David Mercer
According to Ghilarov (1996), the term‘biodiversity’ first appeared (in his words, was ‘invented’) in the literature 16 years earlier in two separate publications authored,first by Lovejoy (1980), and second by Norse and McManus (1980). For Lovejoy the concept was a shorthand way of referring to species totals. For Norse and McManus, the main focus was on genetic and ecological diversity. A few years later the term was adopted as the title of Edward Wilson’s (1988) landmark text. The concept is now synonymous with‘biological diversity’ and defined in the 1992 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) as:
The variability among living organisms from all sources… and the ecological complexes of which they are a part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of eco-systems.
As a legally binding international treaty, the 1992 Convention– which initially was signed by some 50, mainly affluent, nations – came into force the following year because of growing alarm over species loss. This was especially the case in relation to forests and marine resources as well as the rapid expansion of commercial agriculture, large-scale tourism developments and urbanisa-tion, and the negative consequences of the associated overconsumption of land and water resources for humans and planetary life-support systems.
The years immediately following the signing of the CBD saw a strong international focus on the relationship between tourism and biodiversity. In March 1997, this culminated in the pub-lication of the Berlin Declaration on Biological Diversity and Sustainable Tourism, an aspirational document agreed to at an international conference of 18 environment ministers. Inter alia, this recommended:
the promotion of tourist activities that directly or indirectly support the conservation of nature and biological diversity;
the need to avoid additional tourism uses in areas that are already under stress;
the need to protect the integrity of ecosystems and habitats (Vaughan 2000: 287).
Homogenisation
The rich diversity of the world’s landscapes, ecosystems, flora and fauna, architecture, history and culture has long been at the core of tourism. But that diversity is under serious threat in an increasingly‘homogenised’ world where languages (and the associated ecological wisdom) are disappearing almost as rapidly as species. Currently, nowhere is this process more apparent than in the largely untouched dry forest of the Chaco region in northern Paraguay. For centuries the 20,000-strong Ayoreo-Totobiegosode people lived in this largely untouched wilderness, home to native jaguars. But already, some 1 million hectares (10 per cent of the total area) have been cleared since 2007 in a largely Mennonite- and Brazilian-led land rush centred on livestock and biofuel crops for Western markets. As elsewhere, the associated road network attracts a growing tourist trade, something that is currently a particular focus of international concern in Africa with the Tanzanian government’s plan for a road through the centre of Serengeti National Park and bisecting the main migration path for zebras and gazelles (Dobson et al. 2010).
Singapore provides another extreme, but quite different, example. As one of the most highly urbanised nations on earth, and a major international tourism hub, Singapore also ranks as one of the highest in terms of biodiversity extinction (Bradshaw et al. 2010). All but 5 per cent of that densely populated city state’s native lowland forest and mangrove ecosystems are now gone, and it is believed that the overall extinction rate for plants,fish and mammals could be as high as 73 per cent (www.rri.org/singapore). But, as we shall see in the case of ‘pristine’ Ant-arctica, there are now no parts of the world that are untouched by humans either directly, or indirectly via a vast range of pollutants, alien organisms and species, transported by water or air.
Much of the literature on the relationship between biodiversity and tourism tends to focus on
‘flagship’ species such as elephants or the giant apes in tropical and sub-tropical countries (Kruger 2005). But at a quite different scale, a recent report from England on hedgerows has underscored the enormous significance of these micro-ecosystems both as a classic feature of the English landscape for overseas and domestic tourists, as well as being critical to that country’s biodiversity. The Campaign to Protect Rural England (2010) study calculated that there are more than 400,000 km of hedgerows in the UK, some dating back hundreds of years. They provide important habitat and migration corridors for wildlife, yet the decade 1998–2007 wit-nessed a 6 per cent (26,000-km) reduction in overall length. This process is continuing, fuelled in part by technological changes in agricultural practices favouring large machinery and fields uninterrupted by vegetation.
The 2010 biodiversity target
Such was the momentum behind the global‘biodiversity movement’ that by 2002, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, held in South Africa, no less than 188 nations committed to the achievement, within 8 years, of‘a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national level’ (UNEP 2002). Known as the 2010 Biodiversity Target, this also links strongly with the seventh of the eight Millenium Development Goals (MDG– ‘ensure environmental sustainability’). There are 11 principal goals. Goal 1, for example, is to‘Promote the conservation of the biological diversity of ecosystems, habitats and biomes’;
Goal 8 is to‘Maintain capacity of ecosystems to deliver goods and services and maintain liveli-hoods’ and Goal 9 seeks to ‘Maintain socio-cultural diversity of indigenous and local commu-nities’. The most recent assessment is pessimistic about reaching many of the targets but – as with the parallel MDG process– argues that progress has been better in some parts of the world than in others (Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity 2010).
Biodiversity and tourism
The eighth edition of the Living Planet Report (WWF International 2010) reinforces these findings. It highlights a dramatic, 60 per cent overall decline in the Living Planet Index (LPI: a measure of biodiversity) in tropical regions between 1970 and 2007, but a 30 per cent increase in temperate areas. But even in the tropics there are some‘good news’ stories. The declaration of the Los Amigos-Tambopata Conservation Corridor (LAT) is one of these. Over 500,000 acres in area, it connects Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador and provides a migratory corridor for jaguars and giant anteaters as well as ecotourism opportunities for local entrepreneurs. As well, until recently, Gabon had no conservation areas. But approximately 10 per cent of the country is now protected in 13 new national parks. As Vaughan (2000: 284) has argued more generally in his landmark paper on‘Tourism and biodiversity’, ‘the protected area system is vital, for it is realistically the only way most tour companies are able to promote nature tourism’. He also adds (Vaughan 2000: 285) a recent assessment by UNEP that, worldwide, nature tourism is worth US$260 billion annually.
Subsequently, the United Nations declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity. In October of that year, environment ministers from around the world attended a meeting in Nagoya, Japan, to negotiate the next round of the CBD and set new targets up to the year 2020. One outcome was the establishment of an equivalent body to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), known as the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). In the lead-up to the Nagoya conference, China, in particular, announced some significant reforms that will see around a quarter of the country protected in conservation areas. As well, US$4.5bn. has been allocated for‘rewards’ to pro-vincial districts that protect biodiversity (Watts 2010a).
Needless to say, in China as elsewhere, protected area status does not automatically guarantee species protection. In many countries the vast majority of critically endangered species are found outside protected areas (see, for example, Watson et al. 2011), and ongoing management requires substantialfinancial resourcing.
Evaluating biodiversity and ecosystem services
Those advocating the need for biodiversity conservation traditionally have done so by promoting one, or a combination of the following propositions: (i) all life on earth has intrinsic value and a
‘right’ to exist; (ii) it provides vital ecosystem services such as carbon storage or clean air and drinking water; (iii) there are substantial economic benefits to be derived from nature-based tourism; and (iv) medicinal/pharmaceutical breakthroughs often derive from recently discovered genes or species (Horwitz et al. 2001).
In some parts of the world experiences are on offer whereby indigenous people share their intimate knowledge of traditional medicinal plants and bush foods with Western tourists. Such enterprises can play an important role in keeping indigenous cultures alive and raising awareness of different spiritual traditions and the value of biodiversity. The 9-day, 80-km guided walk along the Lurujarri Dreaming Trail that takes place once a year, starting in Broome, Western Australia, is an outstanding example. Also, in Sri Lanka and India, a thriving tourist trade has built up over the years grounded in Ayurvedic herbal medicines and associated health practices.
A serious concern is that, until recently, the undoubted economic benefits of ecosystem services (the ‘positive externalities’) were largely invisible and unrecognised in dollar terms. This is changing, but slowly. The landmark synthesis study on this, by Robert Costanza and his collea-gues, was first published in 1997. Aggregating upwards from the per-hectare level, they esti-mated the global economic value of 17 ecosystem services and 16 biomes (open ocean, forest, tundra, etc.) to be of the order of US$33 trillion per year.‘Recreation/tourism’ is considered to be one David Mercer
of these services. Other examples are the regulation of: (i) climate; (ii) disturbance; and (iii) water, and nutrient cycling. More recently, Balmford et al. (2002: 950), including Costanza as one of the co-authors, have reconsidered and updated the original methodology, arguing that
‘high local values of services such as tourism may not be maintained if extrapolated worldwide’.
Belatedly, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has recruited a team of international experts working on a project investigating the ‘Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity’ (TEEB; www.teebweb.org). Their recent estimate of the annual costs of forest degradation and loss, alone, ranges from US$2 trillion to US$4.5 trillion, but they calculate, optimistically, that this could be reversed by an annual injection of as little as US$45 billion (Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity 2010).
Costa Rica provides a good example. Some 15 years ago, in order to discourage deforesta-tion, the government decided to pay farmers who had forest on their land US$50 per hectare per year to preserve the trees. As a consequence, forest cover has expanded dramatically. In addition to the undoubted tourism-related benefits associated with biodiversity (one tree can host a thousand different life-forms), one of the positive outcomes has been much higher levels of reliable electricity generation from hydro-sources because dam water levels have risen sub-stantially in protected catchments (ABC Radio 2010). This, in turn, has delivered clear benefits to tourism, a sector that is strongly reliant on a secure electricity supply, as well as on clean drinking water. Together with another Central American country– Belize – Costa Rica long ago recognised the commercial potential of biodiversity for the national benefit, not just from ecotourism, but also in the form of pharmaceutical products.
Marine protected areas (MPAs) provide another comparable example. Even though the rate of uptake for these has been slow by comparison with their terrestrial counterparts, there are now over 5,000 around the world covering almost 1 per cent of the oceans. In all parts of the world where they have been gazetted and policed, invariably there has been an explosion in thefish population both within and adjacent to the protected zones, generating substantial benefits for both the commercial fishing and tourism sectors. However, if MPAs are not appropriately managed and policed there can be serious ecological repercussions. This is happening in Hani-faru Bay, Baa Atoll, in the Maldives. This has been an MPA since 2009 but its 250 manta rays breeding in an area no larger than a footballfield are under serious threat from totally unregulated tourist visitation (Shelton 2010).
Australia now leads the world in terms of the total area of MPAs nationally, and the 344,000 sq km Great Barrier Reef Marine Park (GBRMP) is a clear case in point (Olsson et al. 2008). In 2004 re-zoning of the GBRMP resulted in the proportion of‘no-take’ zones expanding in area from 4.5 per cent to 33.3 per cent. This has improved the health of the highly prized coral trout popu-lation, in particular, and a broader tourism-relatedfishing sector that now contributes more than A$150 million to the Queensland economy (Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority 2009).
Needless to add, this has done little to change Australia’s overall status with regard to its international standing on the number of threatened and extinct species. With a current total of 822 (including 95fishes and 175 molluscs) threatened species, it has a far worse record than Cameroon, Tan-zania or India. It also has the poorest record of all countries for the number of mammal species (22) that have become extinct over the last 200 years of European settlement (Johnson 2006).
Habitat loss and‘dead zones’
There are now 193 Parties to the CBD, but in many ways it is surprising, and disappointing, that it took so long to come to fruition. Interestingly, leading players in the early years included a number of countries with by far the highest rates of ecological change and species extinction. In Biodiversity and tourism
the USA, for example, 126 major ecosystems covering most of the country have had their natural habitats reduced by 75 per cent or more over the centuries. For 30 of these thefigure is 98 per cent, and for 58 of these 85 per cent (McDaniel and Gowdy 2000). The impact on wildlife has been dramatic. Common across North American grasslands prior to the nineteenth century, only two small populations of migratory bison now exist (Harris et al. 2009).
Further, to take but one of many possible recent cases, Stafford et al. (2010) report that the so-called Dead Zone of oxygen-starved waters in the northwestern Gulf of Mexico was initially identified as a serious problem in the early 1970s. But by the mid-1980s, fuelled by massive injections of nitrogen and other nutrients from heavy fertiliser application on US and Mexican farmland into rivers, and subsequently the marine environment, it had expanded to around 8,000 sq km and has more than doubled in size since then. Fish and crustaceans cannot survive in this ever-expanding toxic ‘soup’, and coastal communities formerly totally dependent on commercialfishing and tourism have suffered accordingly. The most recent UNEP Year Book reports that, globally, there are now around 400‘dead’ marine zones and that they have been doubling in size approximately every decade over the last 50 years (UNEP 2010).
It is not uncommon in the affluent world for specific commercial interests like tourism to be compensatedfinancially if livelihoods are decimated by serious oil pollution, as recently in the US states bordering the Gulf of Mexico, or by the legislated designation of ‘no-take’ fishing areas, as in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park (Macintosh et al. 2010). But commercial enterprises impacted by slow-onset environmental deterioration from multiple point-sources are rarely compensated in the same way.
Biologically ‘dead zones’ similar to the Gulf of Mexico example are now common around the world and serve as a stark reminder of the complex inter-play between ecosystems, gov-ernance systems and damaging practices associated with a variety of commercial activities. Staf-ford et al. (2010) point out that natural systems invariably demonstrate surprising resilience, but, when subjected to continued, cumulative stress from a process like nitrogen build-up, a crucial
‘tipping-point’ is reached beyond which restoration is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.
Coral reef ecosystems are without doubt one of the single most important of all for the tourism sector. Coastal regions are now home to over half the world’s population and a third of these live in close association with coral reefs. But reef ecosystems everywhere are under severe stress from mining (for construction materials and tourist souvenirs), dredging (for resort and marina developments), pollution and sedimentation, as well as from overfishing. Such activities weaken reef structures and make them especially vulnerable to extensive and often irreversible damage from sudden biological‘shocks’ such as explosions in the population of the Crown-of-thorns Starfish (Acanthaster planci). This has occurred from time to time with devastating impact on the Great Barrier Reef and more recently (in 2009) on the UNESCO, World Heritage-listed Tubbataha Reefs in the Philippines’ Sulu Sea.
Also, as became apparent following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, intact coral reefs can act as a strong protective buffer against destructive waves. In Sri Lanka, for example, hotels along the densely settled south and eastern littoral that were guarded by largely unmodified reef, dune and mangrove ecosystems invariably escaped serious damage, whereas resort developments that had significantly altered these environments suffered either partial or total destruction. Unfor-tunately, there are signs that this lesson has already been forgotten, with major, resort-style tourist developments currently being promoted by the government and overseas commercial interests in significant mangrove and lagoon environments along the west and south coasts. In this, Sri Lanka is not alone. The Balmford et al. (2002) study, mentioned earlier, found that mangrove communities around the world are the most relentlessly eliminated of all biomes, at a far greater rate, for example, than tropical forests.
David Mercer
Levels of biological organisation
The CBD definition above highlights that there are different levels of biological organisation.
From small-scale to large-scale, the four most commonly recognised are: genetic; species;
community or ecosystem; and landscape or regional. As Noss (1995: 80) notes,‘Biodiversity is most commonly measured at the species level’. Yet, paradoxically, only a tiny proportion (around 1.9 million) of the world’s estimated 10–100 million species have been scientifically classified. An ambitious, decade-long project – the Census of Marine Life – involving scientists from 80 nations, has recently concluded that biologists are aware of around 230,000 named marine species out of a likely total of anywhere between 1 million and 1.4 million (Carey 2010).
In short, there is still a remarkably high level of scientific ignorance about species, their interactions and ecosystem functioning and a serious paucity of evidence-based information to guide management decisions (Pullin and Salafsky 2010). The causes of Crown-of-thorns Starfish infestations on the Great Barrier Reef are a classic case. After years of generously funded, detailed research, there is still no certainty as to whether the intermittent plagues are‘natural’ or human-induced, or indeed some combination of both. The costs of removal during an infes-tation can be as high as A$40 per starfish so this form of control has only ever been used for relatively small, intensively used tourist sites (Lawrence et al. 2002).
Definitional debates
Notwithstanding the rapid developments in international diplomacy related to the CBD, as in Ghilarov’s (1996) paper and more recent contributions by Hamilton (2005), Mayer (2006) and Ridder (2008), there has been a vigorous, ongoing debate around rival definitions of ‘biodi-versity’ and what these mean for ecosystem management and policy. Academic commentators from disciplines as diverse as anthropology, political science, economics and, of course, ecology, marine biology and genetics, have joined in sometimes heated argument about the origins, evolution and, indeed, ultimate utility of the concept. Diamond’s (2005), best-selling book, Collapse, and the subsequent critique of that text by a number of writers in Questioning Collapse (McAnany and Yoffee 2009) provide a useful insight into the complexity of this trans-disciplinary issue. Since the early 1980s, a parallel debate has also centred around the related concept of
‘ecosystem health’.
Ghilarov, in particular, is highly critical of the superficiality of the ‘aeroplane rivets’ metaphor that was so widely invoked in the 1990s and emphasises that biodiversity is not a‘thing’, but a process involving constant change and evolution and sometimes massive disturbance through such media asflood, fire, tsunami or hurricane, etc. Thus, measurement always entails numerous complex issues revolving around precisely where the geographical borders are to be drawn with regard to any given system (the scale question), as well as the time-period involved (the temporal question). Mayer (2006), by contrast, argues that when viewed as a‘framework’ for the variety of planetary life, biodiversity is not a measurable‘thing’, but that, nevertheless, carefully speci-fied features of biodiversity certainly can be calibrated.
Together with other scientific commentators, both Ghilarov and Ridder are adamant that management practices prioritising the protection of individual species (invariably ‘world-wide flagship species, Kruger 2005) are quite different from those focusing on managing for diversity.
Ghilarov (1996: 306) reminds us, for example, that:
… the bear (ursus arctos) was a common species in forests just near Moscow up to the 17th century. Now, unfortunately, there are no more bears in the Moscow region, but the Biodiversity and tourism
forests continue to grow, consuming carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen in the same manner as they did centuries ago.
Further, in their critical commentary on the representation of biodiversity in the Western Pacific region in tourism promotion brochures and the publications of such bodies as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Conservation International (CI), the anthropologists, Foale and Macintyre (2005: 13) comment that:
We rarely see photographs of organisms of major ecological importance: the fungi in the soil, the symbiotic unicellular algae living within the tissues of corals, the thousands of drab little insects that perform vital pollination.
This view is shared by the zoologists, Zamin et al. (2010) in their recent overview of the poor state of National Red List (NRL) reporting around the world. They found that only 109 countries had such lists (less than 50 per cent in Africa, Oceania, Latin America and the Car-ibbean), and that there is an overwhelming emphasis on data collection for amphibians, birds and mammals rather than for plants or fungi, lichens and invertebrates. This again highlights the poor state of scientific knowledge for many parts of the developing world, in particular, that are often in a rush to embrace Western-style tourism-related infrastructure projects in the absence of crucial baseline data.
In terms of species numbers, invertebrates represent some 75 per cent of recorded global biodiversity and it is not uncommon for such organisms to be‘keystone species’, performing a disproportionately pivotal role in ecosystem functioning and, indeed, collapse. A classic example is provided by the black sea urchin (Diadema antillarum) that plays such a key role in Caribbean coral reef ecosystem functioning and the tourism sector that is so dependent on the existence of healthy reefs. In 1983, a pathogen infected this sea urchin on a massive scale across 3.5 million sq km of the Caribbean in‘the most widespread epidemic ever documented for a species of marine invertebrate’ (Lessios et al. 1984: 336). The impact on tourism-related dive and fishing enterprises in Jamaica has been profound. Live coral cover there declined from 52 per cent to 3 per cent between 1977 and 1993 (Carr and Heyman 2009).
Biodiversity and climate change
Since the early 1990s there has been growing scientific recognition and consensus regarding the crucial link between biodiversity (the‘ecosystem sector’) and climate change, and the role that intact ecosystems can play in building resilience to climate change. Together, deforestation and agriculture, for example, contribute around 20 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions, globally, whereas some 15 per cent of emissions are sequestered in tropical forests (van Oosterzee 2010).
Tourism, climate change and biodiversity are intimately connected at many different levels.
The WTO/UNEP (2008) analysis, for example, identified five global ‘hotspots’ where climate change will almost certainly have major impacts on tourism destinations. In three of these– the Mediterranean region, and the Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean Small Island Nations – both land and marine biodiversity decline on a large scale are anticipated, as is marine biodiversity in the other two hotspot regions, the Caribbean and Australia/New Zealand.
Potentially this has far-reaching negative consequences for tourism in the future, especially in countries like Antigua and Barbuda where coral reef ecosystems are the foundation for an economic sector contributing to 75 per cent of the nation’s GDP (Carr and Heyman 2009).
One controversial response that has been adopted by some airline companies is to encourage David Mercer
travellers to make a financial contribution towards voluntary carbon offsets for their flights.
Effectively this is a modest carbon tax that can be used, for example, to fund afforestation projects to sequester carbon. A criticism of this approach is that it shifts the burden from producer to customer responsibility and, because of its voluntary nature, has had minimal impact (WTO/
UNEP 2008).
The growing dominance of anthromes
Mention has already been made of the extreme examples of biodiversity loss in Singapore, Australia and the USA. But these particular cases are part of the larger global picture of what many scientists believe to be the most recent of the world’s six mass extinction phases char-acterised by a species destruction rate some 1,000 to 10,000 times higher than is‘natural’ (iucn.
org/what/tpas/biodiversity).
A recent study of the replacement of‘wild’, terrestrial biomes by anthropogenic biomes (or anthromes) has painted a picture of relentless transformation of natural landscapes and ecosys-tems by humans, mapped for four specific time periods: 1700, 1800, 1900 and 2000 (Ellis et al.
2010). In pre-industrial 1700, around 5 per cent of the terrestrial biosphere was impacted to any significant degree by human activity. But by 2000, only 25 per cent could be classified as ‘wild’.
The early twentieth century marked the crucial‘tipping-point’ for the transition of the world’s ice-free lands from largely ‘wild’ to predominantly ‘anthropogenic’. Interestingly, the research found that by far the most significant change in global land use occurred between 1800 and 2000. This was the sixfold increase in the area of pastures, or rangelands.
Tourism has contributed to biome transformation in many different ways, not least through the rapid growth in recent years in the popularity of golf and the massive expansion in the total area of golf courses around the world, even in arid countries like Egypt and Australia. Con-temporary 36-hole golf courses typically have a coverage of around 300 hectares and frequently involve large-scale biodiversity depletion or loss of productive agricultural land. Heavy watering and fertiliser application regimes are also a common feature. The tropical island of Hainan in the South China Sea is one of the latest battlegrounds in the ongoing conflict between envir-onmentalists and multinational golf resort interests. Catering largely for an affluent Chinese clientele, the island already has 30 golf courses but, with strong government support, there are plans to expand this number tenfold in anticipation of growing domestic demand, but also to compete with Hawaii for overseas tourists. Home to 300 endangered species, the biologically rich, Diaolou Mountains National Park is currently under serious threat from a proposed golf course development (Watts 2010b).
Habitat destruction and species loss
Since the signing of the CBD,‘biodiversity’ has become a familiar term in the media and popular parlance, often being linked automatically with the words‘extinction’, ‘loss’ or ‘collapse’ (Dia-mond 2005). However, it should not be forgotten that, through a process of selection, species disappear ‘naturally’ all the time. A commonly quoted statistic is that around 95 per cent of all species that have ever existed on earth are now extinct. Nevertheless, UN background docu-ments regularly highlight the unprecedented historical changes to ecosystems that have taken place over the last 50 years, in particular, and the fact that the pace of destruction is accelerating.
These processes and outcomes are elaborated on in the pathbreaking, 2005 Millenium Ecosystem Assessment Report (United Nations 2005), as well as in the annual Red Lists of the World’s Endangered Species, produced by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Biodiversity and tourism
Certain large mammals (‘flagship species’) are often iconic tourist attractions in their own right and– largely because of habitat destruction – many are on the verge of extinction. One of these is the rare Rothschild giraffe. Added to the Red List in 2010, there are now fewer than 700 of these alive in the wild, mainly in Uganda and Kenya, and largely restricted to small, isolated popu-lations in predominantly agricultural landscapes and with limited capacity to range. Apart from rigid protection and captive breeding, one of the key strategies necessary for the survival of such species is to accommodate them in very large reserves or an inter-connected system of habitat corridors, often demanding international co-operation. Such an outcome has been successfully negotiated between Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa in the form of the still-expanding Great Limpopo Transfrontier Peace Park, which incorporates the 19,000 sq km Kruger National Park, the largest conservation zone on the planet. Because of its sheer size, wild animals here have the freedom to make much-needed migrations over long distances in line with seasonal variations in rainfall and food resources.
Another worthwhile strategy, advocated for example by the Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS)‘living landscapes’ approach in Madagascar, is to engage in far-sighted consensus-building with government institutions and agricultural landholders to increase revenue generation at the local scale and facilitate land-use trade-offs (Erdmann 2010). So-called REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) schemes also have potential. These pump millions of dollars into developing nations in return for forest protection. Norway has recently signed a $1-billion REDD deal with Indonesia, and Australia has committed A$70 million to the same country (Fogarty 2010). Positive ecotourism revenue increases over the long term are a hoped-for outcome.
The most recent of the Red List reports has underscored the often strong association between biodiversity‘hotspots’, poverty and high numbers of threatened species (IUCN 2010). Ecuador, for example, tops the list with 2,227 threatened species (by comparison, highly developed Canada has only 68 and the UK 72); Indonesia (1,116) Malaysia (1,167) China (832) and Madagascar (641) also have large numbers of threatened species. In the latter country, all but 10 per cent of the original forest cover has been lost.
Consumptive and non-consumptive uses of wildlife
In such countries mammals, birds and plant associations are often a valuable tourist drawcard for specialist nature tours, catering especially for European and North American tourists. But, unfortunately, those same resources are frequently more highly valued domestically for envir-onmentally destructive and/or illegal commercial ends such as logging, plantation establishment or the now lucrative and thriving international trade in endangered species. The latter is often run by well-organised crime syndicates serving Asian markets and can involve either live animals or body parts for medicinal and related purposes or– as in the case of elephant tusks – for highly valued ivory. Estimates now put the number of black and white rhinoceros in Africa, for example, at only 18,000, down from 65,000 in the 1970s. The black rhinoceros is critically endangered. In July 2010, poachers killed the last remaining rhinoceros cow in the 1500-hectare, Krugersdorp game reserve for its prized horn (The Guardian 2010). The reserve currently attracts over 200,000 visitors each year.
This highlights the important issue of significant and long-established cultural differences over the consumptive and non-consumptive use of wildlife– particularly between ‘East’ and ‘West’
(but also within such countries as Norway (Ris 1994) and the Azores (Neves 2010a, b))– that so often bedevil the successful implementation of international conventions relating to the pro-tection of wildlife and associated habitats. The ongoing conflict over Japanese whale-hunting in the Southern Ocean is a clear case in point.
David Mercer