"Paper Parks" Illustrate Magnitude of Threat to World's Forests
12/5/99
OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY
A new report commissioned by the World Bank/WWF Alliance and carried
out by IUCN revealed that less than one quarter of declared parks,
refuges and other protected areas in ten key forested countries are
well managed. This means 1% of the forests of Brazil, China, Gabon,
Indonesia, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Russia, Tanzania and
Vietnam are protected and thus secure from the threat of destruction.
The western notion of Parks appears to be increasingly irrelevant as
a strategy to conserve forests and diversity--particularly in the
tropics.
This argues strongly for focusing more upon maintaining large,
contiguous areas of natural forest cover with various levels of
protection and management over landscapes and bioregions. In
countries that still have large forest expanses, it should no longer
be assumed that the majority will be industrially harvested, to
arrive (maybe, if lucky) at a maximum of 10% intact "preserved"
areas. As shown by the fact that few such Parks enjoy real
protection, this is the wrong approach. By all means, manage
existing Parks better. However, the emphasis in remaining forest
wildernesses should be upon maintaining extensive (if not entire)
forest cover; including large blocks of ecological core areas under
strict preservation surrounded by various types of certified and
sustainable forest management activities by local peoples for their
benefit.
Forest ecosystems are not well suited to being caged into little
refuges surrounded by a sea of human development and need. Given a
long enough time frame, and inevitable human demands, such isolated
and fragmented parks will come down eventually. It's just a matter
of time. The alternative is reintegrating large, functional forests
with various levels of use and protection into human landscapes.
This will require careful conservation planning, and massive
restoration activities in areas that have already been fragmented.
It will also require laws to reign in predatory logging, transfer of
finance and technology to developing countries, and political will
underpinned by an active and vocal civil society. Forest
sustainability is not exclusively determined at the stand level by
harvest practices. The focus needs to be more upscale. A given
forest (be it a park or managed forest) is sustained by maintaining a
forested landscape as its context.
g.b.
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ITEM #1
Title: New research reveals magnitude of threat to world's forest
protected areas
Source: World Bank/WWF Alliance Press Release,
http://www-esd.worldbank.org/wwf/
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: December 2, 1999
2 December, 1999
New findings released today by the World Bank/WWF Alliance revealed
that less than one quarter of declared national parks, wildlife
refuges, and other protected areas in 10 key forested countries were
well managed, and many had no management at all. What this means is
that only one percent of these areas are secure from serious threats
such as human settlement, agriculture, logging, hunting, mining,
pollution, war, and tourism, among other pressures.
In response to these findings from a study conducted by IUCN for the
World Bank/WWF Alliance for Forest Conservation and Sustainable Use,
World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn and WWF-US President Kathryn
S. Fuller today adopted a new target for converting these so called
'paper parks' into effectively managed areas. The target calls for 50
million hectares of existing but highly threatened forest protected
area to be secured under effective management by the year 2005. To
achieve this goal, the Alliance will continue to work with
governments, conservation organizations, indigenous people and other
stakeholders to identify the world's most threatened parks and to
develop a system for implementation, improving and monitoring
management of these protected areas.
"This new research highlights the urgent need to manage these
protected areas more effectively so that they are secure for the
people and wildlife who depend upon them for their survival" says
Fuller.
These findings, among others, are outlined in the World Bank/WWF
Alliance's first annual report released today by Wolfensohn and
Fuller. The Alliance is working world-wide, from Vietnam where it has
helped to mobilize more than $1 million private-sector investment
from the Tropical Forest Fund, an association of furniture buyers
committed to sustainable forestry, to Georgia in Eastern Europe,
where WWF and World Bank collaboration catalyzed action that led to
the passage of a new forestry code that should halt the devastation
of that country's forests.
The Alliance has seen the governments of Brazil, Peru and six nations
of the Congo Basin commit to actions that once realized, will help
the Alliance meet two-thirds of its target for new protected areas.
"Alleviating poverty and protecting the environment go hand in hand,"
says Wolfensohn. "This Alliance will help leverage our contract with
Nature, delivering real results on the ground." Currently, the
Alliance has projects in over 22 countries worldwide and is
continuing to form partnerships with other NGOs and governments to
make their global vision for the future of the world forests become a
reality.
Contacts:
World Bank: Kristyn Ebro, tel. +1 202 458 2736 e-mail:
Kebro@worldbank.org
WWF: Michael Ross, tel. +1 202 778 9565 e-mail:
Michael.Ross@wwfus.org
NOTES TO THE EDITORS
1. In April of 1998, the World Bank, the largest provider of
development assistance in the world, and WWF*, the world's largest
conservation organization, joined forces to protect the Earth's
forests in an Alliance for forest conservation and sustainable use.
The Alliance promotes the following targets:
* 50 million hectares of new forest protected areas by 2005.
* 50 million hectares of existing but highly threatened forest
protected areas secured under effective management by 2005.
* 200 million hectares of the world's production forests under
independently certified sustainable management by 2005.
2. Copies of the report "Threats to Forest Protected Areas" can be
found on the Alliance web site: www-esd.worldbank.org/wwf
3. 10 key countries in the Paper Parks report: Brazil, China, Gabon,
Indonesia, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Russia, Tanzania and
Vietnam.
4. The Alliance's first Annual Report can be found on the Alliance
web site at: www-esd.worldbank.org/wwf
ITEM #2
Title: ENVIRONMENT: ''Protected'' Forests Go Unprotected
Source: InterPress Service
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: December 2, 1999
Byline: Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 2 (IPS) - Forests protected by the national
governments of developing countries are going largely unprotected,
according to a report released here Thursday.
The study, carried out by the World Conservation Union (IUCN), found
that only about one percent of protected areas in 10 key developing
countries received adequate management and were secure against any
foreseeable threat.
At the same time, some 11 percent of the protected areas were either
thoroughly or considerably degraded, according to the study, which
was commissioned World Bank/World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Alliance,
created to promote the conservation and sustainable use of forests in
the developing world.
''This new research highlights the urgent need to manage these
protected areas more effectively so that they are secure for the
people and wildlife who depend upon them for their survival,'' said
Kathryn Fuller, the president of WWF-US.
Fuller, together with World Bank President James Wolfensohn, held a
review of the Alliance at Bank headquarters with leaders of other
environmental groups.
''This is a global challenge,'' said Wolfensohn, whose agency has
been widely criticised in the past for funding projects and policies
which harmed forests, particularly in tropical areas.
Wolfensohn and Fuller agreed that the IUCN findings were so alarming
that they would add a new goal to the Alliance's seven- year agenda -
to ensure that 50 million hectares of already- protected but highly
threatened forests were secured under effective management by the
year 2005.
Forests - both temperate and tropical - currently were being cleared
at the rate of 23 hectares each minute - or a total of 12 million
hectares a year, an area the size of Greece.
Major threats to forest areas in poor countries include logging,
mining, agriculture, and herding. Some 350 million of the world's
rural poor and forest-dwelling indigenous still depended on forests
for their livelihood, the report said.
The Alliance, an unusual partnership between the Bank and a major
non-governmental environmental organisation, also includes other
NGOs, including Conservation International, the International
Institute for Environment and Development, the IUCN, Resources for
the Future, the Nature Conservancy, and the World Resources
Institute, as well as a number of different national and
international forestry institutes.
The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and the Global Environment
Facility (GEF) also provided funding for the Alliance which next year
will receive backing financial backing from Norway and Finland as
well.
It originally set itself two main goals to accomplish by 2005: to
persuade participating governments to create 50 million hectares of
new protected forest; and to have 200 million hectares of forests,
already being harvested under cultivation, to be put under
independently certified sustainable management.
The alliance already has largely succeeded in its first goal. The
governments of Brazil, Peru and the six nations of the Congo Basin,
the site of Africa's largest remaining tropical rain forests, have
agreed to designate some 34 million hectares of their land as
"protected."
It also has worked closely with the governments of Latvia, Georgia,
Madagascar, Vietnam, China, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Laos - some of
the 22 countries which have joined the Alliance.
But designating areas as protected does not make them so, as the IUCN
survey discovered.
It assessed the status of officially protected forests in ten key
nations: Brazil, China, Gabon, Indonesia, Mexico, Papua New Guinea,
Peru, Russia, Tanzania, and Vietnam.
The study found that almost 25 percent of those areas were either
somewhat or thoroughly degraded, while an additional 60 percent,
while currently secure primarily because of their remoteness, were
certain to face threats in the future.
Of the total, less than 25 percent of the protected areas were
considered to be ''well managed with good infrastructure,'' while as
69 percent of protected forests were found to have inadequate or no
management in place.
The greatest immediate threat to most of the protected forests came
from logging and mining operations, the study revealed. But
agriculture, overgrazing, human settlement, bushmeat hunting, the
collection of exotic species for sale, fire, war, tourism, and the
introduction and invasion of non-indigenous species also were cited.
Nigel Dudley, who wrote the report, said most of the logging and
mining operations in protected areas were carried out by local
companies, rather than western transnational firms to which, however,
the local firms often sold their harvest.
''A lot of the illegal timber ends up in the West,'' he said.
Wolfensohn, who said the Bank increasingly had tried to persuade
local timber companies to cease predatory logging, added that some of
the larger Asian countries also engaged in the practice, as did some
European countries, particularly in Africa.
Underlying causes for the logging in protected areas, according to
the report, included high consumption levels in the world's wealthy
countries.
There also was the problem of persistent poverty in developing
nations caused by such factors as international debt, pressure for
trade and development, land tenure, population growth, corruption,
lack of capacity and education, and social relations, particularly
discrimination against women. (END/IPS/jl/mk/99)