ACES 2011: Conservation Conflicts: strategies for coping with a changing world. Aberdeen Arts Centre, August 22-25th ABSTRACTS Monday 22nd August 2011 Case studies: – Protected area conflicts – Land use and ecosystem services conflicts – Species conflicts 1 Protected Area Conflicts 14.00 – 14.20 Protected Area conflicts: examples between wildlife conservation, pastoralism and hunting in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania Karen Laurenson The Serengeti Ecosystem, encompassing a matrix of protected areas and the Serengeti National Park at its core, is an area of global conservation significance generating well over $30 million USD per year in revenue for Tanzania. Many levels of conflict have existed in this ecosystem since the first protected areas were declared, but as human populations continue to grow, conflict over available land is exacerbated, and most acute in the Maasai pastoralist communities. Access to dry season cattle grazing land is a key determinant of livelihood status and the key source of conflict both within the communities and with other actors. A long history of conflict over access to land designated for wildlife, sport hunting or tourism, combined with vocal local interest groups and NGOs, has both led to inter-clan conflict over competition for revenue generated from wildlife use, and also bolstered enmity towards conservation initiatives from Government or NGOs among pastoral communities in the Loliondo area. As a result, resistance to participate in conservation schemes such as community-managed wildlife management areas (WMAs) has also led to insecure land tenure, fueled inter-clan disputes, and increased rate of land conversion. A severe drought in 2009 culminated in more severe conflict between pastoralists and wildlife users, but also resulted in an increased appreciation for conservation of natural resources and ecosystem services such as water catchment forests and dry-season grazing land, and widespread shift in public opinion of the value of community-managed wildlife areas. Dennis Rentsch, Gerald Bigurube, Markus Borner, Grant Hopcraft and Karen Laurenson Karen Laurenson is a Programme Manager with the Africa Programme of Frankfurt Zoological Society. Following doctoral research on cheetah ecology in the Serengeti, she worked at the interface of disease transmission between domestic and wild animals in Scotland and Ethiopia, with a particularly interest in applied research on conservation and economic issues. In the last decade, based in Tanzania, Scotland and Ethiopia, she has worked in ecosystem management, overseeing complex donor-funded projects and developed ecosystem planning processes, ecological monitoring and project monitoring and evaluation frameworks 2 14.20 – 14.40 “Owning what is ours”: Protectionism, Insecurity and the Production of Vulnerability on the Edge of Mount Elgon National Park, Uganda David Himmelfarb Amidst the political and economic upheaval left in the wake of colonialism and subsequent structural adjustment policies, African governments have faced tremendous challenges as they seek to simultaneously strengthen governance and implement conservation initiatives. Under pressure by international conservation and development donors to both increase the area of land under strict environmental protection and to incorporate the economic needs of local communities into conservation interventions, state cervation bodies, which in many cases originated as para-military institutions, have often gravitated to the seemingly more straight-forward “fences and fines” approach to conservation. Nevertheless, vigorous law enforcement in contexts where thousands of people depend on protected resources has resulted in widespread conflict. Despite scattered efforts to develop community-based conservation initiatives in Uganda, a philosophy of strict protectionism has undergirded the proliferation of protected areas. Beneath the veneer of recent community resource use agreements and revenue sharing, the protectionist approach and concomitant population displacement have had severe repercussions for the livelihoods of rural communities dwelling in and on the boundaries of protected areas. On the northern edge of Mt. Elgon National Park, Uganda, conflict between protected area managers and local communities has raged for nearly 30 years, culminating in sporadic violence and a sustained legal battle over land rights. Focusing on the history and nature of this conflict, this paper examines the development of the protectionist conservation paradigm in the West, it’s application to Uganda during the colonial era, and the implications this continued approach has had for contemporary livelihoods and environments. This paper suggests that exclusionary park policies coupled with tenure insecurity over the past three decades has exacerbated livelihood vulnerability while intensifying the processes of environmental degradation that such policies seek to counteract. Sustained insecurity and the withholding of social services fostered by protected managers has provoked local resistance and generated an unsustainable, “use-it-or-lose-it” mindset among farmers, who refuse to invest in time- and labourintensive measures for fear of eviction and dispossession. This paper argues that addressing “encroachment” in Mt. Elgon National Park necessitates addressing underlying structural inequalities established and perpetuated by the state and its international donors. 3 14.40 – 15.00 Conflict resolution between lions and livestock ranches around major national parks in southern Africa Paul Funston, Sam Ferreira and Nimmi Seoraj Pillai The relative risk to populations of large carnivores in protected areas is generally correlated with the size of the protected area relative to the home range requirements of the species. Lions (Panthera leo) have widely varying home range sizes in southern Africa that broadly follow annual rainfall, and thus ungulate biomass, patterns. Here data is presented on the risk of persecution relative to factors including home range size, boundary type, and various livestock husbandry practices around a few major protected areas in southern Africa. The relative contribution of fencing to minimizing conflict is investigated, with various fencing scenarios from no fences to relative impervious fences being discussed. Clearly one of the key factors determining both the probability of livestock depredation or carnivore persecution is the probability that a large carnivore will come into contact with either livestock or a humans during excursions or forays outside of protected areas. We argue that these relationships can be modelled both spatially and temporally to determine a landscape of relative risk. The spatial and temporal pattern of movement of stock raiding lions and leopards (Panthera pardus) is presented and evaluated with respect to probability of risk. These risk factors could be used proactively to mitigate conflict as opposed to the traditional reactive approaches employed by most conservation authorities or farmers/pastoralists. Various conflict mitigation strategies include the translocation and release of stock raiding lions. This practice is evaluated both spatially and temporally, with long term consequences of management interventions evaluated in terms of their effect on lion population structure and longevity. The value of liaison and communication with neighbours is evaluated and stressed. 4 15.00 – 15.20 Reducing conflicts by modifying the boundaries of protected areas: a systematic conservation planning approach from Mozambique Robert Smith, Kristian Metcalfe, Bartolomeu Soto, Alessandro Fusari and Cornelio Ntumi Land-use planning plays a fundamental role in reducing conservation conflicts and this is particularly relevant when designing protected area (PA) networks. Many PAs were established without accounting for local socio-economic and social factors, so there is a need to modify these systems to reduce impacts on people and help fulfil conservation objectives. Here we describe a case study from southern Africa, where the Government of Mozambique has proposed modifying the boundaries of some of the existing PAs located in the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area. These PAs were generally established in the colonial era and contain several villages within their borders, so the government is investigating whether this settled land could be exchanged for other areas outside existing designated land. To help inform this process we developed a conservation planning system containing data on 57 vegetation types and 18 species, as well as data on opportunity costs and land tenure. This system was based on the best available information but data quality varied, which added uncertainty to the planning process. In response, we developed three methodologies for informing this PA modification process, which make different assumptions about data quality and provide information at different spatial scales. We show there is great potential for modifying these PAs, assuming support from local stakeholders, and argue that the systematic conservation planning approach is highly appropriate for this type of analysis. 5 Land Use and Ecosystem Services Conflicts 14.00 – 14.20 Conflicts and NATURA 2000 Juliette Young Natura 2000 is the largest network of protected areas in the world, covering over 17% of the European Union’s territory. In order to be successful, the network needs the active involvement of people who live and depend on these protected areas. The top-down selection of sites, combined with poor communication of the Natura 2000 aims, concerns from local people and conservationists and a lack of formal requirement for local actor involvement has resulted in social conflicts associated with Natura 2000, and subsequent delays in its implementation. This paper will start with a brief overview of Natura 2000 and some of the conflicts associated with the Habitats Directives. The paper will then explore the extent to which local actors are involved in the management of Natura 2000 using results from three selected sites in Scotland. Finally, the issue of whether increased involvement may benefit the policy aims of Natura 2000 will be discussed. Juliette Young is an ecologist at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) in Edinburgh. Her main research interest is biodiversity policy, from its development to its implementation, including associated conflicts. Within this context, she is interested in understanding public attitudes towards biodiversity, including views on biodiversity management, conservation measures and the values associated with biodiversity through the use of qualitative and quantitative methods. She is also interested in understanding the barriers to effective communication of science to the public and policy-makers and the role of interfaces between policy-makers and scientists. 6 14.20 – 14.40 Understanding Human Wildlife Conflict in Areas Adjacent to National Parks and Conservancies: A Case Study of Mbire, Chiredzi and Hwange Districts in Zimbabwe Sébastien Le Bel, George Mapuvire and Rene Czudek Human-wildlife conflict is a growing global problem. It is not restricted to a particular geographical region or climate condition, but is common to all areas where wildlife and human populations coexist and share limited resources. Human-wildlife conflict is a problem for farmers, and ultimately it must be tackled by the farmers themselves. However, although numerous research articles, reports, recommendations, guidelines and training manuals have been produced in recent years to address the problem, most have been aimed at technical support agencies, government wildlife departments, and conservation and/or development oriented non-governmental organizations. Few tools have been developed for and adopted by rural farmers and communities to help them to address human wildlife conflicts at grass roots level. In Southern Africa, FAO and Bio-Hub have teamed up to develop a handy toolkit designed for use by extensionists offering to local communities a range of simple and practical solutions that can have great success when used in combination. It is designed not only to help protect people, their livestock and their crops from wild animals but, just as important, to safeguard wild animals from people. Two types of toolkit, an electronic and a hard version, are available in three languages: English, Portuguese and French. The hard version is a rubber canvas bag containing a series of water proof booklets, helping users to define which kind of conflict they are facing. Solutions vary according to whether the need is to protect people, villages, livestock, water or crops and are classified in five colour-coded categories: awareness raising in blue, access prevention in green, translocation in brown, driving animals away in yellow and as a last resort lethal control in red. A system of index identifies solutions in each of the five colour categories according to what it is the user needs to protect. In total, more than one thousand toolkits were distributed during the workshops for field tests with local communities in Botswana, Gabon, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The toolkit is designed in a way that more information can be added or slotted in and this exercise is an own going one, meaning for the next years to come, funding permitting, the toolkit will be reviewed and added with more information. 7 14.40 – 15.00 Ecosystem Service: tool(s) for understanding land-use conflicts Agnes Kaloczkai and Eszter Kelemen This paper seeks to explain the first results of a conflict resolution process dealing with a land-use conflict in Kiskunság, Central Hungary. Since nature protection has been institutionalized, beside the positive effects, its existence caused social and land-use conflicts in many times (McNeely 1995). Conflicts between local stakeholders (mainly farmers) concerned by the protected areas and the National Park Directorate can be caused by cultural differences, emotional reasons or communication barriers (Stoll-Kleemann 2001), but in many times the sources of the problems could be the dissenting opinions about the importance or value of a given ecosystem service. The variety of processes developed for ecosystem services valuation have been considered important mostly for supporting decision-making processes and solving management problems (Fisher et al. 2009). In our opinion, the analysis of ecosystem services from the perspectives of the different stakeholder groups could explain arising social problems related to nature conservation and land use. Our aim is to resolve the conflicts between nature conservationists and farmers emerged from the disagreement about the importance and values attached to ecosystem services. In the first part of the four-year research, started in 2009, qualitative methods (semi-structured interviews, focus groups) were used to identify the roots of the conflicts. Following interviews participatory process (community planning through scenario workshops) will be initiated to find solutions which are able to bring closer the perceptions of local actors about the ecosystem services. 8 15.00 – 15.20 The dynamics of cash cropping, culture and conflict in Kahua, Solomon Islands Jasper Kenter , Ioan Fazey and Tammy Davies This paper reports on analyses of the complex dynamics between resource use, aid delivery, cash cropping, culture and conflict in Kahua, a remote region of the Solomon Islands, and their implications for trajectories of vulnerability to global change. Local perceptions of change and its drivers were elicited using an extensive participatory approach that included developing conceptual models of the underlying feedback processes within the Kahua social-ecological system. Most changes were being driven by a small number of key drivers including population growth and desire for economic prosperity. These drivers were found to be acting synergistically in combination with increasing opportunities for income generation through cash cropping to decrease social cohesion and increase conflict over resources. Together, the complex dynamics suggest that the system’s trajectory is moving towards greater conflict and vulnerability to future change. Research into ecosystem service tradeoffs illustrated the perceived impacts of cash cropping in more detail. These included deforestation and a decrease in food security; privatisation of common land; increased work burden, particularly for women; increased inequality; erosion of traditional culture and loss of social cohesion. Though cash cropping is encouraged by aid agencies, the apparent significant reduction of social, cultural and natural capital associated with increased cash crop cultivation suggests major implications for long-term local sustainability. While the situation is complex, there are some opportunities for social-ecological transformation. These include the recent establishment of a grass roots organisation that can act as a bridging organisation across governance scales, including facilitating cross-community action. However, the grass roots organisation faces significant challenges, including limited financial and human capital. This case study therefore highlights that focussing on understanding and reducing the ultimate causes is an essential requirement of addressing conservation conflicts. 9 15.20 – 15.40 Wilderness conservation, politics and Chitsa settlers in Gonarezhou National Park, Zimbabwe Sebastien Le Bel The vision of pristine wildernesses was, and still is, central to the creation and maintenance of national parks in Zimbabwe and beyond. Proponents of national parks point to the potential of pristine parks to not only conserve biodiversity and avert the extinction of endangered species but also to generate foreign currency, employment and incomes from tourism and to alleviate rural poverty. This is the promise that national and transfrontier parks hold for state and non-state stakeholders. This vision has come up against a competing small-farm first policy narrative whose advocates see it as the best way to meet both growth and equity objectives. This line of argument chimes with the farming interests of rural households. Based on primary research and the review of secondary literature, this article uses the case of Chitsa settlers in Gonarezhou National Park to explore the implications of these ideas. The article examines how the translation into practice of these competing policy narratives has been mired in sectoral agendas and power politics that, for better or worse, interlock with the livelihood interests of the settlers. Chitsa settlers’ contestations centre on accessing ancestral land and using natural resources to sustain their livelihoods and socio-cultural identity. In this part of the park, the smallholder-farming narrative is holding sway and contextual forces and the specific constellation of institutional actor alliances have been critical in shaping relations between the settlers and the park. The paper contributes to understanding the intensely political nature of the interface between wilderness conservation and smallholder livelihoods in contemporary Zimbabwe. 10 Species Conflicts 14.00 – 14.20 Snow leopards and yaks: managing conflicts with endangered carnivores Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi & Charudutt Mishra With increasing human density and intensifying land use across the world, management of human-wildlife conflicts has become a critical facet of conservation. Conflicts over livestock depredation pose a serious challenge to endangered carnivore conservation. Retaliatory killing against livestock depredation has resulted in two carnivore extinctions and several range collapses. We review the primary causes of livestock depredation conflicts, their ecological and societal correlates, and the commonly employed mitigation measures. Livestock depredation conflicts are characterized by complex interactions between carnivore and livestock behavioural ecology, animal husbandry practices, human psyche, culture, world-views, and socioeconomic and education levels of affected peoples. Conflict-mitigation measures include better herding practices, use of physical, chemical or psychological barriers, selective removal of carnivores, use of livestock guard animals, damage compensation, education and incentives. The choice of mitigation measures, however, is often dictated by socio-political expediencies rather than by science. Although selective carnivore removal is often employed, there is little scientific support for its efficacy, particularly for endangered carnivores. Effective conflict management usually requires a combination of measures aimed at reducing livestock depredation, efficiently sharing the costs of depredation, and increasing the social carrying capacity for carnivores through education and incentives. We describe a pilot, community-based programme to manage conflicts with the endangered snow leopard Panthera uncia that has employed a combination of measures including wild prey recovery, improvement in herding practices, livestock insurance, and conservation education. Having effectively addressed conflicts at a local scale, this initiative makes a case for multi-pronged, community-based conflict management and for insurance programmes over damage compensation subsidies. We nevertheless emphasize the need to view both these cost sharing measures along a continuum, with greater conservation subsidy being made available at the lower end of the economic spectrum. 11 14.20 – 14.40 Engaging Samburu Warriors in Lion Conservation: A Case Study in Westgate Community Conservancy, Northern Kenya Shivani Bhalla The reduction in lion numbers in Africa is largely due to habitat loss and conflict with humans, and lions are a species whose distribution and conservation status is dramatically impacted by such conflict. Lions in the Ewaso Nyiro ecosystem of northern Kenya are especially vulnerable because they live in or adjacent to areas inhabited by nomadic people. Their natural predatory behaviour has caused great resentment among a rapidly increasing rural pastoralist population. Ewaso Lions is a focused research and community conservation project aimed at enhancing the survival of lions by examining the understudied populations in and around the Ewaso Nyiro region’s protected areas (Samburu, Buffalo Springs and Shaba National Reserves), which have been identified as highest priority areas for biodiversity conservation and research, and are critically important areas for lions and their dispersal. Local scouts and warriors are engaged in the project to monitor lions in the community areas, document prey numbers, as well as investigate humancarnivore conflict in the region with the goal of reducing conflict to increase large carnivores to sustainable numbers. One of the most neglected groups of people in conservation management in this region, is the moran, or warrior age-class. These young men spend more time than anyone in wildlife areas, yet they are rarely involved in decision making when it comes to wildlife conservation. To address this gap, Ewaso Lions founded the Warrior Watch programme in early 2010. Through Warrior Watch, morans become active within their communities as wildlife ambassadors by reporting on wildlife sightings and issues such as conflict. I will present the Lion Scouts programme and Warrior Watch findings to date including successes and challenges of promoting human-carnivore coexistence in this region. 12 14.40 – 15.00 Recreational Fishing: Putting the pressure on Southern Bluefin Tuna, Thannus maccoyii Peter O'Toole, Anne Wallis and Laurie Laurenson Recreational fishing is an important means of harvesting fish resources. This particularly holds true for southern bluefin tuna, Thunnus maccoyii, in the Southern Ocean. Southern bluefin tuna is a highly migratory species that is widespread throughout the southern temperate oceans from the Western Atlantic to the Indian and Western Pacific oceans. The global stock status of southern bluefin tuna is classified as ‘overfished’, yet in Australia little research has been undertaken exploring the ecology or the human dimensions of southern bluefin tuna resources. Therefore the aim of this study was to investigate the impacts of recreational southern bluefin tuna fishing and the associated human dimensions of managing this resource at Portland Bay in south west Victoria, Australia. The study was conducted over the southern bluefin recreational fishing season, which extends from April to June. Access point surveys using a questionnaire and instantaneous counts were conducted to investigate patterns of recreational southern bluefin tuna fishing, to determine fishing effort and catch rates and to assess attitudes, behaviour and specialization of the recreational anglers. It was found that fishing effort varied across the season, recreational catch was significant, anglers are travelling large distances and spend a significant amount of money to fish and the greatest level of fishing specialization was found in charter fishing. What this study reveals is that the behaviour of recreational fishers may be in conflict with Australia’s sustainable fisheries management policy, as when commercial and recreational catch are considered together we are likely to be fishing above our internationally agreed quotas. 13 15.00 – 15.20 Conservation Conflicts in the Wake of New Species Discoveries Pamela Mcelwee The "discoveries" of new species previously undescribed by science are extremely interesting events, ones that raise complicated questions about biology, geography and society, and which have often led, directly or indirectly, to conservation conflicts. In the last twenty years, nearly 350 newly described mammal species alone have been discovered. When new species are described and identified, they are often treated as extremely special animals, above and beyond what their value might have been had they simply been discovered some years ago. This paper will focus on how the discovery of new species affects spatial and social planning for conservation, and the conflicts that often erupt. Using examples from fieldwork in Vietnam, where several new species of large mammals have been discovered in the past 20 years, the paper will show how new species discoveries often set off conservation planning and funding activities that are based on misguided assumptions and a lack of accurate information, with real social consequences. In the case of Vietnam, there has been a common supposition that ‘new’ species were also implicitly very threatened; the assumption was that species had remained unnamed for so long because they existed in low population numbers and therefore were more likely to be in need of serious and immediate protection. As a result, there have been attempts to set up protected areas of hundreds of thousands of hectares for the new species. These protected zones include the lands of some indigenous peoples, indicating that species discoveries can have a serious social impact. Further, some unforeseen consequences of new species discoveries in the field have included an overreliance on foreign scientists for taxonomic work, the rise of markets for the naming of species that have commodified taxonomic practice, and over inflation of ranges of new species in attempts to get conservation funding, even for areas in which the new species have never been documented. All of these issues have lead to different types of conservation conflicts, which this paper will discuss. 14 15.20 – 15.40 Where eagles dare – how conservation frameworks can help underpin raptor management. Des Thompson For most raptor species, an effective conservation strategy has measures which address species protection, the designation of protected areas for breeding and/or wintering birds, and effective conservation and management practices across protected areas and other parts used by the birds. Over the past eleven years we have developed UK-wide conservation frameworks for some of Britain’s most threatened birds - the golden eagle http://www.snh.org.uk/pdfs/publications/commissioned_reports/Report%20No193.pdf and hen harrier (http://jncc.defra.gov.uk/page-5775); a peregrine framework is in preparation. This work has involved government and non-government conservation agencies, researchers and volunteer specialist surveyors; it has relied on a wide range of people with skills in ornithology, field work, data checking, statistics, modelling, file processing and handling, and GIS. Using national and regional data sets describing raptor distribution, abundance and reproduction, ecological modelling studies can test the associations of these measures with spatial and temporal environmental trends in order to identify the key constraints acting on populations. These findings can then be used in conjunction with conservation targets for raptor abundance, demography and distribution in order to determine what management action is needed, and where these interventions should be prioritised. We outline the work done to date and highlight some of the successes of the approach as well as limitations. Themes emerging are widespread illegal persecution of some raptors coupled with a lack of acceptance in some quarters of the scale of its demographic impact, chronic shortages of live prey in some regions, and lack of data on land and legal predator management extent and impacts. We argue that a transparent and robust evidence base on constraints acting on raptors is an essential step in resolving raptor-land use conflicts. 15