Conservation is all about people

News

Rare Planet Yobo Member
June 4th, 2010

There is a popular misconception that conservation is principally about plants and animals and the physical environment that they live in.

In reality, conservation is just as much about people as it is about fauna and flora. People lie behind most environmental threats — whether it be fuelwood collection, dynamite fishing for protein, chemical run-off or setting fires for agricultural expansion. And it is only people that can drive solutions. Those solutions can be alternatives to fuelwood sources or more efficient stoves, training in sustainable fishing techniques, enhanced pollution controls or better regulation and enforcement.

People are thus the key to conservation, and the focus of Rare’s work around the world. Indeed two of our three measures of success pertain to “people.” Our first “C” (Capacity) refers to the training we give our campaign managers to better enable them to launch effective campaigns, and the second “C” (Constituencies) refers to the community support our campaigns strive to generate — support that creates an enabling environment for sustainable resource-use to take root. (See blog post dated May 11th for a more detailed description of Rare’s 3 C’s.)

It is no wonder, then, that the focus of our cross-regional visit to Madagascar would be to meet and engage with the people who drive our campaigns and those upon whom it focuses.

The success (or otherwise) of our campaign in Madagascar lies in the hands of a truly dedicated group of conservationists that make up Blue Ventures, including its founder and research director, Alasdair Harris, project coordinator, Shawn Peabody and Rare campaign manager, Gildas Andriamalala.

Above, Gildas in Andavadoaka.

Gildas first joined Blue Ventures to work on the socio-economic monitoring of Andavadoaka. He has a law degree from the University of Toliara and has worked on the legal aspects of both the establishment of the Velondriake Marine Protected Area (MPA) and the land acquisition issues relating to the Andavadoaka community Eco-lodge project. In February 2009, he became part of Rare’s PEP 1 cohort that trained at Georgetown University in a Master’s in Communication program that is awarded by the University of Texas at El Paso.

Gildas’s campaign is striving to develop a more sustainable approach to fisheries management along Madagascar’s Andavadoaka coast within the Velondriake Marine protected Area (MPA). The aim is to increase juvenileseagrass and mangrove fish, which will replenish the reef fish population, through the reduction of the amount of poison fishing and beach seine netting. These threats will be reduced by informing the local people of the damage done by destructive fishing and by working with the heads of 24 local villages to increase the enforcement of the local Dina (legislation) and encouraging fishers to adopt more sustainable practices.

Shawn Peabody showing us the plant from which Laru (a poisonous white paste used for poison fishing) is derived. Unfortunately, the plant is readily available all along the Velondriake coastline.

Since many of the area’s beach seine fishers come from neighboring communities, setting up and enforcing local patrol efforts will be critical and getting local leaders to enforce regulations is essential. Gildas’s strategy for success reads:

“To eliminate the principal threat posed to the sustainability of the marine resources and habitat in the South West coast of Madagascar, the use of unsustainable fishing practices must be stopped, to the extent that this behavior becomes socially unacceptable in partner communities. Fishers and other stakeholders will be made conscious of the threats to their livelihoods and cultures caused by target unsustainable practices, and will be made aware of the social, environmental, cultural and economic benefits of using the right methods to improve marine resource sustainability and community life.”

So our team needed to talk first to Gildas to check in on the status of his campaign and his outreach efforts, as well as to meet Shawn and Alasdair to get a lead agency perspective on progress. But that would not be enough; Rare’s team also needed to visit the fishers themselves to ask them if they had heard of the campaign, understood its messages, and seen the collateral that Gildas had produced.

We would need to take to the sea and visit outlying communities and meet with beach seine fishers, village leaders, and other stakeholders to verify some of the assumptions that underlie Gildas’s campaign — all in a couple of days. To accomplish these objectives the team split up: Daniel Hayden, Rare’s director of Global Programs Operations, and I would focus on meeting Gildas and key fishers in the Velondriake area. We would combine efforts to travel to adjoining fisher communities, while Rare’s COO Dale Galvin would take to the sea to look at the underwater world that Gildas and his colleagues were trying to protect – the spectacular coral reefs.

Watch Gildas talking about his campaign:

In the next and final blog post, we will discuss our findings.

You can learn more about Gildas’s campaign by visiting RarePlanet.

Visit Rare Planet’s yobo profile here

This blog post was written by Paul Butler. Mr. Butler led Rare’s first Pride campaign in the late 1970’s to save the endangered St. Lucian parrot and continues his conservation leadership today as Rare’s Senior Vice President, Global Programs.

This part three of a series of posts from Mr. Butler on his campaign visit to Andavadoaka in Madagascar. His first post talked about how Rare is evaluating our first cross-regional campaign visit, while the second post was on how Madagascar is a biological marvel, but it faces grave threats.

This story originally appeared at the Rare Conservation Blog

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