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Sustainable Development Update Issue 4, Volume 5, 2005 The Sustainable Development Update (SDU) focuses on the links between ecology, society and the economy. It is produced by Albaeco, an independent non-profit organisation. SDU is produced with support from Sida, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Environment Policy Division. Dr. Fredrik Moberg, Editor Click the miniature below to download in pdf-format: 
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Flooding in rich and poor countries – two different stories? Spent a few weeks in Venice, Italy, this summer. Except from the standard tourist phrases I also came to learn acqua alta rather soon. It means high tide and is a common feature of the living museum Venice. Built as it is on one hundred and seventeen small islands in a semi-enclosed lagoon the city has always had to deal with the rising Adriatic Sea. And the problem is getting worse. Venice is suffering from higher and more frequent instances of acqua alta, partly as a result of sea level rise due to global warming. In addition, the city is sinking, as a consequence of both natural settling of lagoon sediments and the overexploitation of freshwater from beneath the city. Hundred years ago, water covered the famous St. Mark’s Square seven times a year whereas in 1996 this happened almost 100 times. Around Venice the natural ecosystems have now been so altered that many argue for engineering solutions to save the city. The government has approved construction of a controversial system of movable undersea gates that will take about ten years to build at a cost of almost $3 billion. Critics say there are many better solutions that will cost less, take less time, will have less impact on the fragile marine ecosystems, are reversible and better able to protect the sinking town. New Orleans is another very recent example where nature’s own capacity to protect people from natural disasters has been undermined. The city has become abnormally vulnerable to flooding due to alteration of the Mississippi River and the destruction of wetlands at its mouth. Moreover, global warming and the accompanying rising sea levels may have exacerbated the destructive power of the hurricane Katrina. Venice and New Orleans are by no means alone. Other cities in developed countries like London, Rome and New York are also prone to sea level rise. But, as the planet warms, I worry much more about the many developing countries that have their main cities in coastal areas. These will be among the first to go, causing devastating destruction in the countries least able to deal with it. Who will keep places like Manila and Dhaka from becoming the next Atlantis when not even the richest country in the world can protect their poor? /Dr. Fredrik Moberg, Editor | ||||||
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The bushmeat crisis – sustainable livelihood alternatives are crucial The bushmeat crisis in West and Central Africa threatens the survival of countless wildlife species and the livelihoods of many communities. This alarming trend will continue as long as millions of people rely heavily on wildlife for food and income. No amount of law enforcement or awareness will curb the commercial bushmeat trade in the absence of realistic protein and economic alternatives.  Worth more alive than dead? Bushmeat trader holding smoked bats, known to be keystone animals providing important ecosystem services, as seed dispersal and pollination, of immense indirect economic value. Photo: John Swensson The unsustainable hunting for bushmeat – the meat of wild animals used for food – is today recognized as one of the most serious and immediate threats to biodiversity in the tropics. Only from the Congo Basin forests, in Central Africa, 1-3,4 million tonnes of bushmeat, valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, is being harvested each year!
Legislation is not sufficient Wildlife conservation efforts have traditionally focused on creating and strengthening protected areas. Hunting and trading regulations followed by strict law enforcement are important and necessary tools to address the bushmeat crisis, though clearly not sufficient, considering the magnitude of people involved in and depending on the bushmeat trade. Unless affordable and viable alternatives are developed and locally implemented, people will continue hunting for and trading with wild animals, whether it is legal or not. Today, awareness is increasing and the situation is gradually changing: conservation and development groups are now addressing the issue of bushmeat alternatives.  Fishing is one alternative to wild bushmeat, which is unfortunately in decline. Photo: John Swensson Livelihood alternatives Below some livelihood alternatives being promoted for sub-Saharan Africa are presented. For conservation and development projects to be successful they must be designed to provide an economic incentive for people to protect wildlife. Since bushmeat hunting is a relatively cost effective and lucrative business, finding alternatives for people to consider a change of occupation is definitely not an easy task. Community based natural resource management. In East and Southern Africa, many communities abandon hunting of large animals and instead manage wildlife for consumptive or non-consumptive tourism. Income from hunting or photographic safaris is split among the communities, providing direct payments and small development projects. Wildlife – and the ecosystem services it provides – is regarded as a valuable resource. Furthermore, these projects offer livelihood opportunities for scouts, antipoaching officers, guides and biologists. Examples include among others the Amboseli Community Wildlife Tourism Project in Kenya and the Cullman and Hurt Community Wildlife Project in Tanzania. Wildlife Works is a successful conservation-oriented business model. In order to make better use of an 80,000 acre failing cattle ranch between Tsavo East and Tsavo West, Kenya’s largest national parks, Wildlife Works offers local people alternatives to their subsistence living as bushmeat hunters or traders. In exchange for removing snares in the area, Wildlife Works has built a so called Ecofactory in the community for producing designer t-shirts, which are then sold in the U.S. and Europe. Sales has so far financed development projects and 56 full-time jobs (including health insurance) in the community. The 80,000 acre ranch is now the Rukinga Wildlife Sanctuary, and has recovered to provide a key migration corridor for endangered elephants, cheetahs, wild dogs, zebras and 43 other large mammal species. Wildlife Works is now applying their business model to other conservation initiatives in Africa. The Heifer Project provides rural families with animals to raise for meat (rabbits, chickens, grasscutters/cane rats, giant snails) or for animal products (cows, goats, chickens, bees). Some young are passed on to other families, spreading the wealth. The Heifer Project helps form farmer cooperatives to supply volume orders (e.g. restaurants) and provides training in animal husbandry, meal preparation and marketing.
Cultural preferences The extent to which other protein sources actually can replace the meat of wild animals is, however, unclear: where there is cultural or other preference for bushmeat the availability of alternatives may not reduce the demand. Rather than change the types of animals eaten, some projects are therefore working to change the way traditional bushmeat species are “produced”. Candidate species for farming must breed quickly and be culturally acceptable. So far only two species have proven to be relatively productive – the grasscutter or cane rat (Thryonomys swinderianus), a large rodent, and the giant African snail (Archachatina marginata).  The grasscutter or cane rat is one of the few species that can be farmed as an alternative to wild bushmeat. Photo: John Swensson A complex issue The bushmeat commodity chain involves many different types of bushmeat actors: hunters (rural subsistence and commercial), traders, transporters, weapon dealers, restaurateurs, consumers (rural and average/elite urban). These actors tend to have different nutritional and economic needs and might therefore need different types of alternatives and solutions – making this a very complex issue. Rural subsistence hunters, families without access to agricultural markets, people with no other job opportunities and those too poor to purchase other sources of meat are the ones who require most attention from donors and conservation/development projects. Conservation and development Successful solutions require multi-disciplinary approaches, and the full integration of conservation into development agendas. Bushmeat is intimitely linked to the daily livelihoods of millions of poor people. This fact should be reason enough for decision makers to ensure that key policy processes, such as those underlying Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), take wildlife-poverty linkages into much greater account. /John Swensson More at: Organisations and projects Bushmeat Crisis Task Force, BCTF: http://www.bushmeat.org Overseas Development Institute, ODI: http://www.odi-bushmeat.org Amboseli Community Wildlife Tourism Project, ACWTP: http://www.amboseli.org/ Cullman & Hurt Community Wildlife Project: http://www.cullmanandhurt.org Wildlife Works: http://www.wildlifeworks.com Heifer International: http://www.heifer.org Articles Postnote. February 2005. Number 236. “The Bushmeat Trade”. The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. London. http://www.parliament.uk/post/home.htm Archer B., J. Beck, K. Douthwaite and D. Ruppert. 2003. “Playing in Counterpoint: Bushmeat Users and the Possibility of Alternatives”. http://www.bushmeat.org/docs.html Milner-Gulland E. J. and E. L. Bennett. July 2003. “Wild Meat: The Bigger Picture”. Trends in Ecology and Evolution. | ||||||
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Biological pest control is an environmentally friendly way to protect crops from harmful insects and other pests. It utilises naturally occurring predators, parasites and diseases to control pests as a part of an approach called Integrated Pest Management (IPM). A good place to start for any biological control program is, therefore, to investigate the state of the natural enemies in the area and identify factors that limit their effectiveness. When properly applied biological control efforts can reduce pesticide use and hence save money and the environment simultaneously. For example, one widely cited study estimated that the control of the cassava mealybug by a parasitic wasp has saved US$8-20 billion in crop losses in 27 African countries since it was first deployed two decades ago. A dollar invested returned 200 to 500 dollar The small wasps lay their eggs inside the mealybug and the larvae kill the bug as they grow. Before this biological control program the mealybug was reported to waste up to 40% of cassava yields, the major starch staple for more than 100 million people in Africa. Studies have shown that every dollar invested in the biological control of the mealybug has returned between 200 and 500 dollars in terms of increased cassava production. Prior to their release the wasps were tested to see if they would also damage beneficial insect species in their new environment. As the tests showed the wasps were highly specific to the mealybugs they were imported from Latin America into Nigeria for mass rearing and release. Moreover, there are numerous additional benefits to both the environment and human health from this solution. Similarly, biological control of the water hyacinth and the mango mealybug has also been successful and entailed considerable economic benefits. Biological control agents tend to be very specific for a particular harmful insect, meaning that other beneficial insects can remain unaffected by their use. Biological control, however, often requires more time, record keeping, patience and education. More at: http://www.cgiar.org/pdf/biocontrol_cassavamealybug.pdf | ||||||
| In Brief | ||||||
Natural resources managed at the local level are often the most effective way to create wealth for the world’s rural poor. This is one of the main conclusions in yet another attention-grabbing report from the World Resources Institute (WRI), World Resources 2005: The Wealth of the Poor: Managing Ecosystems to Fight Poverty. Here the Washington-based environmental group stresses the urgent need to look beyond aid projects, debt relief and trade reforms and focus on local natural resources to address the global poverty crisis. – Traditional assumptions about addressing poverty treat the environment almost as an afterthought. This report addresses the stark reality of the poor: three-fourths of them live in rural areas; their environment is all they can depend on, says Jonathan Lash, WRI president. The new report also highlights a number of case studies revealing how local stewardship of ecosystems can be key to fighting poverty. For example, the Sukuma people of Tanzania was given control over restoring 700,000 local acres of denuded forests and grazing lands and now have higher household incomes, better diets, and improved status of tree, bird and mammal species. Likewise, the report describes how community control over a watershed led to a nearly six-fold increase in the cash value of crops grown in Darewadi Village, India. While the last decades have witnessed substantial gains in human well-being and economic development in many parts of the world, large groups of people in rural areas have experienced increased poverty. Three-quarters of the world’s poor people, which live on less than $2 per day, live in rural areas and depend overwhelmingly on nearby natural areas for their income. Lack legal rights to ecosystems – Unfortunately, the poor often lack legal rights to ecosystems and are excluded from decisions about ecosystem management. Without addressing these failures through changes in governance, there is little chance of using the economic potential of ecosystems to reduce rural poverty, says Ian Johnson, vice president of sustainable development, The World Bank. The new report is number 11 in a series of reports on global environment and governance. It is a natural follow-up to the two previous editions: World Resources 2000-2001: People and Ecosystems and World Resources 2002-2004: Decisions for the Earth. The World Resources Institute, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, and the United Nations Environment Programme publishes the series jointly. /Fredrik Moberg More at: http://population.wri.org/worldresources2005-pub-4073.html How forests decreased vulnerability to hurricane Mitch A new study of the Tawahka indians of Honduras provides compelling evidence that access to natural insurance capital– e.g. forest land and the resources within – can make a large difference in the ability of vulnerable, rural communities to cope with, and rebound from, unexpected natural disasters. Access to natural resources, in the form of tropical forests, helped vulnerable communities in Honduras cope with the multiple misfortunes following Hurricane Mitch in October 1998. This is shown in a recently published study by Kendra McSweeney from Ohio State University, USA. She has studied how the indigenous Tawahka community coped with and recovered from the Hurricane that swept over Honduras seven years ago with devastating fury, causing more than 9,000 deaths and large-scale material damage. People of the Tawahka community, in the Mosquitia and Olancho regions of northeastern Honduras, have led a smallholder, subsistence lifestyle circling around horticulture and shifting polyculture for the past 400 years. As many other indigenous people, they also have for centuries harvested forest products to sell or barter in local, regional and national markets. This form of forest extraction, a secondary economic activity, has been shown to help the Tawahka community cope with economic and social crises experienced over both community and household scales. For example, following “boom and bust” cycles of certain commodity production, the Tawahka indians responded by diversifying their production activities, taking advantage of changing rates of return across multiple sectors while minimising the impact of failure in any one. After the cataclysmic flooding, which resulted from hurricane Mitch, direct forest access helped alleviate Tawahka community recuperation in two direct ways: firstly, forest-harvested goods allowed families to survive and quickly rebuild immediately after the flood. Secondly, Tawahka families’ traditional access to primary forests in the highland regions of the area allowed them to recoup landholdings lost to the flooding in the longer run. Having lost their most productive riparian land areas, families could re-establish their subsistence security by the extensive cultivation of upland forest plots. Plots that before Mitch had been considered too distant by the community. The livelihood insurance capacity of forests Finally, McSweeney suggests that a means to ensure the insurance capacity of vulnerable households against such unexpected natural phenomena is to create ”area-based insurance contracts”. Within such a framework, local involvement in conservation and land stewardship could be stimulated by a local community belief in the insurance function of forests. This could become a viable alternative to the bewildering amount of state sanctions that are often introduced, without local input, in the name of conservation. /Albert Norström Source: McSweeney K. 2005. World Development 33 (9): 1453-1471. “Invest in the environment to reach the Millennium Development Goals” Large environmental investments are required to attain the MDGs. A new report identifies a number of solutions where synergies between the environment and development can be reached for more rapid MDG achievement.
The SEI report advocates the integration of environmental issues in human development to protect valuable ecosystem services that support life on Earth – such as fresh water, capture fisheries, air and water regulation, and the regulation of natural hazards and pests. Such services can determine the long-term capacity of human societies to buffer or absorb sudden environmental shocks, such as droughts and floods. Moreover, there is a growing realization that the huge MDG- challenges, such as eradicating hunger, will have to be achieved through environmentally sustainable solutions. Investments that pay off A number of key environmental investments required to reach the MDGs are identified in the new report. For example, major investments in freshwater management for food production is suggested in order to achieve the hunger target. Harvesting of rainwater in “rainfed agriculture” is one suggestion. It is a low-tech alternative solution to increase food production in dry areas with high rainfall variability. Another suggestion is to introduce so-called ecological sanitation where human excreta is composted and recycled back to the soil (closing the loop on both nutrients and water). Such ecological sanitation usually pays for itself by substituting costly chemical fertilisers, by reducing the occurrence of diarrhoea, by allowing people to be more productive and by reducing mortality due to contaminated drinking water. Finally, there are also a number of propositions to provide the poor with basic modern energy services in a sustainable way. 1.6 billion people will still be without electricity access and 2.5 billion people will still rely on traditional biomass for cooking by 2015 unless something drastic happens within the energy sector. Along this line the new report suggests a wide array of options for an energy system that evolves from being based on a large share of non-renewable and traditional energy sources to one that is to a significant degree based on energy efficient technologies and modern renewable energy sources. /Fredrik Moberg More at: http://www.sei.se http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ "Protect the coast and it will protect you" Coastal populations and ecosystems can become less vulnerable to hazards by protecting local environments and building on local knowledge, says new research. Hazards in coastal areas often become disasters through the erosion of resilience of coastal environments and communities, according to a recent report published in Science. The research group from Australia, US, Sweden and UK, led by Dr Neil Adger of the University of East Anglia, studied the Asian tsunami in 2004 and the impact of severe storms in the Caribbean over the past twenty years. They saw that coastal populations and ecosystems can become less vulnerable to hazards by protecting local environments and building on local knowledge. For example, Bangladesh has reduced mortality in flooding through careful planning focused on the poorest and most vulnerable sectors of society. - If we protect our coastal environment, it will protect us in times of disaster. This now appears to be true for some areas of Asia affected by the tsunami. And it will certainly be true for coasts of the future, says Dr Neil Adger. Resilience a key factor A problem is that during periods of gradual or incremental change components of resilience is allowed to decline or are eliminated because their importance is not recognized. When a crisis occurs it might have a larger impact as those buffering components are gone. Coastal ecosystems are some of the most impacted and altered worldwide. These areas are also sensitive to many hazards and risks, from floods, tsunamis and hurricanes to disease epidemics. Already today 23% of the world’s population live within 100 km from the coast and in 2030 50% of the world’s population is expected to live in this area. Coastal societies of today are tightly linked to large-scale processes. Changes in land use through tourism or international trade create vulnerabilities, although this globalisation also can increase resilience. Traditional agriculture in the Caribbean survived hurricane Mitch much better then those with modern practices producing cash crops. A better understanding of the linkages between ecosystems and human societies can help to reduce vulnerability and enhance resilience. /Louise Hård af Segerstad More at: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/ abstract/309/5737/1036 Trees do not always give more water Trees planted in water scarce environments may reduce dry season water flows and therefore worsen the living conditions of the poor. This is revealed in a new report from UK’s Forestry Research Program: From the Mountain to the Tap: How Land Use and Water Management Can Work for the Rural Poor, which was launched at the World Water Week in Stockholm in August. Now, the researchers behind the new report urges water managers and policy makers to base decisions to plant trees on scientific evidence appropriate for the site. Unless there is urgent action, the looming water crisis will aggravate, and leave the most vulnerable – the rural and urban poor populations – ever more disadvantaged, they say. The report does, however, not advocate an end to tree planting, as trees can decrease soil erosion, preserve biodiversity and provide a number of other ecosystem services. What it does is merely to challenge the wide-spread belief that forests always supply more water than treeless areas. “If we are trying to manage our water resources effectively, the overenthusiastic adoption of the simple view that ‘more trees are always better’ is a prime example of how a failure to root decisions in scientific evidence leads to bad water policy,” says Ian Calder, one of the researchers behind the new report. More at: http://www.frp.uk.com Ecosystems can be big business Companies who use the Earth’s ecosystems more wisely are likely to see bigger profits and enjoy more stable businesses in the near future. In doing so they will also conserve the life support systems upon which human development depends and provide new income flows to overcome poverty. This is the conclusion of the fourth Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) report. – It is an invaluable resource for business leaders who think long term and seek to understand the threats and opportunities that will shape the economies of the future, says Professor Jane Lubchenco, one of the scientists behind the new report. This is especially true for developing countries as these are home to much of the remaining natural capital, including genetic diversity and the materials and services underpinning tourism and developments in the food, pharmaceuticals and tourism industries. Companies who invest in ecosystem care and conservation are likely to enjoy enhanced profits, improved reputations among consumers and new business opportunities. They will also be better placed to respond to sudden ”shocks”, as higher oil prices, dramatic falls in the availability of raw materials or development of greener laws. More at: http://www.maweb.org/ The quote: “If a member of the family gets sick, there is an awful choice: to either spend the day’s money on food or on a doctor... As a photographer, how do you depict this situation without it appearing wretched and hopeless? Will they be offended by your close-up photographs of their meagre supper? How do you politely decline tea made with water from their only source, a local pond contaminated with sewage?” Zed Nelson, British photojournalist, on the Millennium Development Goals photo exhibition found at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/millenniumgoals |
