08 September 2009
Addressing Climate Change with Ecosystem Services
Podcast on conservation of the central African rain forest
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Narrator:
What are ecosystem services – and why are they becoming a big discussion topic in climate change negotiations? The U.S State Department’s CO.NX podcasting team presents the fourth podcast in our crowdsourced podcast series on development partnerships between the United States and Africa.
Joining us once again is John Flynn, Director of USAID’s Central African Regional Program for the Environment.
Ecosystem services is a concept being widely discussed now as a part of efforts to address climate change. The concept has many applications. It is based on the notion that natural ecosystems provide services both to humans and the wider world. These services include , for example. the filtering of water by plants to make it clean, the role of wetlands as nurseries for fish and birds, and the role of birds and insects in the pollination of crops and other plants
Recent innovations in environmental protection policies have begun to develop financial frameworks around these services. In America, schemes have been implemented to pay farmers for using their land in sustainable ways that help avoid chemical runoff and soil erosion which pollutes local rivers. The same principles are now a part of the global climate change discussion.
These financial incentives will play a large part in the outcome of climate change negotiations later this year. Today, in part four of our discussion with John Flynn, Director of the Central African Regional Program for the Environment, part of the US Agency for International Development, discusses how ecosystem services, and especially ecotourism, are playing a role in the conservation of the central African rain forest.
John Flynn:
Environmental services means many things to different people. Typically it means, I think generally now, the payment for environmental services in some ways. Because all of the functions that the forest provides, whether anybody pays for it or not, it’s a service to people and to the overall ecosystem health of the globe. It’s an incredible engine. The whole hydrologic cycle, the carbon cycle, photosynthesis, all the things that go into this process, enormously complex, and I don’t think we should be deluding ourselves, we don’t even understand well, the scientific community, the ecology of tropical forests enough to say you can actually harvest timber or you can do this or you can do that. We’ll never have perfect knowledge and so we have to act and try to learn as we go. And this concept of eco-services is something that is critical to the sustainability of what we’re trying to do. Right now we can see three or four principle environmental services that have the possibility to generate revenue. And the one that we have been working on probably the longest is ecotourism. Ecotourism is a kind of an environmental service, it’s a non-consumptive one done properly. In other words, it does not damage the resource. I have to make that caveat, though, it can if it’s not done properly. Especially in fragile ecosystems – Galopagos Islands, etc., that can be – you can damage the very thing you came to see. The tropical forest looks robust but it’s quite fragile. The wildlife is not that abundant as it is on the big plains, you don’t have big migrations, you don’t have concentrations of animals. And you can’t see them – the forest is a very dense place. Recently I was trekking through an elephant trail essentially is what you have to walk on if you’re going to go through the forest and much to my amazement I was charged by a male silverback gorilla. And a more terrifying sight one is not likely to come upon too often! I didn’t see him – he was thirty feet away. And I got too close. And he didn’t like that. But this happens. The tropical forests are deceptively non-productive. One just looks at the lush growth and water and the greenery all around you and you think this must be just a massively productive area. But in reality it’s at its highest and best use as a forest, ecologically speaking. Agriculture and other kinds of uses are not very favorable for a forest region. The soils are not very good, there’s a lot of pests, there’s a lot of problems. Part of our work there is to try to at least eliminate the fragmentation of the forest – this is what I mean by that. During all this unrest, for example, in DRC, people were driven away from their normal places of living and they started penetrating deep in the forest for protection against militia and rather raiders. Because traditionally they have their villages and they have an area around there where they farm and they rotate the thing according to a certain system, that’s traditional – replenish the soil, let it grow back a bit. As population growths increase, these fallow periods become necessarily less and less to where the productivity is so low that they have to go out and find new places. So these villages tend to move around. What we’re trying to do is find ways where can keep populations around a certain, particular area where the farming can be sustained without having to cut primary forest all the time to accommodate new population. Also, and try to discourage people from going way off in the hinterland and just starting farms out there in the middle of nowhere. Because it starts fragmenting the ecosystem and this is particularly important for wildlife, and especially the wide-ranging landscape species like elephants. Tourism, done properly, we think can provide some revenue for local people , and some revenue to manage and protect the particularly sensitive areas that we have identified. We have several nodes of tourism that have been successful. The mountain gorillas of the eastern DRC and Uganda, Rwanda – that has now developed into a highly profitable industry and it employs a lot of local people, and generates a lot of revenues. Especially for Rwanda and Uganda who have developed in further than DRC, but DRC is ready to capitalize on it. The other area, in the Central African Republic, there is a large forest clearing that in the local dialect they cal Bai (pronounced “by”).There are certain clearings in the forest, marshy, that have only recently been understand to be important ecologically for large populations of animals. That area has documented 5,000 forest elephants that use that area. And anytime you go there, you can always see 30-50 elephants that just happen to be visiting at that particular moment. They come for the salts in the soil, and just to socialize, it turns out. That area is a great tourist area because the animals are concentrated; you can see them every time you go. We’re building a few others like that in areas where we’ve seen that there’s potential.
Narrator:
To learn more about U.S. partnerships with central Africa, visit carpe.umd.edu.
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