Renegade General Laurent Nkunda’s fighters seized Virunga National Park headquarters at Rumangabo on Sunday, overtook the town of Rutshuru yesterday, and continue to advance on the regional capital of Goma, facing little resistance from either Congolese government troops or MONUC, the UN peacekeeping force. Thousands of local residents have fled the fighting, including 53 gorilla rangers who were in the park when it was taken by Nkunda’s rebels. Twelve of the rangers made it back to the relative safety of Goma today, after more than two days dodging bullets in the forest with no food or water, but the rest remain missing. Almost nothing is known about the condition of the park’s mountain gorillas, which represent half of the world population of 700.

If you’re not too daunted by its size (it tops out at just over 400 pages), the Dictionary & Introduction to Global Environmental Governance serves as a useful primer on international environmental politics and policies. This volume could be particularly useful to those working in related, but distinct, sectors who want to familiarize themselves with global environmental governance’s history and recent developments. Ever wondered what an epistemic community is? What makes water soft or hard? Curious to see the authors attempt to define “environment” and “ecology”? This book answers all these questions and many more, and most definitions are distinguished by admirable clarity and brevity.

The Nature Conservancy’s first Conservation Learning Exchange, or ConEx, concludes tomorrow in Vancouver, Canada. It focuses on six themes: climate change and energy; poverty, population growth, and consumerism; ecosystem services; science and technology; working with others; and values and society. You can read more about the goings-on on the ConEx blogs. A sampling from today: “People, poverty and diversity are major themes running throughout this conference and the underlying buzz from the ballrooms to the bars is mission drift. In the sessions I’ve attended, over and over I hear that the Conservancy needs to bring people, of all races, religion and socio-economic backgrounds into our work. Conservation is not just about biodiversity, it is also about human diversity.”

In Poverty: Combating the Global Crisis, a paper for the Better World Campaign, Wilson Center Senior Scholar John Sewell urges the next U.S. president to focus on promoting open political and economic systems; universal education; better health systems and disease prevention; and equitable trade liberalization in order to reduce poverty.

“Somebody recently said water’s the new oil and there’s a lot to be said for that,” Tad Davis, the Army’s deputy assistant secretary for environment, safety, and occupational health, told Reuters. “If we don’t have water, then we don’t have the ability to perform,” said Davis.

Scientists attending the World Conservation Congress in Barcelona this week released The World’s Protected Areas, a book that examines past progress and continuing challenges in the struggle to protect some of the world’s most biodiverse places.

An Encyclopedia of Earth article examines the important role of forest-derived environmental income in the lives of the rural poor in developing countries.

<href=”https://newsecuritybeat-org.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2012/07/Kalema-Zikusoka1.png”>Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka is founder and CEO of Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), an NGO that seeks to save the endangered mountain gorillas of Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park and improve the health and livelihoods of people living on the outskirts of Bwindi. Close proximity of humans and gorillas has resulted in the transfer of a number of diseases, including tuberculosis and scabies. In this podcast, Kalema-Zikusoka describes CTPH’s success providing integrated health services, educating people about family planning methods, reducing human–wildlife conflict, and improving local livelihoods. In “Sharing the Forest: Protecting Gorillas and Helping Families in Uganda,” the latest issue in ECSP’s Focus series, Kalema-Zikusoka and coauthor Lynne Gaffikan write that “members of these communities have the potential to serve as model stewards of the country’s natural resource wealth”–if their health needs are met and livelihoods improved. Kalema-Zikusoka recently spoke at the Wilson Center on human, animal, and ecosystem health and population-health-environment lessons from East Africa.

I’ve been busy the last several days attending the “Healthy Environments—Healthy People” stream of the World Conservation Congress. While there has been much talk about the connections between environmental services and people’s livelihoods and allusions to how this links with human health, I’ve been surprised by the scarcity of actual documented linkages between conservation strategies and human health.

This conundrum got me thinking about why there aren’t more people trying to actually evaluate impacts on human health. Do environmentalists simply lack the tools and expertise to evaluate human-health impacts? Are human-health benefits too hard to measure? Or does conservation not really have any human-health benefits? No, no, and no again are my answers to these questions.

I think the real problem is that “healthier people” is really just a good selling-point for conservation rather than a true objective of most conservation institutions. In other words, arguing that environmental health promotes human health is a good way for conservation organizations to expand their constituency.

Am I a jaded conference participant who has simply attended one too many sessions? I don’t think so, based on a meeting I attended last week of the EuroNGOs, a network of European organizations advocating for sexual and reproductive health. The topic of this year’s EuroNGOs meeting? The interface between population, environment, and poverty alleviation. Was this really a group of population and health organizations interested in adding an environmental dimension to their work or interested in the environmental benefits of their work? No—the real purpose was to increase funding for sexual and reproductive health by discussing the links and benefits related to environmental conservation and poverty alleviation. So these are different communities coming together for a common goal: to increase the funding for their particular missions.

Does this mean, however, that it is wrong to advocate for conservation interventions based on health benefits or wrong to advocate for health interventions based on environmental benefits? I don’t think so. I just think we need to do a better job of building bridges across communities. It would have been wonderful to have a few environmental organizations at the EuroNGOs meeting and a few more health organizations at the World Conservation Congress. Perhaps then we would do a better job evaluating the cross-sectoral benefits of our health and environment work.

Jason Bremner is program director for population, health, and environment at the Population Reference Bureau.

Photo courtesy of Geoff Dabelko.

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The lawyers are out at the World Conservation Congress Forum in Barcelona. Carl Bruch of the Environmental Law Institute in Washington, DC, was one of several speakers at “Armed Conflict and Environment: Protecting the Environment During War and Improving Post-Conflict Natural Resource Management.”

Bruch is leading a forward-leaning initiative entitled “Strengthening Post-Conflict Peacebuilding and Recovery Through Natural Resource Management” that is collaborating with Tokyo University and the UN Environment Programme’s Conflicts and Disasters Programme to analyze cases from around the world where the environment is key to causing, extending, ending, or recovering from conflict. Bruch and his team of authors are trying to glean lessons for peacebuilding by examining natural resource management in post-conflict societies. Bruch emphasized that the goal is to provide actors on the ground who are not environmental practitioners with the practical means to integrate natural resource management into their operations.

Michael Bothe, an expert on the environment and laws of war from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, suggested IUCN could play a positive role in using the parks-for-peace process to establish parks as demilitarized zones. He noted that peacetime treaties often remain in effect in times of conflict, but that obligations in international environmental treaties are promotional and therefore have limited impact during war. Bothe called for more work in three areas:

1. Passing laws that use parks-for-peace mechanisms to prevent valuable habitats from becoming military objectives;
   
2. Clarifying how the military doctrine of proportionality of response applies to environmental damage; and
   
3. Specifying the application of customary (i.e., traditional) law regarding environmental protection during armed conflict.

Illustrating the diversity of participants at the World Conservation Congress, questioners from Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Angola, Georgia, and Germany focused on environmental damage from conflicts in their regions.

“Frequently, we forget that environmental management is all about institutions and governance, and the decisions and trade-offs that we make,” said the University of Washington’s Patrick Christie at “Governance of Marine Ecosystem-Based Management: A Comparative Analysis,” a September 29, 2008, event sponsored by the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP). “And of course they need to be informed by ecological principles as well. But when it comes down to it, you’re managing individuals, institutions, [and] budgets.” Christie believes that as more and more marine species move dangerously close to extinction—whether from overfishing, pollution, or habitat destruction—ecosystem-based management (EBM), which governs ecosystems according to ecological rather than political boundaries, offers the best approach to marine conservation. This meeting was the final event in ECSP’s “Fishing for a Secure Future” series.

Decentralizing EBM

For Alan White of The Nature Conservancy, the Coastal Resource Management Project (CRMP), initiated by the U.S. Agency for International Development in 1996, exemplifies EBM’s success. Working in 111 coastal municipalities in the Philippines and covering approximately one-sixth of the country’s coastline, CRMP helped managers of municipal fisheries and marine protected areas (MPAs) collaborate with coastal law enforcement agencies to restore fish populations. EBM can be achieved, argued White, by allowing local municipalities to control simple regulatory schemes—so long as they are simultaneously sharing information with larger-scale networks. However, “the local governments have to be the ones to pay for this; they can’t be dependent on foreign donor projects or even large NGOs. It’s got to be sustained through the mechanism of governance and governments in those areas,” he said.

The Coral Triangle Initiative (CTI) regional action plan, drafted by the CTI’s six members—Indonesia, East Timor, the Philippines, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands—is designed to make ecosystem-based fisheries management “more mainstream in the region,” said White. Among the many factors decreasing fish populations in the region are illegal and commercial fishing, chemical poisoning, industrial pollution, coral bleaching, typhoons, and aquarium fishing, he noted, and to effectively address these problems, local municipalities and larger-scale actors must coordinate their strategies.

Curbing Illegal Fishing in the Philippines

Tetra Tech’s Nygiel Armada explained that the Fisheries Improved for Sustainable Harvests (FISH) Project in the Philippines’ Danajon Bank ecosystem demonstrates how improving control mechanisms can combat illegal and commercial fishers’ activities. The FISH Project focuses on improving control mechanisms, including the network of MPAs; species-specific management; gear restrictions; size limits on fish; registration and licensing; and zoning of fishing and water activities. Strengthening these mechanisms and combining them with cross-cutting initiatives such as information, education, and communication campaigns; better policies; and collaboration with law enforcement agencies led to more fish.

“Governance is only as strong as your weakest link,” emphasized Armada. The weakest municipalities—those that allowed illegal fishing practices to continue and failed to enforce control mechanisms—weakened overall gains. To sustain fish stocks and improve governance, all localities must work together to enforce control mechanisms.

Marine Governance, Large and Small

“As scale increases, and complexity increases, and control and potential for coordination become less feasible, there’s really [a] need to pay increasing attention to the context within which governance is taking place,” maintained Robin Mahon of the University of the West Indies, who studies the Caribbean large marine ecosystem. As Mahon argued, “policy cycles at all levels are important because different types of decisions take place at each level.”

Video of the event and PowerPoint presentations are posted on the Woodrow Wilson Center website.

Photo: Patrick Christie. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Woodrow Wilson Center.

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