadows. Such habitats have other public and nature conservation benefits.
It’s not just farming and aesthetics that are at stake here. Challenges such as climate change and air pollution should also inform how financial support for appropriate land management is managed. For example, floods are predicted to become more common as the climate gets warmer. Reforestation can help to diminish floods, the roots channelling water down through the soil instead of letting it run off the land. Re-establishment of woodlands can also improve air quality: the leaves absorb harmful gases such as sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide.
But rewilding, or any form of restructuring land management, can be costly. It therefore needs to be based on the best scientific evidence, preferably from well-designed experimental research studies. In controlled experimental studies, the cause for any effects found can more easily be determined, as opposed to observational studies, which risk being biased by other, confounding, factors. But due to the cost and complexity of maintaining them, long-term, experimentally manipulated land use studies are rare, and with it the necessary evidence base for long-term management decisions.
Experimental grazing
I’ve been lucky to be involved in one such long-term experiment. The Glen Finglas experiment, managed by the James Hutton Institute, was set up in 2002 in Scotland’s Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park. The experiment examines the long-term ecological impacts of different livestock grazing intensity levels on plants, arthropods (insects and spiders), birds and mammals. These grazing levels reflect the conventional stocking rate in the region at the start of the experiment (about three ewes per ha), low intensity grazing at a third of the conventional stocking rate (with sheep only or both sheep and cattle), or no grazing at all.
The experiment has six replicates of four grazing treatments and covers around 0.75km² of land, with 12km of fencing. This may not seem large, but in experimental terms, it is. According to Robin Pakeman, a researcher at the James Hutton Institute who manages the project, the experiment constitutes “an unrivalled resource to understand how grazing impacts on a whole range of organisms”.
Since the start, the Glen Finglas experiment has shown that grazing intensity affects plants and the amount of insects and spiders. The highest amount of plants, insects and spiders were found in the ungrazed areas. This was not too surprising as grazing livestock removes vegetation, which results in reduced habitat conditions for insects and spiders overall (although some species benefit from grazing).
There have also been studies on carbon storage, vole abundances and fox activity within the experiment. These have shown higher carbon storage and higher fox activity in the ungrazed areas.
Meanwhile, the research on birds within this experiment has, from the start, focused on meadow pipits. These small, brown birds are the “house sparrows of the uplands”, yet often go unnoticed. But they are the most common upland bird and an important part of upland food webs, forming key prey for birds of prey such as hen harriers and a common host for cuckoos. The experiment has provided unique insights into the ecology of this fascinating little bird, and a much clearer understanding of how it is affected by grazing.
In just the first two to three years, it became clear that meadow pipits could be affected by grazing intensity. My PhD supervisor, Darren Evans, found that the breeding density and egg size were both positively affected by low intensity mixed cattle and sheep grazing. But there were no differences in how many meadow pipit chicks were produced and fledged between the grazing treatments, at least not in the very early phase of the experiment.
I wanted to test whether these results changed in the longer term. Together with colleagues from Newcastle University, the British Trust for Ornithology, The James Hutton Institute and The University of Aberdeen, we looked at whether 12 years of continuous experimental grazing management had affected the breeding success of meadow pipits.
We assumed that low intensity grazing, compared to high intensity or no grazing, was most beneficial for pipit breeding productivity. We found the low intensity grazed areas did indeed seem to be better for meadow pipits, but the effects were not clear enough to be statistically significant. And there seemed to be potentially more important factors, such as predation, affecting their breeding outcome.
But although we did not initially set out to test it, we found other, more significant, effects on the wider bird community.
When the experiment started, there were almost no bird species other than meadow pipits in and around the treatment areas, hence the focus on them. But in 2015, while looking for meadow pipit nests, we came across a few other beautiful nests in the low intensity grazed areas. These nests had colourful blue eggs or eggs that appeared to have been painted with dark brown watercolour paint. These turned out to be stonechat and reed bunting eggs, two bird species that had not previously been seen in the experiment.
Later on, we saw that they had fledged successfully: the parents would call them to warn about human intruders. If we didn’t get too close, the newly fledged young would curiously nudge their heads up through the vegetation. By this stage of the experiment – 12 years in – the vegetation had actually become quite dense and high in the ungrazed and some of the low intensity grazed areas.
We also detected several black grouse nests, mainly in the ungrazed areas. Most of them were already hatched, but one had a female who bravely stayed put on her eggs every time we visited this area until they hatched.
Another great discovery was when we found a meadow pipit nest with one egg that seemed oddly big in comparison to the rest of the clutch. We were really excited to realise that it had been visited by a cuckoo that had laid an egg there, which hadn’t happened during the early years of nest monitoring in the experiment. This egg had a brown spotted pattern which was fascinatingly similar to the meadow pipit eggs. (As exciting as this all may seem, nest searching should only be carried out under permit. I also had a bird ringing permit covering my research activities).
Thanks to all these encounters, we decided to test how the different grazing treatments affected the species richness of breeding birds. Over the first two years, we found that there was basically no difference. But another decade on and there were clearly more bird species found in the ungrazed areas compared to the other experimental plots.
A fractious debate
It was not only bird species richness that needed time to respond to the change in grazing management. Although plant structure responded early, it was not until 2017 – 14 years since the experiment began – that an effect on plant species richness could be detected. In this case, the variety of species was greater in the intensively grazed areas, probably because the livestock holds back fast-growing plants from dominating. Whether this would remain the same in another decade is far from clear.
The ungrazed areas in our study, meanwhile, showed more shrub and tall-growing plants after a bit more than a decade. There were also patches of deciduous tree species, which were not there when the experiment commenced.
Rewilding is such a fractious debate because of the difficulty in obtaining solid scientific evidence on which to base decisions. It takes a very long time – far longer than our political cycles, most research studies, perhaps even a lifetime – to determine what the ultimate effects of large scale land management on the environment are. In our experiment, changes have been very slow. Pakeman explained to me that this is partly expected in cold and infertile habitats but another reason for slow responses is that plant communities exist in a sort of “mosaic”, with each community having a different preference for the grazers. He continued:
The long history of grazing has meant that the most highly preferred communities show little response to grazing removal as they have lost species capable of responding to this change.
There is no one management practice which creates the perfect environment. Some bird species (skylark and snipe) were only found in grazed areas. Other species were more abundant in the ungrazed areas. There is no one size fits all.
But much more consideration and effort needs to be given to unattended land and its potential for boosting biodiversity. There is no single answer to what is the best alternative, but our experiment indicates that a mosaic of different grazing types and shrub or woodland would be more suitable if the aim is to increase biodiversity, carbon uptake and habitats for endangered species.
The experiment also showed that changing the management had no effects on plant diversity and bird species richness in the first years. But this may only be the beginning of the transformation. Another decade of no grazing may result in even higher, or lower, species richness. This shows how important it is to be patient in receiving the effects of land management on plants and wildlife.
Using existing evidence
Our results bring some experimental evidence to the debate around sheep farming versus rewilding. Hopefully, decisions around new policies and subsidy systems will be based on such evidence. As new policies are formed, there will inevitably always be winners and losers, among both humans and wildlife, according to which habitat types receive more support.
Biodiversity is incredibly important. It creates a more resilient ecosystem that can withstand external stresses caused by both humans and nature. It also keeps populations of pollinators strong. At the moment, perhaps the most current and urgent reason is that it could be instrumental in protecting us from future pandemics. A wider range of species prevents unnatural expansions of single species, which can spill over their diseases to humans.
But preserving biodiversity is just one element of long-term environmental aims. Other processes, such as increased flood protection and carbon storage, which both can be achieved through more vegetation, may soon become more prevalent.
There are therefore several biological processes pointing towards public gain from increasing the area of unmanaged land. Across Europe, land is being abandoned due to low profitability in farming it. There are predictions that the amount of abandoned land in Europe will increase by 11% (equivalent to 200,000km² or 20 million ha) by 2030. This is often reported negatively, but it does not have to be. The problem most people see with land abandonment or rewilding is the decrease in food productivity, which will have to increase in order to feed a growing human population.
But as Richard Bunting at the charity Rewilding Britain explained to me, a decline in food production could be avoided, while increasing the areas subject to rewilding to 10,000km² (a million hectares) by the end of the century:
We’re working for the rewilding of a relatively small proportion of Britain’s more marginal land. One million hectares may sound like a lot, but there are 1.8 million hectares [18,000km²] of deer stalking estates and 1.3 million hectares [13,000km²] of grouse moors in Britain. In England alone, there are 270,000 hectares [2,700km²] of golf courses.
As farmers and other upland land owners may be opposed to the idea of rewilding, I also asked him how this would work in practice. He told me that he believes farming and rewilding could work well together, but he had some caveats:
We do need conversations around fresh approaches to the way farming is carried out and how land is used. A key point here is that for farmers, engaging with rewilding should always be about choice, as we seek a balance between people and the rest of nature where each can thrive.
There are many ways to rewild. The Woodland Trust have been successful in restoring ancient woodlands and planting new trees by protecting them from large herbivores such as deer and livestock. Another method is to let “nature have its way” without intervening at all. This has been successful in restoring natural habitats, including woodland, such as the Knepp estate in West Sussex, which Isabella Tree has made famous in her book Wilding.
After 19 years of no conventional management, The Knepp estate now hosts a vast range of wildlife, including all five native owl species, the rare purple emperor butterfly and turtle doves. Large herbivores, including both livestock and deer, graze the area on a free-roaming level. These animals are replacing the large natural herbivores such as aurochs, wisent and wild boar which would have grazed the area thousands of years ago.
So there is room for discussion on what environmental and financial benefits there may be of different rewilding, or woodland restoration projects, and where they are most suitable.
The first thing to do, I think, is to diversify the types of land management championed by the government through subsidy. Natural habitats could be increased through more financial benefits to landowners for leaving land unattended, while improving public interest in visiting woodlands and thereby the support for preserving wild habitats.
Meanwhile, long-term research of land-use change would give us a better evidence base for future decisions. But this must go hand in hand with much needed serious evaluations of rural communities’ long-term income opportunities under alternative management scenarios, which will always be a cornerstone in land use politics.
Editor’s note: The Biden administration’s budget to address the extinction crisis for the year 2021 is $22 million ($22,000,000). That is $60,273 per day, $2,511 per hour, and $41 per second. The Biden administration’s military budged for the year 2021 is $705.39 billion ($705,390,000,000). That is $1,93 billion per day, $80,527 million per hour, and $1,34 million per second. The US military is also the single largest polluter in the world, burning about 269,230 barrels of oil per day. The numbers alone show the preferences of this “culture” very clearly. (In my view, the term “culture” seems inappropriate to describe a societal structure that follows the logic of a cancer cell.)
Featured image: “We Live Here Too” by Nell Parker.
This is a press release from the Center for Biological Diversity, May 28.
WASHINGTON— With today’s (May 28) release of President Biden’s first full budget, the administration signaled that stemming the wildlife extinction crisis and safeguarding the nation’s endangered species will not be a top priority, despite the warnings of scientists that one million species are at risk of going extinct around the world without intervention.
The Biden administration is proposing just $22 million — a mere $1.5 million above last year’s levels — to protect the more than 500 imperiled animals and plants still waiting for protection under the Endangered Species Act. It is at the same level as what was provided for in 2010.
The budget proposal increases funding for endangered species recovery by $18 million. While this represents a modest increase from last year’s budget, the Endangered Species Act has been severely underfunded for decades, resulting in species waiting years, or even decades, for protection and already-protected species receiving few dollars for their recovery.
Based on the Fish and Wildlife Service’s own recovery plans, at least $2 billion per year is needed to recover the more than 1,700 endangered species across the country. The proposed budget fails to even come close to closing the gap in needed funding.
“It’s distressing that President Biden’s budget still ignores the extinction crisis,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “What’s especially tragic is that restoring abundant wildlife populations would also reap huge benefits in helping to stop the climate crisis, reduce toxic pollution and protect wild places. This was a missed opportunity.”
During the presidential campaign, President Biden touted his early support for the Endangered Species Act when the law was passed in 1973. In January President Biden launched a review of the Trump administration’s rollbacks of the regulations implementing the Endangered Species Act and decisions to weaken protections for the monarch butterfly, spotted owl and gray wolf.
To date, however, the Biden administration has not moved to alter or reverse any Trump-era policies or decisions related to endangered species. With today’s budget, President Biden is adopting the measly funding levels of the Trump administration.
Over the past year, more than 170 conservation groups have asked for additional funding for endangered species. This request echoes similar pleas from 121 members of the House of Representatives and 21 senators.
“Every year, more of our most distinctive animals and plants will vanish right before our eyes. Perhaps for the sake of his grandchildren, President Biden will reconsider this disastrous budget proposal,” said Hartl.
Around 650 U.S. plants and animals have already been lost to extinction. Some of the plants and animals that have been deemed extinct in the United States since 2000 include: Franklin’s bumblebee from California and Oregon; the rockland grass skipper and Zestos skipper butterflies from Florida; the Tacoma pocket gopher; the Alabama sturgeon; the chucky madtom, a small catfish from Tennessee; a wildflower named Appalachian Barbara’s buttons; and the Po’ouli, a songbird from Maui. Scientists estimate that one-third of America’s species are vulnerable to extinction and 12,000 species nationwide are in need of conservation action.
The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.7 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.
Featured image: An elephant bull strides through Kimana Sanctuary, with the iconic Mount Kilimanjaro in the background. Image by Kang-Chun Cheng for Mongabay.
KiliAvo Fresh Ltd seeks to establish water-intensive commercial farm that would obstruct wildlife corridor adjacent to Amboseli National Park.
Majority of landowners of the former Kimana Tikondo Group Ranch area working together to preserve free movement of wildlife and livestock in this dryland ecosystem.
April 26 ruling dismisses the farm’s appeal against revocation of its licence by National Environment Management Authority.
An April 26 ruling against a licence for a commercial farm near Kenya’s Amboseli National Park will help to preserve free movement of both Maasai livestock herders and wildlife. The National Environment Tribunal’s dismissal of an appeal by KiliAvo Fresh Ltd confirms the importance of ecological concerns in determining appropriate land use in the semi-arid region.
The farm’s owners initially applied for a licence in August 2019, but this was denied by the National Environmental Management Authority because it fell in an area zoned for livestock under the Amboseli Ecosystem Management Plan. The plan aims to preserve free movement of both domestic animals and wildlife across the Kimana plain, which has largely avoided the gradual fragmentation of ownership, growing permanent settlement, and agriculture in other areas surrounding Amboseli National Park.
Tracking data from three collared elephants showing their movements through the Kimana area, a vital wildlife corridor and rangeland for herders. The KiliAvo farm is shown in red. Data from the Amboseli Trust for Elephants and Save the Elephants.
Movement the lifeblood of pastoralism
For 60 years and more, a series of changing legal boundaries has fallen across this dryland ecosystem. While the ecological demands of this arid, beautiful territory have remained the same – seasonal availability of grazing and water prompting both wildlife and herders to move freely across it – until recently, the legal framework had increasingly divided the land up, assigning legal title to steadily-smaller plots which individual owners were tempted to sell off to private developers.
In 2013, two thirds of landowners of the former Kimana Tikondo Group Ranch pooled their plots, establishing the Amboseli Landowners Conservancies Association (ALOCA). In concert with the Kenya Wildlife Service and the ministries of environment and tourism and wildlife, ALOCA designed a management plan intended to ensure revenue streams for members, covering lease fees, bursary, livestock breed improvement, and livestock compensation lost to predators.
Kenya has come a long way in mitigating human-wildlife conflicts. Carefully developed strategies have allowed threatened lion populations to make a comeback despite growing human populations and pastoral needs for livestock grazing. Big Life Foundation, a nonprofit organisation focused on preserving wildlife and habitat, works to support local communities through the collaborative protection of wildlife. Advocating for coexistence can be a challenging process, one that will persist into perpetuity, but a meaningful one. Jeremy Goss, a conservation manager at Big Life, emphasized their mission statement: “We see wildlife and domestic livestock as inherently compatible.”
Land use in Amboseli has long accommodated the needs of both livestock and wildlife, whose fates are inextricably linked. For both, mobility is essential – survival depends on constant movement to viable resources. Rangers and herders alike understand how these animals constitute the local economy and Maasai culture. The vast bush of Amboseli may seem undeveloped in the conventional sense–underutilized to the inexperienced eye–but it is this very land that has supported some of the world’s most renown wildlife and the livestock that supports local economies.
ALOCA’s management scheme formally recognised that movement is the lifeblood of pastoralism, helping to avoid overgrazing and allowing the landscape to support livestock herds and wildlife more sustainably while building in the flexibility needed to survive and recover from periodic droughts.
KiliAvo Fresh Ltd seeks to establish water-intensive commercial farm that would obstruct wildlife corridor adjacent to Amboseli National Park. Image by Kang-Chun Cheng for Mongabay.
‘Soon, this area will be covered with farms’
KiliAvo Fresh Ltd’s project moves in the opposite direction. The 72-hectare (180 acres) farm is situated in the middle of the Kimana wildlife dispersal area; its electrified fencing partially obstructs a wildlife corridor linking Amboseli National Park with Kimana Sanctuary and opening into the Chyulus and Tsavo to the north and east.
The project’s Environmental Impact Assessment raises concerns over the impact of setting up water-intensive commercial agriculture here, as well as the risk of chemicals from fertilizers and pesticides leaching into surrounding areas.
Kenneth Nashuu is a retired warden whose 40 year career with Kenyan Wildlife Service brought him all across Kenya. He predicts serious repercussions for both wildlife and the economic situation of local communities should KiliAvo’s vision succeed. “An insertion like KiliAvo in a critical route point should have never been allowed to happen. There needs to be a stronger management plan in place that trains people so they understand the consequences.”
Once open rangeland is transformed into cultivated farms, reductions in grazing land would impact livestock herding, likely causing people to lose money and affecting cultural norms tied closely with herding.
Kimana is one of several sites across the country where strategies to reduce conflict between growing human populations and their livestock and farms have enjoyed recent success.
Daniel Ole Sambu, head of the Predator Protection Programme at Big Life, helped develop a compensation scheme to attenuate retaliatory predator killings in 2003. Funds from both Big Life-facilitated donations and a local community kitty offer partial compensation for attacks on livestock by lions, hyenas, leopards, and other predators. By offering compensation credit on a sliding scale, the program encourages herders to adopt good husbandry practices, such as fencing and keeping constant watch over livestock. For instance, should the attack occur in a fenced area, the compensation will be greater than if the attack took place in an open pasture.
Since the introduction of the program, fewer predators have been killed in retaliation for livestock casualties. Big Life’s Rangers’ phones used to ring off the hook with people reporting intruding wildlife. Now, there is an average of four or five calls a day across the 647,497 hectare (1.6 million acres) that they oversee.
Speaking to KiliAvo shareholder and manager Jeremiah Saalash on the path leading to the farm’s newly-drilled borehole, an opposing vision quickly becomes clear: “Soon, this area will be covered with farms just like this one. My ancestors farmed in the foothills of Kilimanjaro, and I have made it here.”
The establishment of an enterprise such as KiliAvo may undo years of hard work and catalyze conflicts beyond Amboseli, reintroducing conflicts where people are living and grazing due to the disruption of a critical migration corridor.
Further constraints on grazing from encroachments like KiliAvo could even force locals to return to subsistence poaching.
It is worth noting that there are smallholder farmers growing maize, beans, onions, and other vegetables near natural water sources in ALOCA’s seven conservancies. It’s the location and scale of KiliAvo that raises concerns.
Changes to ecosystems in tandem with conventional human development are inevitable, but this is not to say stewardship should be abandoned. The KiliAvo ruling by the National Environmental Tribunal clarifies which forms of development make ecological sense here in sight of Amboseli.
By obstructing wildlife migration corridors, eliminating critical pastures for local herders, and monopolizing scant resources, a farm such as KiliAvo is fundamentally incompatible with the drylands of Kimana.
“Everything is connected here,” Parmuya Ole Timoye, a manager at nearby Amboseli Bush Camp commented.“One person’s actions can affect everyone else.”
SAN RAFAEL, Calif.— The Marin County Superior Court today ruled that the county in Northern California failed to adequately protect coho salmon and their habitat in the San Geronimo Valley.
Marin County originally planned to adopt a streamside conservation ordinance to preserve vegetation, maintain water quality and prevent erosion in 2007 when it last updated its countywide plan. But 12 years later, the measure has still not materialized, in violation of the California Environmental Quality Act.
The lawsuit was brought by the Salmon Protection And Watershed Network (SPAWN) and Center for Biological Diversity.
“Salmon continue to disappear while the county fails to provide adequate protection, and 14 years later we are still begging for relief,” said Todd Steiner, executive director of SPAWN. “All we have asked is for Marin County to enact a commonsense, science-based streamside protection ordinance. Instead it has delayed, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay consultants to write additional studies and conduct listening sessions with stakeholders, and hundreds of thousands of dollars more to try to defend its inaction in court. Once again, this strategy of delay has been ruled illegal by the courts.”
Coho salmon in the Central California Coast have declined more than 95% from historic population levels. The fish are protected as an endangered species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and the California Endangered Species Act.
The San Geronimo watershed includes 30% to 50% of the entire Lagunitas coho population, one of the largest remaining in the state. The county expects the number of developed parcels in the watershed to increase by 22% in the coming years. That will significantly degrade habitat along streams used by coho and steelhead for spawning and migrating to and from the Pacific Ocean.
The National Marine Fisheries Service has characterized the coho as in an “extinction vortex” and identified preserving streamside buffers — which filter runoff and remove sediment — as essential to curbing future threats to the coho.
“For years the county has blatantly ignored the need to protect salmon and steelhead habitat. The court’s ruling confirmed that officials have violated the law by failing to adopt measures to safeguard the San Geronimo watershed,” said Peter J. Broderick, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. “These runs of coho and steelhead are going extinct before our very eyes. The county now has no excuse for not adopting long-overdue stream protections.”
After an earlier successful lawsuit by SPAWN the county was required to issue a supplemental environmental impact report that confirmed a streamside protection ordinance is necessary to mitigate future development to reduce impacts to coho. But officials have attempted to obtain one to five years or more to adopt one.
“All our clients have wanted is for the County of Marin to abide by California law and ensure that development in the San Geronimo Valley is done responsibly, not at the cost of extinction of endangered and threatened species,” said Maddie Coles, certified law student of the Stanford Law School Environmental Law Clinic. “Today the court recognized that responsibility.”
“We are ready to sit down with the county today and construct that commonsense ordinance,” Steiner said.
SPAWN and Center for Biological Diversity were represented by attorneys at the Stanford Law School Environmental Law Clinic and the Law Offices of Michael W. Graf.
“As a member of SPAWN and the Center for Biological Diversity’s legal team, and personally as a citizen of Marin, I am thrilled about today’s decision,” said Kate Gaumond, certified law student of the Stanford Law School Environmental Law Clinic. “Marin County’s natural resources are so unique, and it is in everyone’s interest to ensure those resources are protected for future generations as the county grows.”
The Salmon Protection And Watershed Network (SPAWN), is a program of national marine conservation nonprofit Turtle Island Restoration Network. SPAWN protects endangered, wild Coho salmon and the forests and watersheds they need to survive in West Marin County, California.
The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.7 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.
