Does conservation really benefit the poor?
Last week, more than 1,600 people involved in conserving Earth's flora and fauna came to Port Elizabeth, South Africa. It was the first time that the Society for Conservation Biology, based in Arlington, Virginia, had met in Africa, and the setting raised a challenging question: does conservation help poor people?
Some researchers think that conservation work will naturally and inevitably benefit local people, because it will sustain resources over time. But conserving animals and plants often means restricting access to them. And as Yaa Ntiamoa-Baidu, a Ghanaian conservationist, asked those gathered at the opening plenary session: “Do your conservation projects make a difference in village life in Africa?”
Few development projects measure the effects they are having on village life. Credit: A. JOE/AFP/GETTY
To try to get some data with which to answer her own question, Ntiamoa-Baidu, who works with the conservation group WWF and the Ghanaian government, looked at 50 projects in Africa. Of the project managers surveyed, 92% thought that they were making a difference on the community level. But projects that tried to measure the effects — such as a wetland conservation project in Ghana that measures the number of new enterprises created by an eco-tourism effort — were few and far between. Hardly any of the 50 projects had any built-in way to quantify or demonstrate their benefits. “Why is it that we do not have concrete data to support this?” Ntiamoa-Baidu asked.
In a session on the link between conservation and poverty, Peter Kareiva of Seattle, Washington, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, presented an analysis of almost 200 development projects run by the World Bank, some of which had environmental components. Encouragingly, he found that development projects with built-in conservation goals were no less effective than those without them, as measured by the World Bank's evaluations. But his data do not address the issue of how effective conservation projects are if they include specific development goals in their remit.
Many hope that local researchers will take the lead on conservation projects. “If Africans have the empowerment and the tools, they will have to make these decisions themselves,” says Jonathan Adams, also of the Nature Conservancy.
In South Africa, there are hopes that more black people will take careers as conservation scientists. According to Brian Huntley, an environmental adviser to the South African government, black conservation scientists are only now starting to emerge, more than a dozen years after the end of apartheid, and he thinks that their number will increase exponentially.
But for many South Africans, continued poverty and the lingering social effects of apartheid are daunting obstacles to such a career. “When we were kids, we weren't allowed to go to the aquarium or anything like that, so how were we to learn that saving nature was important?” asks Mncedi Nkosi, a young, black, freshwater ecologist at Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife, a province-level public–private conservation group. “Most people still are more worried about socioeconomic issues, and they don't really understand what I do. I sometimes just say that I clean water for a living.”
About one-third of the 700 papers and posters at the conference were presented by Africans, according to the meeting's organizer, Graham Kerley.
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Marris, E. Conserving life and livelihood. Nature 448, 111 (2007) doi:10.1038/448111a
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