Inclusive Wildlife Conservation Models
- Rahul Jayaraman
- Aug 27, 2022
- 3 min read
India - the country known for its vast geographical landscapes and thriving wildlife system is now at a critical juncture. A checkpoint where it should redouble its efforts to conserve and protect ecosystems that struggle against divisive infrastructure development projects that are often blind to the needs of the entire ecosystem.
In order to sustain these ecologies, it is not only important for lawmaking bodies to take these stakeholders into account, but also adopt an inclusive development model. A number of projects have failed simply because of their exclusive agendas, agendas that benefit humans living in that area, that let powerful corporations and individuals continue with their operations without any compromise. And while these may look lucrative in the short term, what these vested individuals should realize is that these are the decisions that will hamper not only their long term goals, but also those of the state.
Inclusive models, then, heavily depend on the cooperation of all communities in and around the affected area. To paint a clear picture, we can take the example of the village of Pangti, in Nagaland.
This is a village that hosts thousands of Amur Falcons year after year, the birds take their temporary break in their journey from Siberia to Africa.
(Figure 1 - Amur Falcon) In previous years, opportunistic villagers decided to hunt these elusive birds and sell them at the local market as meat. More than 10,000s were hunted each day during the migration season essentially creating an annual poaching project.
However, local conservationists and the government took stringent measures and banned the hunting of these birds, but they did not stop there. The critical step that most conservation projects fail to take is educating the common people and involving them in conservation efforts, without which the community would not understand the objectives behind these measures. Economic gains would always trump social welfare for individuals who are not aware of ecological problems.
This district turned a hunting tradition to one of celebration from the very next year.
(Figure 2 - Flocks of Amur Falcons in Pangti)
But how can this model be implemented on a large scale?
1. Recognise that India hosts a number of wildlife reserves. These reserves are very attractive to wildlife enthusiasts in and around the country and even individuals from abroad.
Local governments should double down on promoting these sites as tourist attractions and even educational locations and thus help raise awareness on the need to protect the wildlife that the country is blessed with. Currently these sites are really limited to tourists such as photographers and researchers but not to the greater public.
2. The implementation of localized laws, such as the one recently proposed by the state of Maharashtra - the first Indian state to pass its own Wildlife Action Plan. Keeping these regulations localized really helps in communicating to the local community and educating them.
3. A lot of these reserves suffer from problems such as man-animal conflict, and this is due to limited space allocated to the animals in protection. We see this happening to tigers both in Bandhavgarh National Park as well as Panna National Park, where tigers really need a lot of space (especially in dry tropical forests such as Panna) to lead regular lives. In this situation, providing vocational training to the community in and around the area, and integrating them with the tourism efforts previously mentioned, would go a long way both for the community, and for India’s wildlife.
For sustainable growth in wildlife and economy, it is hard to achieve long term goals without considering both of them together.
References
Comments