#iucn

  • “Green colonialism”: the background behind a Western outlook https://ideas4development.org/en/green-colonialism-western-outlook


    07 January 2021
    Visuel “Green colonialism”: the background behind a Western outlook on African nature
    A group of tourists observe a lion in a natural park in South Africa. Photo by Adrega / Pixabay

    In his book L’Invention du colonialisme vert – Pour en finir avec le mythe de l’Éden africain (“The Invention of Green Colonialism – Putting an end to the myth of the African Eden,” Flammarion, 2020), the environmental historian Guillaume Blanc analyzes the undercurrents and consequences of an idealized vision of African nature inherited from the colonial period.

    What is this “African Eden” myth invented by Westerners and linked to the notion of “green colonialism” that you talk about in your book?
    The African Eden is the myth, created in the colonial period, of a wild and virgin-nature Africa. When European settlers went to try their chance in Africa in the 1860s and 1870s, they left behind a continent whose landscapes were being radically transformed by urbanization and industrialization. In Africa, they were convinced that they had rediscovered the nature that, back home, was in the process of being lost.

    Then, from the end of the 19th century, the popular press took up this narrative and made it fashionable. These are the stories of Stanley and Livingstone, hunting expeditions by Roosevelt and Churchill, and literature such as Ernest Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa. These cultural products describe an Africa untouched by human presence, where nature and animals rule. But this Africa doesn’t exist. It never did. Like Europe, Africa is inhabited and farmed. The concept of a virgin-nature Africa is as absurd as the one according to which the African has not fully entered into history. But this myth is so deeply ingrained in people’s minds that it persists to this day.
    From a scientific point of view, this idea of a primeval Africa of virgin nature has never existed.

    Another myth that won’t go away is that of primeval forests. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, botanists, especially from France, studied the forest cover of West Africa. They noted that most villages were surrounded by a forest belt and that there was savanna between the village and the forest. The “climax community” theory led them to believe that, prior to human settlement, Africa was covered with a huge, virgin and primeval tropical forest. They hypothesized that the savanna was the result of the destruction caused by the local populations. But these scientists read ecosystem history backwards! In most semi-arid environments, the presence of trees in fact came about through that of humans, thanks to gradual fertilization of the soil. Nonetheless, the myth of primeval forests is a stubborn one. Even today, belief in it sometimes prevails over fact. UN experts say, for example, that 90% of primeval forests have disappeared in Sierra Leone and Guinea, while in reality forest cover has been increasing there for two centuries.
    But weren’t ecosystems, and especially certain species, ever threatened with extinction?

    Of course, and that’s why it’s essential to carry out conservation policies. The colonial era is synonymous with particularly strong destruction of ecosystems. Colonization led to intensified hunting, especially for the ivory trade. About 65,000 elephants were killed each year in Africa at the end of the 19th century. The forest also suffered damage because of conversion to farmland. Between 1850 and 1920, 95 million hectares of forest in Africa and Asia were cleared, four times more than in the previous 150 years. But the European settlers didn’t realize that the ecological damage they were witnessing was actually their doing. They put the blame on the colonized people and decided to create hunting reserves. And the people living on those reserves were strictly controlled, if not expropriated. These same hunting reserves were converted into national parks in the 1930s.

    What is behind your assertion that Africa’s nature parks are perpetuating a tradition of “green colonialism”?

    In the 1950s, the organizations and imperial institutions promoting nature conservation changed their names. For example, at the same time as they created hunting reserves and then parks, colonial administrators and hunters founded the Office International de Documentation et de Corrélation pour la Protection de la Nature in 1928. In 1934 this organization became the International Office for the Protection of Nature (OIPN), in 1948 the International Union for the Protection of Nature, and in 1956 the International Union for Conservation of Nature—the IUCN as we know it today. In fact, many conservation institutions and NGOs were created during the colonial period.

    During its seventh General Assembly in 1960, IUCN, with support from FAO and UNESCO, launched the “African Special Project.” A conference was then held in 1961 in Arusha, Tanzania, with heads of state of around 20 newly independent countries. Its organizers explained that it was necessary to continue the work achieved in the parks, especially faced with the “Africanization of nature programs.” It was at that conference that the World Wide Fund for Nature (known in some regions as the World Wildlife Fund), or WWF, was created. This organization went on to finance the sending of Western conservation experts all over Africa. However, these experts were mostly reconverted colonial administrators who, throughout the continent, perpetuated the notion that nature had to be emptied of its inhabitants in order to be protected.

    That’s why I speak of “the invention of green colonialism.” It’s not a question of neo-colonialism, but of post-colonialism, because heads of state have found it to be to their advantage. They have been programmed to believe in the international system of heritage conservation and have utilized international standards to promote their own interests. It’s this alliance between Western experts and African leaders that is responsible for perpetuating this colonial tradition.
    What are the consequences of this “naturalization” process for the local populations in Africa?

    The process of “naturalizing” Africa’s parks involves “dehumanizing” them, often by force. Today, we no longer speak of evictions, but of “voluntary departures.” But when these population displacements take place in an authoritarian State, like Ethiopia, these departures become not voluntary but forced. International organizations are aware of this but prefer to look the other way. When people living in those parks are not evicted, they are criminalized. Millions of farmers and shepherds are fined for cultivating the land or for grazing their herds in the mountains, or they face prison sentences for poaching small game. Sometimes the local people are subject to violence by eco-guards equipped with weapons and high-tech equipment financed by international institutions or NGOs. For the past thirty years, we’ve been witnessing a militarization of parks in Africa, encouraged by the international community. Sometimes there have been tragic consequences.
    The background to the conception of nature parks in Europe is different. Why?

    The nature parks there were not created in the same way as in Africa. If local populations were quickly integrated into European parks, it’s because the nation-states there were built with the notion of heritage in which the peasantry generally played an integral part. In France, for example, the parks created in the 1960s are a means of preserving “traditional” peasant farming. This process has not always been exempt of violence: the creation of parks also helped in the forced republicanization of mountain villages. But the difference is that, in Africa, not only was park-related violence much more intense, but it has never come to an end.

    A comparison between two parks is enlightening. In 2011, UNESCO classified the Cévennes region in France as a World Heritage Site, citing the cultural landscape of agropastoralism that has existed there for 3,000 years and that shapes the landscape. In contrast, in 2016, the people living in the Simien Park in Ethiopia were evicted because UNESCO felt that agropastoralism was threatening the natural value of the land. In other words, while Europeans shape their environment, Africans are thought to degrade it…

    Interview conducted by Flora Trouilloud (ID4D Editorial Team)

    #colonialisme #colonialisme_vert #parcs_naturels #Ethiopie #IUCN #decolonising_landscape #écologie_décoloniale

  • Je découvre ces deux articles qui se focalisent sur les #réfugiés et les #animaux... un regard assez nouveau...

    The important role of animals in refugee lives

    Refugees are people who have been forcibly displaced across a border. What do animals have to do with them? A lot.

    Companion animals, for example, are important to many people’s emotional wellbeing. “For people forced to flee,” the Norwegian Refugee Council recently noted, “a pet can be a vital source of comfort.” At the sterile and hyper-modern Azraq refugee camp in Jordan, Syrian refugees would pay a high price for caged birds (30-40 Jordanian dinars each, roughly €35-50). In Syria, many people keep a bird at home. At Azraq keeping a bird is one way of making a plastic and metal shelter into a home.

    In many contexts, refugees also depend on animals for their livelihoods. Humanitarian assistance understandably focuses on supporting people, but if refugees’ working animals and livestock perish then their experience of displacement can worsen drastically: they lose the means to support themselves in exile, or to return home and rebuild their lives.

    Ever since the earliest days of modern refugee camps, at the time of the First World War, agencies responsible for refugees have had to think about animals too. When the British army in the Middle East built a camp at Baquba near Baghdad in 1918 to house nearly 50,000 Armenian and Assyrian refugees, there were some animals that they needed to keep out. Fumigation procedures and netting were used against lice and mosquitos, carriers of typhus and malaria respectively. But refugee agencies also needed to let larger animals in. The people in the camp, especially the Assyrians, were accompanied by seven or eight thousand sheep and goats, and about six thousand larger animals like horses and cattle. Many of the people depended on their animals for their livelihood and for any prospect of permanent settlement, so they all needed to be accommodated and cared for.

    There are similar examples around the world today, like the longstanding camps for Sahrawi refugees in southwestern Algeria. There, goats and camels are socially and economically significant animals: goat barns, enclosures often made of scrap metal, are a prominent part of the camps’ increasingly urban landscape, while camel butcheries are important shops.

    This helps us understand why the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees now has programmes to support refugees’ animals. For example, in 2015, with funding from the IKEA Foundation, the organization assisted 6,000 Malian refugees in Burkina Faso and their 47,000 animals: helping animals helps the people too, in this case to earn a living (and achieve economic integration) through small-scale dairy farming. It also helps us understand how conflicts can arise between refugees and host communities when refugees’ animals compete for grazing or water with local animals, or damage local farmers’ crops.

    Starting in 2011, nearly 125,000 people from Blue Nile state in Sudan fled from a government offensive into Maban country, South Sudan, with hundreds of thousands of animals (about half of whom soon died, stressed by the journey). Peacefully managing their interactions with local residents and a community of nomadic herders who also regularly migrated through the county was a complex task for the South Sudanese government and humanitarian agencies. It required careful negotiations to allocate grazing zones as far as 60km from the camps where the refugees lived, schedule access to watering points, and agree a different route for the nomads’ migration.

    In Bangladesh, meanwhile, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature has recently been involved in efforts to prevent conflict between refugees and wild animals. Nearly a million Rohingya refugees from state persecution in Myanmar live in semi-formal camps near Cox’s Bazar that have grown up since 2017, but these block the migration routes of critically endangered Asian elephants. The International Union’s conflict mitigation programme includes building lookout towers, training Rohingya observers, and running an arts-based education project.

    And this highlights a final issue. The elephants at Cox’s Bazar are endangered because of ecological pressures caused by humans. But increasingly, humans too are endangered—and displaced—by ecological pressures. In the late 2000s, a years-long drought in Syria, worsened by human-caused climate change, pushed over a million rural Syrians off the land. (The country’s total livestock fell by a third.) The political and economic pressure that this generated was a significant factor in the crisis that ignited into war in 2011, in turn displacing millions more people. Hundreds of thousands of them fled to Jordan, one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, where the increased extraction of groundwater has lowered the water table, drying out oases in the Jordanian desert. Wild birds migrating across the desert have to fly further to find water and rest, meaning fewer survive the journey. In the Syrian war, and in many other conflicts around the world, human and animal displacements are intersecting under environmental stress. If we want to understand human displacement and respond to it adequately, we need to be thinking about animals too.

    https://blog.oup.com/2019/10/the-important-role-of-animals-in-refugee-lives
    #rapport_aux_animaux #animaux_de_compagnie

    • ‘Tusk force’ set up to protect refugees and elephants in #Bangladesh

      UNHCR and the International Union for Conservation of Nature are working together to mitigate incidents between elephants and humans in the world’s largest refugee settlement.

      Battered and badly bruised, Anwar Begum, a Rohingya refugee, surveys the damage around her bamboo shelter.

      Sleeping mats ripped apart; plastic buckets and even metal cooking pots and plates torn and dented. Her shelter was toppled – but neighbours in Kutupalong refugee settlement near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, have helped her re-erect it.

      “I’m very grateful, thanks to the almighty, to be alive,” the 45-year-old said. “But I’m terrified.”

      Just a few days earlier, in the middle of the night, a wild elephant entered her small shelter and killed her husband, 50-year-old Yakub Ali. It was one of several elephants that wandered into the camp, damaging shelters and injuring their occupants, following their usual migratory path.

      Anwar and her family fled their home in Myanmar six months ago, settling in the vast Kutupalong refugee settlement. “We weren’t aware of any elephant presence here,” she said. “I remember once seeing elephants back home in Myanmar, but in the distance – never close up like this.”

      Clearly shaken, Anwar recounted the events that occurred that night. “It was around 1 a.m. I heard a heavy sound and felt the roof falling onto us. It was quick and loud. I started screaming. It all went very fast and my husband was killed”.

      Anwar was treated in hospital for three days. By the time she came back to the settlement, neighbours had helped to rebuild her shelter. UNHCR’s partners have now provided her with new household items, and Anwar has received counselling from UN Refugee Agency protection staff.

      UNHCR and its partner IUCN – the International Union for Conservation of Nature – have now launched an action plan to try to prevent incidents like this, which have resulted in the deaths of at least 10 refugees, including young children, in Kutupalong settlement.

      “This partnership is critical not only to ensure the conservation of elephants, but to protect refugees.”

      The highly congested site, which used to be forest land, lies along one of the migratory routes between Myanmar and Bangladesh for critically endangered Asian elephants.

      The so-called ‘tusk force’ will work with both the local host community and refugees, in close consultation with the Bangladesh Forest Department and the Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner’s Office.

      Mitigation plans include installing watch-towers in key spots around the settlement, as well as setting up Elephant Response Teams who can sound the alarm if elephants enter the site. Elephant routes and corridors will be clearly marked, so that people will know which areas to avoid. Campaigns will also be carried out to create better awareness of the risks.

      “This partnership is critical not only to ensure the conservation of elephants, but to protect refugees, a number of whom have tragically already lost their lives,” said Kevin Allen, UNHCR’s head of emergency operations in Cox’s Bazar district.

      The project is part of a wider initiative by UNHCR and the IUCN, in support of government activities, to mitigate some of the environmental impacts linked to the establishment of refugee settlements in Cox’s Bazar.

      Other plans include carrying out environmental education and awareness among refugees and the host communities about the importance of forest resources as well as taking steps to improve the environment in the refugee settlement areas and nearby surroundings.

      The project leaders will also advocate for reforestation programmes to ensure that natural resources and a shared environment are better protected.

      https://www.unhcr.org/uk/news/latest/2018/3/5a9801d64/tusk-force-set-protect-refugees-elephants-bangladesh.html
      #éléphants #IUCN #sécurité

    • Bangladesh elephant rampage highlights dangers for refugees

      A refugee prays on a hill overlooking Kutupalong camp after another Rohingya burial.

      After fleeing flames and gunfire in Myanmar, Rohingya refugee Jane Alam thought danger was behind him in Bangladesh.

      But as he slept last night in a fragile shelter in a forested area near Kutupalong refugee camp, rampaging elephants crashed in on top of his family.

      The 18-year-old’s father and a seven-month-old baby were killed in the attack, which also injured seven of his relatives.

      “We thought we would be safe here.”

      Grazed on the cheek, neck and hip, he trekked barefoot up a hillside overlooking the makeshift camp this morning to bury them.

      “We thought we would be safe here,” he says, numb with disbelief, standing beside his father’s grave, marked with small bamboo stakes.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cy_fkc5qRt8

      A few paces away, the tiny body of his infant relative lies on the muddy ground, wrapped in a white cloth. A man scoops out her shallow grave with a farm tool as a group of men stand solemnly by.

      The deaths highlight one of the unexpected dangers facing refugees and the risks as humanitarian actors respond to the arrival in Bangladesh of at least 429,000 people who have fled the latest outbreak of violence that erupted in Myanmar on August 25.

      As two formal refugee camps in Bangladesh are overwhelmed, thousands are seeking shelter where they can - some in an uninhabited forested area outside Kutupalong camp.

      “The area is currently completely wild, so the people who are settling-in where there is wildlife,” says Franklin Golay, a staff member for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, who is working to provide water, sanitation and shelter at the informal camp.

      “There are elephants roaming around that pose a threat,” he says.

      Asian elephants are considered a critically endangered species in Bangladesh, where conservationists estimate there are presently just 239 living in the wild. Many roam in the Chittagong area in the southeast of the country, where the refugee influx is concentrated.

      Local residents say the elephants are drawn to populated areas in the Monsoon season, when fruit including mangos and jackfruit ripen.

      Securing the rugged and partially forested area to mitigate the risk could be achieved with lights or electric fencing, Golay says.

      But for Alam’s grieving family, who fled persecution across the border in Myanmar, the attack is a stark reminder that their trials are not yet over.

      “We ran from danger, and we are still in a dangerous situation now,” says Ali Hussein, the dead man’s uncle. “This cannot be forgotten.”

      https://www.unhcr.org/news/latest/2017/9/59c37c0f16/bangladesh-elephant-rampage-highlights-dangers-refugees.html

  • Polar bears and climate change: What does the science say?
    https://www.carbonbrief.org/polar-bears-and-climate-change-what-does-the-science-say

    Overall, the #IUCN estimates the total number of polar bears at 26,000, with only a 5% chance that it’s less than 22,000 or more than 31,000. But given several polar bear subpopulations are still unaccounted for and there is high uncertainty about the numbers that do exist, scientists are wary of trying to pinpoint the absolute size of the global polar bear population.

    [...] Scientists’ best estimate is that there’s a 70% chance the global population of polar bears will fall by more than a third within the next three generations.

    According to IUCN criteria, this qualifies polar bears as “vulnerable”, reflecting the potential for large reductions in the global population as climate change and sea-ice loss continue.

    [...] The IUCN assessment doesn’t look at the extinction risk for polar bears over a time-span of longer than about 35 years – or three generations of polar bears. But without action to tackle climate change, it is likely that many polar beat subpopulations will cross “tipping points” over the next century if sea-ice loss continues as forecasted, says Cator.

    #ours_blanc #arctique #biodiversité #climat

  • Le Capital naturel, un nouvel eldorado pour le business ?

    Le concept de « capital naturel » a été récemment promu par de nombreuses conférences et publications dans les arènes nationales et internationales. Pour protéger l’environnement ou permettre le maintien d’un business as usual dévastateur ? Retour sur le récent premier Forum Mondial sur le capital naturel organisé à Edimbourg fin novembre 2013.

    http://blogs.mediapart.fr/blog/maxime-combes/110214/le-capital-naturel-un-nouvel-eldorado-pour-le-business

    #capital_naturel #business #Edimbourg #Ecosse #Rio+20 #services_écosystémiques #compensation #investissement #révolution #Royal_Bank_of_Scotland #Rio_Tinto #Coca_Cola #KPMG #IUCN #scientifique #biodiversité #carbone #zones_humides #mangroves #Havas #Defra #chaines_d'approvisionnement #métrique #entreprises #PUMA #Webcor #TruePrice #internaliser #externalités #communs
    @rezo