What am I trying to illustrate in the above photo (a picture of cattle and elephant dung)? That conservation planning is a pile of poop?

No. But this mixture of excrement does show why such planning needs to incorporate extreme events like drought or flooding – especially for the impacts of those events on local people.

In the place where I took this photo — Mt Kenya – livestock herders have moved into protected areas. Why? Because of a protracted and devastating drought — one Kenya is (hopefully) at the end of. The drought has caused the displacement of huge numbers of people and the estimated deaths of half the livestock.

In times this tough, local herders have been forced to graze their animals in protected areas around the country – areas normally set aside for nature and tourism. I can’t blame them — but in a country that relies on tourism so heavily (it’s the second largest sector of the economy), this development is big and troubling news.

Obviously, conservationists should be planning for such extreme events. They will occur; we just don’t know when. We do often include in our plans responses to long-term environmental events (e.g., blow-downs, hurricanes, etc) and critical threats (such as habitat fragmentation and large-scale agriculture). We are even slowly coming to grips with consequences of climate change. But how often do we consider the effects of extreme events on local people, especially the poor, in the areas in which we work?

Probably not nearly enough.

Why should conservationists do this kind of planning? Because quite often the people living in and around the areas we are interested in protecting rely on their immediate surroundings for sustenance. And how extreme events effect these people will likely tell us how they will in turn use those local resources (in many cases, such as around Mt. Kenya, for their survival). By planning for these events and the ramifications on both nature and people, the effects can be at least reduced or muted.

To that end, many Conservancy projects have indirect benefits to people; but not many plan for direct ones. One example of direct benefits to people is grassbanking – the setting aside of land that can be used for grazing livestock in the event of an extreme drought. It’s simple and effective, and something the Conservancy has done in areas such as Montana, and in Kenya, with our partners at the Northern Rangelands Trust (http://northernrangelands.wildlifedirect.org/) where the grassbanks are being put to good use right now – helping both wildlife and people get through the current drought. And this grassbanking in Kenya has helped reduce pressure on protected areas and keep many more people off of Mt Kenya.

We will get droughts, or floods, or extremes of some sort or another — and people, especially those in poorer areas and countries, will turn to nature to help them through those tough times. We should make sure that nature is resilient enough not only to endure these extreme events, but also the pressures that will be brought to bear by local people — especially when those people’s very survival is at stake.

(Image courtesy Timothy Boucher/TNC.)

Thirteen years ago, The Nature Conservancy teamed up with Fundación Amigos de la Naturaleza, American Electric Power Company, BP America and Pacificorp to buy out four logging concessions adjacent to Bolivia’s Noel Kempff Mercado National Park.

In addition to protecting almost 832,000 hectares of forest habitat and doubling the size of the national park, this purchase (which became known as the Noel Kempff Climate Action Project) aimed to test an idea that was appealing in principal but not yet tested in practice — that saving trees could reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Today, there is broad agreement among businesses, environmentalists, local communities, and government leaders that forest protection must be part of the solution in the global fight against climate change.

That consensus was most recently highlighted at the Governors’ Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles and in the findings of the bipartisan Commission on Climate and Tropical Forests.

Why such broad consensus? Because deforestation accounts for about 17 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions — more than from all the planes, trains and automobiles on Earth.

Slowing — and eventually stopping — that deforestation is one of the most cost-effective ways to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. And it is something we can do right now.

But in 1996, discussions about how to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) were in their infancy.

Trees obviously store carbon as they grow, but there were outstanding questions about how to measure the emissions reductions and to assure that saving trees in one place would not just displace logging elsewhere.

A report from Greenpeace being issued today revisits some of those old questions in an attempt to criticize the Noel Kempff Climate Action Project and to discredit emissions offsets that businesses might claim by supporting such efforts in the future.

The Nature Conservancy respectfully disagrees with Greenpeace’s assertions – a disagreement based on our experience working on the ground for more than a decade to develop high quality forest carbon projects, and on the documented accomplishments and lessons learned from the Noel Kempff project.

As the world’s first project of its kind, the Noel Kempff Climate Action Project was a pioneer project that tested and refined the science of forest carbon accounting and monitoring. It is the first — and still only — REDD project to have its carbon benefits verified by an independent third party.

The Noel Kempff project also serves as an example of how well-designed forest carbon projects can result in real, scientifically measurable and verifiable emissions reductions with important benefits for biodiversity and local communities. These benefits and reductions include:

• Avoiding 1,034,107 metric tons of verified CO2 emissions — emissions that would have been caused by logging and deforestation between 1997 and 2005;
• Preserving a rich and biologically diverse forest ecosystem that was chosen as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its outstanding biodiversity value;
• Helping local indigenous communities achieve legal status as “Communities of Native Peoples” and obtain official land title;
• Providing alternative, environmentally sustainable economic opportunities for the local communities, especially via community forestry, and jobs in park monitoring;
• Establishing an endowment which is used to fund project activities and preserve the park for future generations.

The Nature Conservancy and other organizations are now building on the experience and lessons learned in Noel Kempff to inform scientifically rigorous methods and standards for other forest carbon projects, and we are undertaking REDD projects that span entire political jurisdictions in Berau, Indonesia and Para, Brazil.

Projects like these are critical stepping stones that can help inform development of national-level programs and build up the capacity and expertise that countries will need to protect their forests on a national scale.

Getting REDD right and doing it at national scales is essential for making forests a part of the climate solution.

The Nature Conservancy is proud to have had the courage to take the first steps with the Noel Kempff Climate Action project.

We remain steadfastly committed to working with partners from all sectors to learn from, improve on and share the lessons of our experience in Noel Kempff and other forest carbon projects around the world.

(Image: Arcoiris waterfall at Noel Kempff Mercado National Park in Bolivia, South America. Credit: Hermes Justiniano.)

“The forest is our supermarket,” says Bang Liling, the deputy chief of Long Oking village inside the Berau district of Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of Borneo.

It tells you something that that’s a common phrase heard in this part of the world, which I visited earlier this fall.

“We get all of our medicine from the forest,” adds Lung Bu, village leader of Long Oking, a nearby village. “The roofs of our buildings, our huts on the field, they all came form the forest. So our lives depend on the forest.”

Think how often you go to the supermarket, not just for food but for other supplies like medicines and toiletries. Then imagine what happens when the supermarket is gone.

The protection of forests in Indonesia is clearly important to local people who depend on the forest for their resources and livelihoods. But it turns out that these forests are also important to everyone on the planet. Forests play a crucial role in fighting climate change, and Indonesia’s forests are disappearing faster than any others’ on Earth.

Forests are remarkably efficient at taking greenhouses gases out of the atmosphere. When forests are cleared, we not only lose the potential for them to pull more gases out of the atmosphere, but all the gases that were being held inside them are released and added to the global emissions tally. Deforestation alone accounts for 17 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

That’s why The Nature Conservancy is working with local villagers and logging companies in Indonesia to reduce the impacts of conventional logging practices. Simple changes can yield more intact forests, cleaner water, healthier and happier local villagers, and more trees sequestering carbon and fighting climate change.

When I was in Berau recently with the Conservancy’s reduced-impact logging (RIL) manager, Bambang Wayhudi, it struck me that this approach to logging creates a win-win-win situation — one that keeps much-needed jobs for loggers, protects forest resources for local communities and reduces the emissions caused by conventional logging.

RIL is just one of multiple carbon emission reduction strategies that are part of an approach called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). This initiative was just announced by the Government of Indonesia for the district of Berau at the UN climate change talks in Bangkok.   

Says Agus Purnomo, head of delegation of Indonesia and head of the Secretariat of the National Council on Climate Change:

“Reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation is possible, and doable. By linking our district level initiative in Berau, which is just one of the sub-national processes in our national climate change program, to the international discussions we are showing how to deliver REDD implementation.”

At the global climate change negotiations coming up in Copenhagen this December, many groups—including the Conservancy—will join with several governments to send a clear message: the protection of forests is a vital part of combating climate change.

It is Bambang’s hope and the Conservancy’s hope that the local communities continue to manage their own forests with their local knowledge for their supermarket…and ultimately for all of us.

(Image: Bambang Wayhudi. Source: Bridget Besaw.)

Controversy abounds today: Ecuador institutes a new policy to limit the presence of certain people (poor locals) on the Galapagos, Apple leaves the Chamber of Commerce and concerns are raised about REDD becoming a vehicle for organized crime. Catch up on all the latest news here at Cool Green Morning.

1. They look like shooting stars, but this new infrared video actually shows 500,000 bats emerging from a cave in New Mexico. Researchers set out to get an accurate count of the bat population without shining light on them and found significantly less bats than estimated from 1950s studies. (video above)
2. Everyone’s talking about Apple again… this time, it’s because the super-company has decided to leave the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because the agency won’t support legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. (Hat-tip: Environmental Leader.)
3. Some on the international stage are worried that REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation) projects may be impossible to monitor and will result in corruption and organized crime, reports The Guardian.
4. Climate change is all about minimizing risk, say the authors of a new study from MIT. Researchers released a new analysis showing that early efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will help minimize the risk of future climate change. (Hat-tip: Bright Green Blog.)
5. To help protect the giant tortoises, boobies and other wild inhabitants of the Galapagos, the government of Ecuador is limiting the presence of humans — specifically poor local residents. Tourists, on the other hand, are still welcome.

1. A new iPhone app helps track climate change and melting glaciers in the Swiss Alps – visitors to the region can rent the device while they hike among glaciers that have retreated rapidly in recent years.
2. Electricity from switchgrass instead of coal? That’s what power company NRG Energy hopes to achieve with its pilot project in Louisiana that uses dried, shredded grasses instead of coal to produce power.
3. The local and federal government, Native American tribes and environmental groups have hotly contested the future of dams on the Klamath River for decades. Now an agreement has been reached that proposes removal of four dams on the river starting in 2020.
4. A three-year-survey of Chinese paddlefish in the Yangtze has turned up nothing — no fish — leading researchers to believe the species is on the verge of extinction. 
5. The hot news of the day? The Senate’s climate change bill, introduced at a rally on Capitol Hill yesterday. The bill is similar to the one passed through the House earlier this year, with some notable exceptions, including: the Senate bill aims for 20% emissions reductions by 2020 over the House’s 17%.

Indigenous Aboriginal ranger Romeo Lane points out an ancient painting of a six-legged goanna lizard to the curious crowd of media and visitors — myself included — that surrounds him.

The painting is just one of thousands that scatter the escarpments of Arnhem Land in the very northern tip of Australia’s vast tropical savanna. This rich cultural heritage belonging to Australia’s first inhabitants is in an important part of why so many of us have travelled thousands of kilometres for what is a momentous day in Australia’s history.

Last week, the Australian Federal Government and traditional Indigenous landowners achieved a major milestone for conservation in Australia: the signing of agreements establishing two immense and globally significant conservation reserves on indigenous lands in the Northern Territory of Australia.

Known as the Djelk and Warddeken Indigenous Protected Areas, the reserves are located in Western and Central Arnhem Land about 300 miles from Darwin, and span 7,889 square miles — more than twice the size of Yellowstone National Park in the United States.

The reserves stretch from the high country of the Western Arnhem Land Plateau to the islands off the Northern Territory coast and include sandstone gorges, pristine rivers, tropical savanna and coastal wetlands. The area is of global significance for its natural and cultural values.  

Under the new agreements, traditional landowners will continue to manage the reserves and will be assisted by the indigenous ranger organisations, Djelk Rangers and the Warddeken Manwurrk Rangers. The declaration follows several years of consultation with members of more than 137 indigenous clans in the region and the development of detailed management plans. 

A core part of these plans is the reintroduction of traditional burning practices that have been found to cut greenhouse gas emissions by preventing large uncontrolled bushfires. Other management approaches include control of feral animals, particularly buffalo, which cause serious damage to the region’s wetlands.

The Nature Conservancy has been working with both ranger groups in the lead up to the declaration of these protected areas and is honored to support the landowners and the Djelk and Warddeken rangers in their management of the new reserves.

The Conservancy will continue to work with the groups in securing long-term funding from private investment to ensure these extraordinary areas can be managed effectively into the future.

(Image 1: Indigenous dancers celebrate at the official declaration of new conservation lands. Image 2: Warddeken Manwurrk Ranger carries out fire control. Source: Peter Eves.)

There might not be much hope for the Goose Creek milkvetch, but at least you can now heat your home with an ethanol fireplace. Read on for that and weightier topics like sunspots, the Peruvian Amazon conflict and REDD (one of the most important strategies in fighting climate change, says Conservancy president Mark Tercek).

1. Goose Creek milkvetch (pictured above) is a rare plant found in a small area on the border of Utah, Nevada and Idaho. After five years gathering data and debating, the USFWS recently decided that while the plant deserves protection, it won’t be added to the endangered species list because of other priorities.
2. Heat your home with biofuel? Ethanol fireplaces are the latest in green heating… Treehugger questions whether they’re really green or not.
3. The dispute between indigenous tribes and the Peruvian government continues. In the latest development, Ecopolitology reports that the government has incorporated some communities into a new national reserve without their consent – and tribal members fear this will limit their rights to natural resources there.
4. Climate change skeptics like to point to sunspots as a possible explanation for global warming… now The Economist raises the question again: could sunspots have an influence — good or bad — on Earth’s temperature?
5. Marc meets Mark… journalist and author Marc Gunther talks with The Nature Conservancy’s president and CEO Mark Tercek about REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation) — potentially the most effective strategy in dealing with global climate change.

(Image: Goose Creek milkvetch. Credit: Jody Fraser/USFWS. Source: Nevada Natural Heritage Program.)

A couple weeks ago, after another of those planning meetings that take up so much time in the less-glamorous-than-you-might-think world of international conservation, I spent a day in one of the world’s great museums, Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology.

A day in a great museum teaches you as much about conservation as a month visiting projects, something I learnt as an open-mouthed child in the British Museum looking at the magnificent Assyrian lion gates of Nineveh, in modern Iraq — thousands of miles away from any modern lion. Museums are only superficially about the past: a great museum helps us think about who we are and where we are going.

The riches of the civilizations on display in Chapultepec Park immediately made me realize how shallow our notions of pristine nature are. For millennia, sacrificial offerings in temple courtyards mixed an extraordinary variety of skeletons from the natural world together with those of human victims. Featherwork, especially using the tail feathers of the quetzal, was one of the highest forms of Aztec artistic expression  – and must have had considerable impact on quetzal populations well before the Spanish arrived. The selective pressure to be boringly colored was probably greater then than now.

But it is the Maya gallery that truly messes with conservation preconceptions. It shows how the “pristine rainforests” of southern Mexico and northern Central America supported a sophisticated complex of urban centers for almost a millennium. Much of what we think we know of tropical ecology in supposedly pristine forest came from research experiments and field plots in Panama – where descendants of the Maya are still to be found today, living in and from the forest.

All over the Americas, archaeologists and historians are rewriting environmental history. Even without stone buildings and proto-states along central American lines, the Amazon floodplain supported much larger and more sophisticated civilizations than had been supposed. New archaeological discoveries from Pennsylvania to southern Chile have pushed back the date of the original peopling of the Americas by thousands of years. All of which suggests that using the word “pristine” in relation to nature in the Americas, as conservation organizations do all the time, is at best an oversimplification and at worst a cynical marketing ploy. Things are much more complicated than we like to think.

I took away another, darker lesson from my day at the museum. Anthropologists dislike making cultural judgments. Archaeologists and historians rightly point out that the past is another country where they do things very differently. But looking at the decorated skull of an executed eight-year-old child, sold in a slave market and bought specifically for sacrifice, it is hard to avoid a certain feeling that the defeat of the Aztecs, for all the horrors it involved and precipitated, was a more morally complex event than we often think. Descendants of European and North American romanticism as conservationists tend to be, we like our savages noble, rather than, well, savage.

Just as we need to get away from the myth of the pristine rainforest, so we need to get away from the myth of the noble savage. The reason is the same in both cases: you can’t do effective conservation if you oversimplify, ignore history or deal in stereotypes. The last thing indigenous peoples need as they face their many modern problems is the notion that they deserve support because they are closer to nature than us and can tap into older, wiser systems of balance between the human and the natural world.

Things are made more complicated by rhetoric that feeds upon itself: indigenous leaders know what their non-indigenous audiences like to hear, and in pandering to the stereotype of the noble savage they reinforce it. The Maya, who probably disappeared because they overtaxed their natural resource base, in fact teach the opposite lesson: detailed knowledge of natural environments can lead as easily to over-exploitation  and collapse as to sustainability and balance.

I believe that the most effective help indigenous peoples and organizations can receive from conservation organizations revolves around empowerment, based on notions of rights and citizenship rather than on any idea that indigenous peoples are by definition good stewards of the environment and therefore to be supported. The first and most essential step is land rights. In order to be able to make any decisions at all, indigenous peoples need secure control of and title to their land. They need it as a matter of natural justice that has nothing to do with conservation. That conservation often follows the securing of indigenous land rights is, however, a matter of historical record. Why?

The reasonably successful bet we make as conservationists is that it is easier for an indigenous person in a threatened place to make the connection between an intact natural resource base and survival, and also easier to work out what needs to be done in the short term to protect that resource base. Not because there is any mystical balance between indigenous peoples and nature, but because people(s) facing clear and present danger tend to be more focused.

In societies focused on external threat, whether indigenous or not – Britain in 1940 is as good an example as the Macuxi in 2009 – people put narrow self-interest aside and think more of the good of the group. None of which can be properly understood or supported if we deal in stereotypes or ignore history, a lesson that a day at a great museum can help us all to learn and relearn. Gracias, México!

(Image: Aztec calendar stone at the National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico. Credit: ConstantineD/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

Will Steven Colbert try to stop Bill McKibben from saving the world? Will the tenkile — the world’s rarest tree kangaroo — recover from near decimation? Will Kenya and Uganda go to war over a fish? We can’t promise any answers, but we can deliver the top Cool Green News links you should read today.

1. Bill McKibben of 350.org made an appearance on the Colbert Report last night… watch the clip and see how Bill held up against the relentless jokester. Did he get his climate change message across? Let us know what you think.
2. Fish are the source of a controversy over tiny Mgingo Island in Lake Victoria along the border between Kenya and Uganda. The island –unlike the rest of the lake — is still home to huge populations of Nile perch.
3. Finally, a study that proves downloading music online is better for the environment than buying physical CDs — but interestingly, the carbon savings mostly come in the form of not driving to the store to buy your disc. (Hat-tip: The Vine.)
4. The world’s rarest tree kangaroo — the tenkile, or Scott’s tree kangaroo — is making a comeback in Papua New Guinea. The tenkile population had declined to fewer than 100, but a conservation group has helped turn the situation around by getting local communities to reduce hunting of the animal and protect its forest habitat.
5. Green, Inc. asked readers to submit their nominations for places that should be national parks — check out their short list and see if your favorite spot made it.

I am guessing that few if any people reading this would picture people when they think about an ecosystem. I know when I think ecosystems, I think plants, animals, rivers, etc., but not people.

Ecosystems are about nature. People aren’t nature, right?

But, by definition, there is nothing that excludes people from being part of an ecosystem. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ecosystems are “a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment.” Guess what? People are organisms. We are also a biological community. Ecosystems inevitably include both natural resources and the people that use them, depend on them and extract them.

Nevertheless, in climate change discussions (and, let’s face it, most conversations and news about nature are about climate change these days), there are two conversations:

1. Helping nature (i.e. ecosystems) adapt to climate change through investments in natural systems to ensure their resilience — otherwise known as Ecosystem-Based Adaptation (EBA).
2. Helping people adapt to climate change.

And this dichotomy is why adaptation to climate change really hasn’t caught on as a concept that’s moving environmental policy — not to mention people and their investment in “nature.”

The scientific literature on these topics is what really made me aware of this dichotomy:

• Some are all about EBA — creating resistant and resilient systems that can respond to climate change.
• Some are all about people adapting to climate change (right down to titles such as “Lifting the Taboo on Adaptation“).
• And while some try to bring the conversations together, they still don’t talk about investments in people AND in land as a means to adapt to climate change.

Conversations about ecosystem services — the services nature provides us, like water filtration or fisheries — get us closer, too, when they include the benefits of EBA for people. But conservationists need to talk about people as part of an ecosystem, or better yet, as part of nature — not just people benefiting from some entity outside themselves known as “nature.”

People depend on natural resources. But resource extraction tends to alter native vegetation and systems — so, as our population continues to grow and climate change shifts resource availability, we are going to extract more from new areas. This ever-roaming extractive behavior can threaten invaluable biodiversity…not to mention our quest for sustainable livelihoods.

So yes, EBA needs to be in climate change policy. It also needs to factor into on-the-ground conservation efforts. But it won’t succeed if the investments we’re advocating to help ecosystems adapt don’t also include investments to provide for human well-being directly. Conservation organizations might not be the best equipped to invest in people, but if we at least define ecosystems as including people, we can more effectively partner with those who can make such investments.

Now, while we still have the time, let’s do more than just invest in nature or protected areas or native systems. Let’s also invest in:

• Best management practices on productive systems (such as riparian buffers, contour farming, organic agriculture, among others);
• Education to teach the importance of native systems for the long-term sustainability of resource availability (example: Quito, Ecuador, where as part of the Quito water fund, a project The Nature Conservancy helped spearhead, children in city schools are taken on field trips to understand the source of their water and the role conservation plays in its distribution); and
• Alternative livelihoods for people, making them less dependent on any one resource.

Sound impossible? Think about marine protected areas — which provide a sustainable fish harvest to people or regions where we’ve also invested in providing people with other income options, thereby decreasing pressure on non-human systems and resources while securing livelihoods and protecting biodiversity. Marine protected areas are a perfect example of why EBA must be about human AND non-human systems — because conservation works better if you consider both.

If you still need convincing, then read “An Amazon Culture Withers as Food Dries Up,” a powerful, poignant recent story in The New York Times, depicting just how people suffer “along with the animals” as their fisheries resources dwindle away because of deforestation and climate change.

From the Arctic to the Amazon to the Maldives, indigenous peoples who rely on nature’s cycles are suffering because of climate change — and serve as a warning to us all.

(Image: Farming landscapes in the Ecuadorian countryside in the Paute watershed with a protected area in the background. Credit: Rebecca Goldman/TNC.)