Baraza

Category: Emergencies, Forests, Gorillas, Trade, wildlife | Date: Oct 10 2008 | By: baraza

We are all been glued to the depressing headlines every day about the housing crisis, economic credit crunch, collapsing banks. On the bright side we are witnessing an unprecedented level of global cooperation to manage bailouts and rescue packages to save the worlds’ economies.I don’t think I’m alone in wondering how come we couldn’t get this level of cooperation on global climate change. Surely it is having an even greater impact on global economies.

The current financial news focuses on industrial nations of North America and Europe but here in Africa (and I’m sure it’s similar in other developing countries) we are already feeling the impact. We’re experiencing massive inflation which affects us all. Yesterday I heard about a middle class Kenyan family who are now feeding their children on anything that fills their stomach. Although they are a well educated couple, they cannot afford to balance their children’s diet. It’s a vicious cycle – the kids will be undernourished, will perform poorly at school. This will cap their own prospects and limit their capacity to escape poverty.

So, we are reacting to the financial crisis because it affects each of us individually. We approve the bail out rescue packages, and have allowed our governments to take billions of dollars from our taxes to rescue failing financial institutions.

Many environmentalists and conservationists are amazed that we can galvanize global coordination to prevent a global financial crisis; and furious that the same countries couldn’t come together and agree on a rescue package to address other global crises like climate change and poverty in developing countries.

This story appeared today on the BBC website and it stirred me to write this post because while the financial situation may be a global crisis, it is nothing compared to the unfolding environmental crisis . A new report by TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) informs us that are racing towards catastrophic damage to our economies because of what how we are destroying biodiversity and ecosystem services.

What are ecosystem services and how dependent are we on them?

Our very existence is tied to ecosystems.

They clean our water and air; give us fertile soils; provide us with building materials and clothing (timber, cotton); pollinate our crops (bees); store carbon and stop the world from over-heating. The list goes on.

33 Billion - the annual value of these ecosystem services in US Dollars

16 Billion – the annual value of the global economy

In this study by Robert Costanza and others  of 17 ecosystem services in 16 biomes, the value of ecosystem services that are not already captured in economic markets is US $15 – 54 Trillion (that’s twelve 0’s!) with an average of US $33 trillion. They emphasize that this is a minimum estimate. To put this into perspective remember that the Global economy is worth about US $16 trillion – half of what nature gives us for free.

To make this real, consider pollination services – without pollinators like bees, we would have virtually no vegetables and of course no honey! The value of pollination of our commercial crops is estimated to be US $216 billion every year. We can survive without bees, of course but imagine if we had to do all that pollination by hand!

It is this value that we do not capture in our economic evaluations. These ecosystem services are considered free public goods! There are no markets and no prices. We simply don’t count them in our national economies and they don’t feature in our economic planning.

We are trashing our ecosystems and losing a host of free services

By 2050 11% of the natural areas remaining in 2000 could be lost to agricultural expansion, the expansion of infrastructure, and climate change.

Almost 40% of the land currently under low-impact agriculture could be converted to intensive agricultural use, with further biodiversity losses

60% of coral reefs could be lost - even by 2030 - through fishing, pollution, diseases, invasive alien species, and coral bleaching due to climate change.

And climate change is exacerbating this problem.

What are the global financial implications?

In an interview here, the lead author of the TEEB report Pavan Sukhdev warns that “the fisheries that are basically going to die out in 40 years time don’t just mean $80 to 100 billion worth of lost fishing income, but also lost protein for the world’s billion poorest people”.

Nearly one-third of the world’s fisheries are severely depleted, and some have suffered complete collapse, such as the Grand Banks cod stocks off Canada’s eastern coast. If current trends continued, we will have no commercially viable marine fisheries left within fifty years.

The loss of biodiversity will have serious repercussions on the world’s economy. The TEEB report predicts we are losing forest ecosystem services at a rate of between $2 trillion and $5 trillion per year. This is the combined value of their services, including cleaning water and absorbing carbon dioxide. The situation will worsen with time as our natural stock is depleted, and we lose the services they provide. It’s a little like losing the interest from an investment, as you eat into the capital. Except that the value of the services a forest provides, is worth many times what we would make if we were to chop down the timber and sell it on the open market.

We tend to undervalue things that we get for free.

We understand the value of those things that we spill our sweat for. The TEEB report suggests that we have flawed economic analysis and we’ve been making policy mistakes. Because environmental services are ‘free’ their loss often is not detected by our current economic incentive system, losses due to deforestation, unsustainable harvesting, habitat destruction etc will continue unabated. To add salt to this wound, the world’s poor are most at risk from the continuing loss of biodiversity, as they are the ones that are most dependent on the ecosystem services that are being degraded.

How big is the problem?

Between 1900 and today we have destroyed 50% of the worlds wetlands. In addition 30% of the our coral reefs are damaged and 35% of our magroves deforested. Extinction rates are now 1000 times greater than they should be and the IUCN states that 70% of the worlds plants are in jeopardy. This is already affecting food, water and health. By 2050 7.5 million square kilometers be lost – that’s the size of Australia.

The TEEB report suggests that the cost of the loss of biodiversity today dwarfs the current financial crisis and that we urgently need a rescue package for environment.

You can read the full TEEB report here or the executive summary here.

Bailing out ecosystems

We know that our very well being is totally dependent upon these “ecosystem services” and that we are hurtling towards a crisis, and yet we are not even talking about any sort of rescue package for ecosystems. No one has dared quantify how much that would cost us.

However, the TEEB report warns that if we do not adopt the right policies, the current decline in biodiversity and the related loss of ecosystem services will continue and even accelerate. Some ecosystems are likely to be damaged beyond repair. With a “business as usual” scenario, by 2050 we, or our children and grand children will be faced with serious consequences.

I agree with Corey, the TEEB report is “Yet more evidence that we have to stop the extinction crisis“

Although it sounds horrendous, we mustn’t see this situation as hopeless. Ecosystems are far more robust than banks and economies. If we lose millions of dollars in ecosystem services by chopping down a forest, we can recover that value with a relatively small investment in forest restoration.  It’ll take years but nature also has her own inbuilt repair mechanisms. We can help her to speed up the recovery by planting, protecting and managing the restoration.

Here’s an example of what can be achieved after only 30 years of forest restoration in Africa.

Tree planting with nitrogen fixing casuarina after open cast mining has stripped all the surface soil and rock at Lafarge in Mombasa Kenya

30 years later the restored ecosystem provides many services - cleaning water, producing fish, carbon sequestration, wildlife habitat, recreation and income generation. It is a global showcase and should be replicated and scaled up. You can see more about this amazing place here

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Tags: biodiversity, rescue plan, TEEB report, wildlifedirect

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Category: Emergencies, Gorillas, National Parks and protected areas, WildlifeDirect news, wildlife | Date: Oct 09 2008 | By: baraza

We have been following the alarming developments in Eastern Congo on the Gorilla protection blog and here we bring some of the latest reports on BBC here and from the United Nations official site

There is additional inforamation at the UNITED NATIONS Monuc website here Oct 8, 2008 - The Democratic Republic of Congo’s envoy to the United Nations called Wednesday for an urgent UN Security Council meeting to discuss what he called an “imminent” Rwandan attack on the eastern DRC city of Goma.

Speaking to AFP, Atoki Ileka said DRC authorities had “observed concentrations of Rwandan troops in the Rwandan border town of Gisenyi,” and that this suggested that an attack on Goma, located just across the frontier, was “imminent.”
In an earlier statement, the United States has responded angrily to Nkunda’s recent declarations in this statement from the US Department of State

“The United States condemns and rejects the statements made by General Nkunda, leader of the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), claiming the CNDP intends to overthrow the elected and universally recognized Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (GDRC). The U.S. calls on the international community to support the GDRC as it works to consolidate its democracy and capacity to govern justly its entire territory. The U.S. opposes all those who seek to foment instability in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
The Goma Agreement and the Nairobi Communiqué remain the only true viable framework to bring stability to eastern Congo. The signatories should respect their commitments and implement them swiftly. All concerned parties should also respect the current cease fire and move quickly to disengage their forces in accordance with the UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (MONUC) Global Disengagement Plan. The U.S. applauds MONUC for its efforts to stabilize eastern Congo and calls on all parties to cooperate with those efforts. Conflict between the CNDP and the DRC Armed Forces only detracts attention from resolving the root problem causing instability in the region posed by the ex-Rwandan Armed Forces (ex-FAR), the Interahamwe, and the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).
The U.S. remains committed to supporting the GDRC and the people of the Congo to ensure a strong, democratic state, free from all illegal armed groups. At the October 3rd UN Security Council meeting on DRC, the U.S. condemned statements made by Nkunda and called for the improvement of MONUC capabilities to better carry out its mandate. The U.S. will continue to work with the DRC and the Great Lakes countries both bilaterally and through the Tripartite Plus process to strengthen regional cooperation and build a stable and prosperous region.
The U.S. will work to bring to justice those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in eastern Congo and elsewhere”.

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Tags: CNDP, Gorillas, MONUC, Nkunda, rebels, Rwanda, Virunga National Park

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Category: Rhinoceros, wildlife, wildlife trade | Date: Oct 08 2008 | By: Maina

As the world was busy watching for the outcome of the US financial bailout plan, another bailout plan had come to fruition in Kenya. This second bailout was geared not at rescuing the people from the rising cost of living or the high cost of food but at saving the black rhino, one of the most critically endangered animals in the planet.

For the first time in 25 years, some 15 rhinos were released from captivity after successful breeding in Kenya’s Ngulia Rhino Sanctuary at the heart of Tsavo West National Park. This is a great achievement that follows a long breeding project that begun with the hope of bringing back Kenya’s black rhinos from the brink of extinction. Kenya had, in two decades, seen its black rhino population plummet from an estimated 20,000 rhinos to paltry 350 animals.

This was during the poaching crisis of the 1980s when rhinos were poached en masse for their horn. This poaching inferno was fanned by the demand for rhino horn in Asia and the Middle east for use in traditional medicine and for artifacts. When Dr Richard Leakey spearheaded the formation of the Kenya Wildlife Service in the 80s, the remaining rhinos were put into sanctuaries and accorded 24 hour armed protection inside the fenced-in sanctuaries. Ngulia is the prime government rhino sanctuary in Kenya.

The rhino population has been improving steadily since then and now some 500 black rhinos are estimated to live in Kenya. This release into the open wild is therefore an attempt to have the rhinos breed naturally again in the land - in the greater Tsavo - that they once roamed free and in abundance. Should the release be successful, the project partnership composed of the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) hope they can replicate it in Tanzania and Uganda.

Quite a significant population of rhinos - in Kenyan measure - have been successfully breeding in private sanctuaries. In January 2007, for instance, the most important rhino sanctuaries in northern Kenya, Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Ol Jogi and Solio ranches, conducted the largest rhino translocation in human history when they moved around - as part of a gene and population improvement project - some 34 rhinos. In this translocation exercise, Ol Pejeta got 26 rhinos from Solio and 4 from Ol Jogi. Ol Jogi then got 4 rhinos from Solio to improve the gene pool among their rhinos. This translocation in 2007 was helped a lot by the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy.

Rhino conservation in Kenya is becoming a model of how active species management can actually pull back a species from the very jaws of extinction. I commend the KWS and the ZSL for this achievement.

You can watch clips of the release of the rhinos at the BBC
You can also read the October 3rd news item at ZSL

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Category: wildlife | Date: Oct 01 2008 | By: baraza

There are some conservation projects that really make you feel good. This month we’d like to congratulate and celebrate the Colobus Trust success in Diani Kenya where hundreds of monkeys have been saved by a simple innovation, arboreal rope bridges.

Before we talk monkeys, first come to Diani Beach, Kenya’s version the Florida keys. Driving down the highway you will notice about 20 rope bridges swinging over the highway. If you are there at the right time of the day, you’ll notice it swinging, look harder you’ll see a little bulge with a tail. Before you flash by, you might just recognize that it’s a monkey sitting up there. Yes it’s watching you! And then in a burst of action an entire troop of black and white might start galloping across the wildly swaying bridge!

Colobridges were built by the Colobus Trust to save the rare Angolan colobus monkeys from road traffic accidents

In the 1990’s it was predicted that this species could be driven to extinction within a decade. Faced with a crisis innovative solutions were sought - Lollipop stick men were deployed at major crossing points, roadsigns erected to slow down the speed, and education for taxis, stickers in matatus (local buses), and speeding tour operators were reported to the Residents Association. The idea of speed humps was rejected - in general it was tough to get any support, after all, who really cares about a bunch of thieving monkeys?

The bridges cost about 400 dollars each and are made of cable, rubber and PVC. The bridges straddles the Diani Beach highway between two of the monkeys favourite trees on either side of the highway.

Being naturally shy, the colobus stared at the bridges with disdain for a couple of months until the more inquisitive and daring Sykes monkey began to see the logic. Once the Sykes and even vervet monkeys started using the bridges, the colobus followed suit, and are now very comfortable with their arboreal walkways.

This is an Amazing video of Colobus crossing a “colobridge” (Warning this video is GREAT but the link take you to another site - so read on first or you”ll miss the Australian madness)

There are now 23 ‘Colobridges’ and it’s estimated that they are used 150,000 time a year by at least three different species of monkeys! Amazing because there are only 300 of these Angolan colobus monkeys left in Diani where road kills are now rare.

Not for everyone: Bridges have also been deployed in Zanzibar to save the crazy looking Kirks red colobus but it looks like they aren’t interested in using them. Check out the photos of a confused monkey here

Colobridges have been exported, three arboreal bridges have been built in Australia for possums, squirrel gliders and other arboreal species down there.

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Tags: Colobus Monkeys, Colobus Trust, Diani, Kenya, monkey bridges

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Category: Forests, Mau Forest Complex, National Parks and protected areas, tourism, wildlife | Date: Sep 24 2008 | By: Maina

The power struggles that have characterized the intended eviction of illegal - and perceived legal - squatters from the Mau Complex in Kenya are now degenerating into some really nasty verbal offensives between politicians. On Tuesday, 23 September the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, the Standard and other media reported that the Mau complex was threatening the unity of the ODM Party. The Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) is Kenya’s Prime Minister’s party and has a majority in parliament.

The Mau, one of Kenya’s most important water catchments has been invaded by up to 15,000 families whose eviction - even with the nationwide acceptance that they have to leave - has proved to be extremely challenging for the government. Some of them do indeed have genuine land title deeds. Notwithstanding how fraudulently they acquired them, these are legal government documents that cannot just be wished away. That is why the squatters have stayed put. They say they will only move out when they are compensated for the land they own inside the Mau. They don’t want money, they want land: alternative land.

Now the urgency of evicting these families is creeping in on every Kenyan, and the politicians know this. Politicians being politicians, they see an opportunity to score some career mileage. They are now using the Mau saga - or more so the poor who were sold the land that should not have been sold in the first place - to muscle up their political ambitions. If the event of this Tuesday are anything to go by, then we are in for a lengthy soap opera with a tragic end. Not the happily ever after kind.

Tuesday’s media reports of the emerging cracks in ODM are based on a chain of events that were set into motion by their leader, Prime Minister Raila Odinga when he announced that the squatters have to leave. The situation got worse when Raila, now increasingly getting frustrated by the politicisation of the Mau debacle publicly threatened to name and shame former Kenya African National Union (KANU) stalwarts who he purports are the main beneficiaries of the irregular allocations of land inside the Mau. Most of the remnants of this once powerful party - especially those who stuck with it towards the end of former President Daniel arap Moi’s regime in the late 1990s are now in ODM and they were not amused by the Prime Minister’s uttering.

KANU ruled this country since independence in 1963 until it was dislodged from power during the 2002 euphoric general elections by the then newly formed National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) party. Towards the end of its authoritarian rule, KANU was blamed for having dragged this country through murky decades of economic plunder and stifled democracy. They are said to have acquired colossal swathes of land and Raila believes that, in the same manner, they own most of the Mau land in question.

The situation is so bad such that the Member of Parliament (MP) for Chepalungu Constituency in the expansive Rift Valley Province (where the Mau is located), Honourable Isaac Ruto, is actively campaigning for a candidate from a rival party to ODM for the comming by-elections that were necessitated by the death of a couple of MPs. Isaac was elected to parliament on an ODM ticket. He accuses the Prime Minister of betraying the people who enabled him get to power. Isaac Ruto’s brother, Hounorable Willam Ruto, is credited for having delivered the Rift Valley voting block that sealed the ODM’s parliamentary majority at the end of the hotly contested 2007 general elections in Kenya. Both were former KANU men.

To say that anyone can fully understand the complicated politics that are eating the Mau would be too ambitious. One columnist in the Standard has tried to explain the problem here. I don’t seek to understand these shenanigans. I seek only to see the squatters relocated away from this vital water tower in the most humane manner. The genuine squatters, especially the poor farmers who were duped into buying the land, should be given land elsewhere and immediate forest restoration should start - today. I wonder what will happen to the traditional hunter gatherer minority - the Ogiek - who’ve lived in that forest for eons.

Without the Mau - for example - the Masai Mara will not be the same. The Mara River will not flow. Maybe the wildebeest will stop their annual migration to the Mara and back to Serengeti in Tanzania. Maybe northern Serengeti will die. Maybe.

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Tags: community, Forests, Kenya, Masai Mara, Mau Forest Complex, politics, tourism

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Category: wildlife | Date: Jul 24 2008 | By: Maina

I read about the re-introduction of five cheetahs into the wild at the Cheetah Conservation Fund blog and it reminded me of an article I had read in the Conservation magazine of the Society for Conservation Biology (Vol 9 No.1, Jan-Mar 2008). This particular article took me on a journey of the Lago (Lake) Guri archipelago in east-central Venezuela. For the record, the Lago Guri is the result of the construction of a mammoth hydroelectric dam at the confluence of the Orinoco and Caroní rivers in 1986 and the resultant flooding upstream. The Lago Guri has an expansive matrix of hilltop islands some as little as half-an-acre to 700-ha tracts of land.

So how does this tie in with predators? Simple, in the article, written by William Stolzenburd, one ecologist, John Terborgh, had come up with the theory that top predators were “the irreplaceable forces holding everything together”. Terborgh was not convinced that the modern extinction crisis was as a result of habitats shrinking or their fragmentation. He had observed that in the absence of top predators, the prey would “run amok, with cascades of local extinctions and ecological convulsions in their wake”. Terborgh had boldly declared this theory to his peers in his 1988 essay titled “The Big Things That Run the World” but he so badly needed to prove it.

When he learned of the Lago Guri in 1990, he found what he wanted: a place with islands small enough not to support any large predators. He started his experiment in 1993, by which time, the surviving species at Guri had ballooned to scary proportions. The resident howler monkeys for example, finding themselves without their natural predators, had multiplied and browsed their favorite trees bare. Now they were starving. The trees were fighting back by producing leaves with high concentrations of toxins but the monkeys were too hungry to notice. They would eat only to vomit a few minutes later.

Terborgh was advancing towards proving his theory, and, in a disturbing light, disapproving the island biogeography theory which calculates a ratio to the effect that the smaller and more isolated the island (or forest patch, etc.) the smaller the number of species it can support. According to this theory - proposed by Robert H MacArthur and Edward O Wilson way back in 1963 - fragmentation is the main culprit of extinction and biodiversity loss.

Now, my friend Dino introduced me to the writings of Edward O Wilson and, needless to say, I find Wilson very convincing. But if Terbogh is right, then we, the conservation conscious (and students of Wilson), must then start rethinking how we treat predators. As a matter of fact, we might have to rethink conservation all together.

While am not saying that Terborgh is right and Wilson is wrong (after almost half-a-century), all i am saying is that every species has its place in the whole scheme. Ecosystems are complex. For instance, the reason why there are no predators in the monkeys territory that i spoke of above is because the island is too small to harbor a large predator that can control the population of the monkeys. Therefore, fragmentation led to the absence of predators and the entire system is now collapsing.

Still, the role of the predator is important, and the recent introduction of these five cats into the wild by CCF could help the NamibRand Nature Reserve where they were re-introduced. It would be interesting to find out how these cheetahs fare and how the ecosystem health is affected.

Finally, I need to commend all our bloggers who are working with predators and to encourage them to take good care of our predators. If Terborgh is right, you will have saved the wild as we know it.

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Tags: cheetahs, conservation, ecology, howler monkeys, predators

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Category: Alaska, Climate change, National Parks and protected areas, Oil Exploration, Polar Bears, wildlife | Date: Jul 23 2008 | By: baraza

I was under the impression that there was already too much pressure on the poles and surrounding due to Climate Change so who and where the idea to drill holes and extract oil came from I do not understand. The driving force must be capital off-course and keeping a super economy ahead of the world economic game or is it just one mans inability to comprehend the importance of the environment and wildlife. George.W.Bush favoured the exploration in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), despite studies that showed that oil development would only reduce Americas dependence on imports slightly and lower oil prices by less that 50 cents a barrel.

As many of you may be aware seven oil companies had been granted permission to establish oil refineries in a remote part of Alaska called Chukchi and Beaufort Seas after rights of drilling in the region were auctioned for $2.6 billion by the government. This just happens to be critical habitat for Polar Bears, Whales and other artic species that are already so vulnerable to the effects of global warming.

Despite the negative impacts that endangered polar bears already face from the presence of the oil companies, the US Fish and Wildlife Services issued regulations that in cases of accidental harassment or disturbance by the oil companies towards the polar bears will be allowed, so long as there are no injuries or incidents do not lead to death of the animals.

Where did such immunity for the oil companies come from? Did an incident of such characteristics take place that they had to come up with a regulation to mitigate for ‘problems’ to the oil companies or is this something that is going to happen as a result of an activity they will carry out? I can’t quite get my head around this. So if i have got this straight then, if at any point the oil companies activities cause the disturbance of mating or breeding rituals or cause indirect alterations to polar bear behaviour which do not inflict any physical injury or cause direct death to the bears then it’s ok??? So for instance if the noise of drilling prevents females from mating and the population declines as a result of no births within the 5 year span of this ridiculous regulation then the companies will not be held responsible?

Does anybody have any answers for me?

Personally I don’t think this has been thought out very carefully and it seems to me that the oil companies have been given a green light to do as they please. A deliberate incident can be made to appear accidental if you catch my drift.

Blog by Masumi Gudka.
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