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Where the Wild Things Were

How Conservation Efforts are Faltering

Steven Sanderson
STEVEN SANDERSON is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Wildlife
Conservation Society.

On the eve of the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, I

argued that wild nature was in deep distress and that the international institutions
charged with the planet's care were managing it poorly ("The Future of
Conservation," September/October 2002). Seven years on, the situation is even worse.
Humans control the Earth's biosphere and directly manage perhaps half of global
plant matter. Their collective ecological impact, however, has taken on a pernicious
life of its own, seemingly beyond the will, and perhaps even the capacity. of
sovereign political actors to affect.

The Rio de Janeiro summit in 1992 yielded the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD),
which was designed to promote the "conservation of biological diversity [and] the
sustainable use of its components." As the International Year of Biodiversity
approaches in 2010, a charitable appraisal might argue that the CBD has held its
own. Ten percent of the world's terrestrial surface is now at least nominally under
some kind of protection. National biodiversity assessments and the Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment have provided useful information on the "state of nature" in
various places. The world knows more and is doing more about conservation than in
the past.

Nevertheless, the loss of biodiversity -- wildlife, genetic material, ecosystems, and

evolutionary processes -- has not abated. The United States has still not ratified the
CBD, and the UN system for conservation is still weak, lacking sanctions for states that
fail to live up to their commitments. Trade in protected wildlife continues and
poaching runs rampant. Funding for conservation remains vanishingly small, and
important animal populations and entire species are in grave danger.

Climate change, meanwhile, has begun to rival habitat loss as the greatest threat to
the biosphere. After somehow maintaining most of its animal species throughout
human history, for example, Africa now faces unprecedented losses of wildlife and
wild places thanks to global warming. Savannah elephants have no exit corridors
from East African drought; changes in water availability threaten natural areas and
force the rural poor to resettle; migrating birds arrive at the wrong time, finding little
food or nesting opportunities; small populations of animals are simply blinking out.

Melting glaciers and changing patterns of rain and snowfall are transforming the
Andean, Rocky Mountain, and Himalayan watersheds. The headwaters of the
Amazon, the Ganges, and the Brahmaputra rivers are in peril, along with the human
and wildlife diversity they sustain. The Arctic is warming fast, surrendering methane
and CO2 to the atmosphere from the not-so-permafrost. Troubling images of
drowning polar bears overshadow an even greater concern: credible estimates warn
that five out of every six migratory birds are vulnerable to climate change, and some
Arctic habitats could suffer a 90 percent depletion of waterfowl.

The linkages between climate change and conservation, moreover, go in both

directions. Healthy wildebeests, Afghan Marco Polo sheep, and American bison are
all necessary for the world's grasslands, which in turn are an important store for
organic CO2. Tropical forests represent a vast sink for carbon, and their destruction
may account for 20 percent of annual CO2 emissions. Peatlands lock up one-third of
global soil carbon in three percent of global territory, representing a cost-effective
area for climate change mitigation -- yet they are suffering losses from fire, drainage,
and agricultural conversion and, consequently, emitting up to two gigatons of CO2
per year. Mapping the greatest stores of organic carbon would help connect
protection of that carbon to protection of ecologies at great risk.

In short, the time is ripe for a new vision, one that takes both biodiversity and climate
change seriously and explores the crucial connections between them. The
Copenhagen process is already moving in this direction, and some new global
financial mechanisms are also emerging. The World Bank's climate investment funds
are designed to reduce deforestation in order to mitigate climate change. The
Global Environmental Facility, an organization that provides grants to developing
countries for projects related to promoting biodiversity and other environmental
issues, could make a greater contribution if given more funding and more agile
management. Both the UN and the World Bank have limited but valuable new
financial facilities for reducing emissions from land-use change.

So far, however, these initiatives lack policy coherence and the power to overcome
obstacles thrown up by recalcitrant stakeholder nations. They are burdened by
institutional legacies, stultifying bureaucracy, and the continuing grievances of North-
South relations. Few voices are heard in favor of more comprehensive conservation
of global carbon stocks or the wildlife they protect. Above all, no global actor has
proposed even a rudimentary road map to a global low-carbon future.

For years, Washington has largely stood apart from the climate change debate. The
U.S. role in the lead-up to next month's climate summit in Copenhagen has been
cautious and noncommittal, as the Obama administration looks warily over its
shoulder at years of hostility in Congress toward the Kyoto protocol and its successors.
If climate legislation ever emerges from Congress, it will have struggled its way past
powerful forces trying to prevent a truly global bill or at least deflect its purpose from
combating climate change to subsidizing special interests in the agricultural, energy,
and other sectors.

Realism cannot turn into defeatism, however. There have been landmark foreign
policy acts in the past that managed to satisfy both domestic and global interests,
and there could be again in the future. The Food for Peace program begun in 1954,
for example, has been simultaneously good for agricultural surplus disposal, foreign
assistance, and hunger relief. Leadership from Washington now could help spur
movement toward a low-carbon economy and marry it to existing support for
protected areas and global public health.

The problems of climate change and biodiversity loss are global, but the solutions to
them must begin at the local level. Conservation is about saving wildlife and wild
places in specific locales. Small programs can become large building blocks if the
global community stands ready to encourage them. In October, for example, the
government of Cambodia established the Seima Protection Forest as the first reserve
dedicated to the combined goals of conserving both carbon and endangered
wildlife. This act transformed a former logging concession along Cambodia's eastern
border with Vietnam into a Yosemite-sized protected area that safeguards not only
threatened primates, tigers, and elephants but also massive stores of carbon.

Seima should serve as a model for how efforts known as REDD (Reducing Emissions
from Deforestation and Degradation) can work on the ground, providing inspiration
for similar projects under way in Bolivia, Guatemala, Chile, Democratic Republic of
Congo, Tanzania, Madagascar, and Indonesia. Globalizing such an initiative and
offering it political and financial support would validate the actions of a far-sighted
government willing to lead. Should the Copenhagen conference and other forums
and powerful actors follow such a path, the future of conservation might eventually
appear more promising than it looks today.

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