SUBJECT: Thinking local and of all the users
AUTHOR: Robert Kenward, IUCN European Sustainable Use Specialist Group

SUMMARY: Don't forget opportunities for enhancing biodiversity by local activities that don't involve tourism or protected areas, or private income incentives for such activities, or idealism as a motivation for policy efforts.

KEYWORDS: Scale, local, incentive-based conservation

In his message of the 17th November, Rainer Muessner raised the explicit point about the need to tackle policy issues at local scale as well as higher levels, and indirectly raised the issue of who pressures for biodiversity enhancement at local level, mentioning NGOs. These are crucial points if we are to reverse/halt biodiversity loss by 2010.

These points are also especially relevant to the discussion on tourism, where the focus of most contributions has been on costs and benefits of tourism for protected areas (even suggesting that most people in developing countries cannot be tourists).

In the surveys of wildlife-watching participation and expenditure by the US government, two thirds of participation was within 1 mile (1.6 km) of home. Most harvesting of flora and fauna products (which together had much higher value than watching in the US and a recent study by IUCN-UK) would have been within a local area, not after a carbon-costly flight to a distant country. The same would apply even more to people in developing countries, although the National Parks here in Thailand at the IUCN Word Conservation Congress also report increased use by nationals as recreational time increases.

In Europe, with a very high proportion of our land in intensive agriculture and forestry, are we to be content to live with a countryside polarised into protected areas (local for only a few people) and intensive use? How about discovering the most cost-effective ways to use local interest in the components of biodiversity to restore pockets and networks of local biodiversity? This is already starting to be done in some countries, but the scope must be huge. Conservation headlands connected in a network can be beneficial for walkers and collectors of diverse wild food plants (who may pay to park their cars nearby), horse-riders (who may pay an access fee), some game-birds (game-use fees), as well as other aspects of biodiversity. How to use such schemes best to restore biodiversity, and thereby show those in developing countries another way than protected areas (sometimes local-people-excluded!) to retain biodiversity?

Such schemes can also add private income as an incentive to pressure from NGOs. In fact, they could with imagination add to rural incomes and employment (e.g. payments to farmers for the results).

Robert Kenward

PS. Please don't forget that for very large numbers of volunteers (more than 10,000 in various IUCN Commissions) a simple idealistic desire to improve environments can be at least as strong an incentive as career considerations.