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LANDSCAPE CONSERVATION APPROACH IN NEPAL
Dinesh Raj Bhuju1 and Amulya Ratna Tuladhar2
1Faculty of Science, Nepal Academy of Science and Technology
GPO Box 3323 Kathmandu
2Khwopa College, Tribhuvan University Affiliate
Dekocha, Bhaktapur
dineshbhuju@gmail.com
Introduction
Species know no boundary but their fundamental requirements to exist and proliferate. The ecological intricacies as revealed by scientific understanding of organisms living in the natural environs have called for conservation beyond species and/or their protected habitat. Landscape level conservation, thus, has been a realized management practice today. Nepal's commitment to save and secure biodiversity is evidently reflected in the creation of an impressive network of protected area system. As these areas are now turning out to be islands in the midst of human dominated landscapes, landscape level conservation emerges as an appropriate solution. The landscape conservation approach practiced in Nepal holds an exciting possibility to effectively deliver conservation plans. This essay will look into the theoretical antecedents of landscape conservation, its application in Nepal, and its promise to deliver effective conservation.
Part I: Theoretical Antecedents
Landscape Conservation Approach in Nepal is one of the sustainable development solutions to the threats of biodiversity loss. The approach is a practical, policy implementation mode that draws its theoretical roots from two intellectual traditions: conservation and ecology. Conservation has tried to harmonize the twin goals of protecting Nature from human activities and finding ways to develop within the laws of Nature. On the other hand, ecology has tried to understand the relationship between living organisms and their non-living environment so that human beings, as living organisms, can thrive better in their environment. The following paragraphs will outline key developments in these two intellectual traditions to the point where they converge in the current ‘Landscape Conservation Approach in Nepal’.
Beginning with the alienation of human beings from Nature as a result of industrialization in the 1700s in the West, as a result of rural, close-to-Nature livelihoods converging into the dense, squalid, far-from-Nature livelihoods in the urban, Dickensonian factories, people of all strata began to hanker for a reengagement with Nature (Adams, 1992). This reengagement of Nature was perforce variegated according to mainly spatio-temporal variables but an entry into this understanding can be made by adopting political economic stratification as an optic. According to the political economy optic, following Marxian category of a ‘superstructure’ of political and cultural processes on the ‘base’ of economic processes and structures in society and nature/society relationships, the class that controlled political economic processes, the ruling class of industrialists, politicians, feudal landlords, princes and regents, and residuals of colonial power structures had better access to opportunities to re-engage with nature than those at the bottom: menial labor, farmers, women, underclass and oppressed, and marginalized ethnic groups who were forced to trade all of their labor output for bare survival in the machine mode of the industrial era.
The political economic elite in the West, thus, went back to remnants of pristine Nature in Europe (very little available) by means of country castles, manors, newly invented motor vehicles but the satisfaction received was not enough. There was a growing call for unsullied pristine Nature to wash away the spiritual grime of dirty wealth generated from the protean industrialization. This phenomenon was seen in all walks of life from painters such as Paul Gauguin exoticizing the earthy colors of Trinidadian women to romanticizing, celebrating and idealization of Nature in Arts and Literature. Such inchoate socio-political strivings began to congeal into discrete intellectual traditions to save Nature at a societal level in the beginnings of the twentieth century.
In USA, for example, John Muir (1838-1914) was an early proponent of the ‘Preservationist’ Movement who argued for total hands-off from human beings (meaning money-making industrialization, agriculture, mining, damming) to save pristine Nature like the Yellowstone Geyser, the Old Faithful, Grand Canyon and the Hecht-Hechty spectacular landscape of the Wild West of USA. His efforts represent the longing of the powerful elite that got a hearing under President Theodore Roosevelt and the first National Park was established in 1872. Till date, ‘National Park’ retains the heritage of ‘protected’ areas, carrying the baggage of an antagonistic attitude towards the grubby, money-making by industry and agriculture that privileges the rights of the elite to their aesthetic and spiritual satisfaction with coercive laws, e.g. the National Park and Conservation Act 1973 laws and military protection of Royal Chitwan National Park in Nepal.
For the super elite of Europe, the ex-colonialists, who did not have access to much undisturbed Nature like the boundless Wild West of their counterparts in USA, their option was to venture to their colonial holdings in Africa, Asia and South America, the Tropics, where half of existing known biodiversity still exists. It is in Africa, the land of teaming wildlife of zebras, lions, giraffes and wildebeest that the ex-colonial big game, trophy hunters morphed their love of ‘shooting to kill’ to ‘shooting to photograph’. As these ex-hunters were in the cutting edge of interaction with pristine Nature, they were the first to be alarmed by the dwindling fate of the truly ‘wild’ wildlife and they sounded the call for protection of the objects of their hobby: the ‘wild’ wildlife. To this the burgeoning fields of biology, ecology, botany came to the service of managerial tropical science, which offered a secular excuse to continue interfering in the affairs of their ex-colonies in the name of science and nature preservation. Adams (1990) documents such colonial roots of the now secular conservation oriented international non-governmental organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), IUCN, UNEP, FAO, etc. All of these global organization got together to enunciate a World Conservation Strategy in 1980, to teach the world how to save Nature and justify continued interference of the First World in the affairs of the Third World in the guise of global nature protection (Redclift, 1992).
Along the way, over the last 200 years of inchoate First World elite initiatives to preserve Nature for the satisfaction of their own kind only, there began a more articulated engagement with the needs of the lower class for socioeconomic upliftment, ‘progress’ in the West and ‘development’ in the Third World. Even while John Muir was convincing Theodore Roosevelt to set aside lands and laws to start the birth of the National Park movement first in USA then worldwide, his contemporary Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946), who argued equally effectively for ‘conservation’- defined as the management (not preservation) of Nature for the maximum satisfaction of the most people for the longest time as the rallying cry for the establishment of the US Forest Service at the beginning of the twentieth century but also to manage natural resources rationally for both Nature and People (read low class people), including the damming of the Colorado river to supply irrigation and electricity to the people of California. During Pinchot’s time, ‘conservation’ was only a political slogan, a pragmatic approach not buttressed with solid science or policy dimensions. Over the last century, the science that contributed to the backbone of conservation was ecology and the policy dimension was strengthened by developments in economics.
In ecology, a term coined by Haeckel in 1866 the systematic study of the relationship between biota and abiota developed from the vocation of natural history or observation of all nature in the tradition of Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin to a more systematic study of the relationship between larger life communities in lakes and dune landscapes by S.A. Forbes (1844-1930) and H.C. Cowles (1869-1939) while F.E. Clements (1874-1945) and H.A. Gleason (1882-1975) argued over succession concepts. Early studies of temperate plant communities were enlarged by study of tropical forest communities as well as community structure including animal world and later into a more experimental and mathematical study of individual organism in controlled environmentalists by auto-ecologists such as G.F. Gause (1910-1986), A.J. Lotka (1880-1949) and V. Volterra (1860-1940). In the meantime, animal ecologists introduced the concept of ecological niche, e.g. Charles Elton (1900-1991). The latter half of the twentieth century saw the development of ecology along the hierarchical scales from individual, population, community to ecosystems, landscape, biomes and now global systems like the Gaia.
The latter, post 1950s, developments was aided by intellectual contributions of Geography, the remote sensing technology of air planes, rockets, photography, satellites, which was first pushed by the Nazi Hitler’s desire for world domination with the latest technology of aerial photography. To do this Carl Troll came into the picture by developing ‘landscape ecology’ in 1939 (Troll, 1939) to study scales of lands rendered visible by aerial photos, hitherto not possible by land-based platforms. The contemporary definition of ‘Landscape’ refers to a portion of land or territory which the eye can comprehend as a single view, including all the objects so seen, especially in its pictorial aspects. When this ‘eye’ was substituted by remote sensors such as air borne cameras and satellite sensors, the landscape took on bigger dimensions, however, landscape has traditions in both human geography and physical geography, referring to areas altered by a unit of human processes or physical processes (Johnston et al., 1995). Geography, with its long intellectual enquiry into the category of ‘space’ and how it changes. ‘Spatial heterogeneity’ has been a motif for analyzing ‘landscape’ as a geographical category for over a century. With the technology development of remote sensing driven by war industries and cold war defense motivations and dollars, Landscape Ecology emerged as a sophisticated applied science that can capture processes higher than ecosystems to global processes; however, in many countries, landscape ecology is used to understand sub-national processes of nature-society relationships. While general ecology theory focused on the study of more homogenous, discrete community units organized in a hierarchical structure, landscape ecology built upon heterogeneity in space and time, and frequently included human-induced landscape changes (Sanderson and Harris, 2000).
The recent emergence of landscapes as appropriate subjects for ecological study resulted from three main factors: 1) broad-scale environmental issues and land-management problems, 2) the development of new scale-related concepts in ecology, and 3) technological advances, including the widespread availability of spatial data, the computers, softwares to manipulate these data, and the rapid rise in computational power (Turner et al., 2001). Landscape ecology emphasizes the interaction between spatial pattern and ecological process, that is, the causes and consequences of spatial heterogeneity across a range of scales. The term landscape ecology was introduced by the German biogeographer Carl Troll (1939), arising from the European traditions of regional geography and vegetation science and motivated particularly by the novel perspective offered by aerial photography. Landscape ecology essentially combined the spatial approach of the geographer with the functional approach of the ecologists (Naveh and Lieberman, 1984; Forman and Godron 1986).
Two important aspects of landscape ecology are: 1) it explicitly addresses the importance of spatial configuration for ecological processes, and 2) it often focuses on spatial extents that are much larger than those traditionally studied in ecology. The role of humans, obviously a dominant influence on landscape patterns worldwide, is sometimes considered an important component of a definition of landscape ecology. Indeed in the landscape approaches characteristic of China, Europe and the Mediterranean, human activity is perhaps the central factor in landscape ecological studies. Landscape ecology is sometimes considered to be an interdisciplinary science dealing with the interrelation between human society and its living space- its open and built up landscapes (Naveh and Lieberman, 1984). Landscape ecology draws from a variety of disciplines, many of which emphasize social sciences, including geography, landscape architecture, regional planning, economics, forestry, and wildlife ecology.
One such use is the use of landscape ecology to develop landscape conservation approach (Groom et al., 2006; Haufler, 1999; Cooperrider et al., 1999; Brown et al., 2004). Here, the basic categories of landscape ecology such as heterogeneous patches, matrix, corridors, edges, edge-effects, ecocline and ecotones are used to explore ways to recoalesce fragmented patches of protected areas. National park approach to protected area, despite phenomenal development this century, covers only 10% of the land area in the world, with some areas like Nepal nearing 20% (Forest Minister Bohra Speech, Dec 8, 2010, at ICIMOD) and Bhutan nearing 60%. This was not considered adequate to address the degree of threats to biodiversity worldwide and the ecosystem services biodiversity provides for the very survival humankind (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). Increasing the areas under protection is clearly too costly in terms of political capital, manpower, money and legitimacy in the face of poverty of the millions that demands lands for economic upliftment (Budhathoki, 2003).
Even partial protection by means of buffer zone management and other options as community based conservation management is not considered adequate for the dispersed biodiversity and biodiversity outside of protected area system such as the many species of medicinal and aromatic plants, non-timber forest products, and other ecoregions of the Nepal Midhills. Now, with climate change the prospect of global warming is expected to be the biggest threat to biodiversity over the next century (Groom et al., 2006) so there is an urgency to join fragmented patches of protected areas so they can be operated at higher levels of ecosystem harmony, including for example the enabling of viable metapopulations of tiger and rhino in the Terai Arc Landscape Project (TAL) (Karki et al., 2009; Wikramsinghe et al., 2004; Dinerstein and McDougal, 1998) and the snow leopards, Red panda and Himalayan wildlife as in the case of Sacred Himalayan Landscape, Transboundary Landscape Conservation and Mount Kailash Landscape Conservation (Sharma et al., 2007).
Part II Application in Nepal
In the landscape conservation approach in Nepal, the key approach is to relieve the bottlenecks to migration and movement of animals so that a minimum viable population can be maintained with genetic diversity and stability (Groom et al., 2006; Karki et al., 2009). This ecological objective does present, however, novel policy challenges, since there are people living in these bottlenecks, and some of them are rather poor and sometimes of heterogeneous ethnic groups, administrative and political jurisdictions or even different countries, and operating under different sectoral outreach like forest, agriculture or local development ministry as well as many local non-governmental organizations and community based organizations. There is no ready-made policy road map that has been tested, so active learning from innovations made in landscape conservation approaches in Nepal bear significance worldwide for greater cause of biodiversity conservation in the larger context of sustainable development or the harmonization of the needs of nature and the people. The following two figures summarize the changing approaches biodiversity conservation leading to landscape conservation approach in Nepal, extracted from Budhathoki (2005).
In the rest of the article, we will examine the case studies of landscape conservation approach and analyze them from the perspective of their contribution to landscape ecology, conservation
Fig. 1. Landscape conservation complexes in Nepal. Source: Budhathoki, 2005
Fig. 2. Shifting conservation paradigms from island networks. Source: Budhathoki, 2005
policy, and their general contribution to the cause of global biodiversity services to humankind and the sustainable development of poor peoples of Third World and Nepal.
In Nepal, landscape approach has been spearheaded by geographers and conservation biologists. Specifically since 1990s, Nepali conservation scientists have been looking to enhance conservation in areas outside protected areas and calling attention to contiguous landscapes that are fast being fragmented. Beginning with 21st century, these theoretical approaches have been supplemented by policy related approaches coming from sustainable development paradigms such as participatory management and inclusion of marginalized groups of gender and dalits and greater awareness to address root causes of human development aspirations and social inequity driving environmental degradation including the deterioration of landscapes. Among the proponents are the UNDP/WWF/ICIMOD programs in Terai Arc Landscape (TAL) Project, Western Terai Landscape Conservation Project (WTLCP), Sacred Himalayan and Transboundary Conservation Projects in cooperation with Government of Nepal line agencies such as the Ministry of Forests and Soil Conservation and its departments.
Harka Gurung (1939-2006) was one of the early eminent Nepali geographers who was interested in the combination of both human and physical processes affecting the spatial variability of human landscapes. As early as 1971, he wrote on the landscape patterns of Nepal as determined much by its geographic setting and then the human activities (Gurung, 1971, 1989). The emphatic ridges that run east-west and numerous south-flowing rivers have defined the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the country’s physiographic component, while the lateral disposition of the country has caused bio-climatic variation from the arid west to the humid east. As human attempts to adapt himself to the natural environment and in the process leaves his imprint on the landscape. Thus, the three major geographic regions, viz. Terai, Hill and Mountain correspond to latitudinally arranged ecological zones. Based on these natural settings, the major watershed, and population dimension, Gurung proposed regional development plan, which surfaced in the Fourth Five-Year Plan of 1970-1975 (Sharma, 2007).
The other groups of leaders who have worked and contributed in developing and/or applying the approach of landscape level conservation in Nepal are from landscape ecology domain: forest ecologists, botanists, foresters and wildlife biologists.
In mid-1990s, Robert Zomer undertook a dissertation on remote sensing and GIS analysis of Makalu-Barun, using stereoscopic SPOT and Landsat imagery, and extensive ground truthing as a part of landscape ecology approach to provide high quality for landscape conservation approach to the newly established Makalu-Barun National Park and Conservation Area. Among his outputs were the appreciation of the important role of riparian corridors in biodiversity conservation within the Middle Hills of east Nepal and suggestions for further research on biodiversity within these patches and a specific recognition of the value of remnant riparian forests within the landscape and rural economy for conservation goals for the eastern Nepal Himalaya (Zomer et al., 2001 & 2002).
In 1999, forest ecologist Dinesh Bhuju initiated a survey to record the baseline information on the ecology of the Churiya, the southernmost hills of the Himalaya also known as Siwaliks (total area: 1,886,000 ha, length: 840 km) from east (Mechi) to west (Mahakali) (Bhuju, 2000). To conserve the Churiya, at landscape level, this study aimed to identify key areas, with a two-prong approach: 1) First determine areas with significant changes in land use since 1958, 1978 and 1992; and 2) gather ecology-based information on the Churiya using grid-based samples (Bhuju, 2000, 2006, 2010). The project covered all major watersheds (Fig. 3), and accumulated information on: i) land-use change, ii) forest structure and regeneration, iii) tree species association at different altitudes, iv) local knowledge on plant use, and v) distribution of birds and other fauna. Once a backwater of conservation, Churiya is now in the national priority (Bhuju, 2010).
Fig. 3. Churiya range in Nepal.
At corridor scale of landscape conservation, NTNC (National Trust for Nature Conservation) took up a UNDP supported project on the Tiger-Rhino Corridor in 2001 (Thapa and Basnet 2006). The project focused its study in Barandabhar Corridor Forest adjoining to Chitwan National Park (CNP) and aimed at promoting landscape level biodiversity conservation with strong community-based management links to conserve endangered species. Very significantly, the corridor is inhabited by relocated people from CNP. The Barandabhar Forests serves as an important corridor of the Terai Arc Landscape (TAL), a program initiated by Government of Nepal with the support of WWF Nepal Program encompassing 11 protected areas of Nepal and India in 2001. Envisioning to set a landscape level management model for safeguarding biological wealth and vital ecological functions of western Terai districts (Bardia, Kailali and Kanchanpur), Government of Nepal in partnership seven national and international organizations including UNDP, launched a 8-year long project of Western Terai Landscape Conservation starting from 2005.
A cultural landscape study has also been conducted to describe and understand the relationship of natural habitat and diverse ecosystem viz. agriculture, forest and grassland ecosystems managed by human activities. Ram P. Chaudhary, a plant taxonomist and biogeographer, got involved in an interdisciplinary research undertaken by a group of biological and social scientists from Tribhuvan University and University of Bergen, Norway between 2002 and 2006. The research project made invaluable contribution in cultural landscape of Manang, a remote Trans Himalayan region in Nepal (Chaudhary, 2006).
The interpretation of landscape approach in Nepal, however, had been varying. In 1999, Ministry of Forests and Soil Conservation of Nepal proposed Shey Phoksundo National Park (SPNP) for inclusion on the World Heritage Convention for inscription for which it produced six criteria, three natural and three cultural. The SPNP is a southern margin of Tibetan Plateau, but along with adjoining Tscharka Bhot and Mustang. Therefore, conservation biologist Pralad Yonzon (2001) argued with strong basis of landscape characters such as geology, soil, climate and vegetation that the proposal to truncate SPNP (Dolpo) from similar and contiguous landscape of Mustang together with Tsharka Bhot was unempirical (Yonzon, 2001).
The importance of trans-boundary cooperation in protected area management was realized in mid 1990s; however, it remained at political level organizing few bilateral meetings with bordering countries China and India and organizing a few training activities (Paudel et al., 2008). The trans-boundary landscape approach was finally adopted with the initiation of the Sacred Himalayan Landscape. The SHL includes five of the 19 eco-regions that comprise the Eastern Himalayan Conservation Complex, and the high topographical relief, climatic variation, and its position at the ecotone of several biogeographic regions confer the area and the landscape, with a high level of biological diversity. Chandra P Gurung (1950-2006), a geographer and an eminent conservationist of Nepal, played a key role in formulating and implementing the plan (Gurung et al., 2006). This approach called for the combination of attention on human processes of both cultural and economic dimensions in addition to the ecological dimensions in the landscape conservation approaches for Nepal both in the mountains and the plains.
A group of researchers associated with ICIMOD (International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development) also advanced the concept of trans-boundary conservation landscape. Chettri and Sharma (2006) proposed developing a landscape with conservation corridors as connecting links to existing protected areas (total number: 12; total area: 5904 sq.km.) in the Kangchenjungha complex that spread over a wide spectrum of ecological zones in eastern Nepal, Darjeeling and Sikkim in India and western Bhutan. The landscape provides contiguous habitat and unique situation where within a 100 km N-S transect, habitats range from Tropical to alpine vegetation. In recent days, a landscape level study has also been undertaken in Mt Kailash region.
BHUJU KAILASH WRITEUP HERE
The main contribution of these authors has been to argue for the inclusion of more areas for conservation outside the existing protected areas due to endangerment of particular flora, fauna, ecological and sometimes even cultural processes.
A review of landscape conservation approach in Nepal reveals a heavy commitment to the social dimensions of conservation, ways of eliciting, sustaining and, if possible, enhancing the effectiveness of local communities to rehabilitate and restore the human altered landscape matrices outside the protected areas of national parks and conservation areas for maximal ecosystem health (WWF/Nepal, 2004; NPC/UNDP/UNEP, 2010; Gurung, 2006). The social dimensions may include community forestry, buffer zone management in which local communities are given a share of protected areas incomes to buy their cooperation with legal guarantees of their rights. On a continuum of interventions, help may be offered in awareness raising informal education and publicity, trainings for capacity building, investment in gender mainstreaming, or such social and economic upliftment that addresses the root diversity of biodiversity degradation: poverty and social inequity.
At other end maybe explicitly ecology and biological rehabilitation of such human altered landscapes from anti poaching efforts to ensure safe corridor for migrating animals to the rehabilitation of greenery and degraded landscape to the level of protected areas natural state (considered the benchmark of normality)(Save the Tiger Project, 2009). One of the early investments in landscape management is the enhancement in the quality and quantity of database to allow sophisticated management (e.g. Zomer et al., 2002). This may include inventorying of landscape close to its natural state as was done by Bhuju et al., (2000) in Churiya or drawing of GIS map for transboundary landscape conservation for Mt Kailash by ICIMOD (Sharma et al., 2007).
IUCN, WWF and Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation (DNPWC) have spearheaded the biology end of landscape conservation form tiger census and tiger ecology and enhancement to restoration of tiger prey habitat in the protected areas and the reduction of pressures on the protected areas by enhancing tree resources outside protected areas. The Government of Nepal and UNDP have a more livelihood sustenance and social equity goals within human altered matrix outside protected areas whose expected spinoff is the restoration of ecological services to biodiversity and humans living there (WWF, 2002).
Part III Promise of effective conservation
In a 2004 review paper, Budhathoki (2004) discusses the opportunities and challenges for landscape conservation approaches in Nepal. He calls for a careful integration of national, regional and local interests in planning and management of landscape conservation in order to fulfill the integrated objectives of landscape level conservation.
Despite much experimental and supposedly secular and non-ideological experimentation with different governance regimes, institutional innovations to co-opt the locals in the biodiversity conservation across a landscape, there is much negative international and national baggage of being perceived as external (outside country, outside village) interests on esoteric biodiversity benefits over local (internal) needs to survive on the local natural resources without interfering external legislation, policy, other demands.
On top of this is the changing milieu of decentralization in the country over the last few decades giving birth to local rights for community forestry, local decentralization, and now calls for institutionalizing federal decentralization of authority over the top-down command and control management which INGO and central government and ministry have been doing so far. In periods of political upheaval, all associated with earlier repressive power structures, including military administered protected areas are rendered in to paper parks, i.e. conservation only in reports with nothing on the ground (Budhathoki, 2003b). Whose idea of landscape should rule becomes a contested issue (Walker and Fortmann, 2003).
Landscape approach is, therefore, an attempt to enlist a larger cross-section of people in between the networks of protected areas in the cause of biodiversity conservation.
The emerging issues and options of Payment of Ecological Services (PES) of Biodiversity Conservation, the implications of Climate Change policy initiatives such as Reduced Emissions from Degradation and Deforestation (REDD), the National Adaptation Plan of Action (NAPA) to effects of climate change on Nepal’s biodiversity, the implications of Federalism and the trend towards decentralization of authority in nature conservation from the tradition of centralized command and control policy administration just taking baby steps with partnership with community participation in New Nepal. In one way new challenges and opportunities will turn up. For instance, the trend towards federalism and the fears of political fragmentation and decision making over a landscape opens up new opportunities for developing payment for ecological services between and among landscape elements in country for a federal set up or transboundary and global exchange as in REDD and NAPA climate change adaptation protocols.
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LANDSCAPE CONSERVATION APPROACH IN NEPAL
Dinesh Raj Bhuju1 and Amulya Ratna Tuladhar2
1Faculty of Science, Nepal Academy of Science and Technology
GPO Box 3323 Kathmandu
2Khwopa College, Tribhuvan University Affiliate
Dekocha, Bhaktapur
dineshbhuju@gmail.com
Introduction
Species know no boundary but their fundamental requirements to exist and proliferate. The ecological intricacies as revealed by scientific understanding of organisms living in the natural environs have called for conservation beyond species and/or their protected habitat. Landscape level conservation, thus, has been a realized management practice today. Nepal's commitment to save and secure biodiversity is evidently reflected in the creation of an impressive network of protected area system. As these areas are now turning out to be islands in the midst of human dominated landscapes, landscape level conservation emerges as an appropriate solution. The landscape conservation approach practiced in Nepal holds an exciting possibility to effectively deliver conservation plans. This essay will look into the theoretical antecedents of landscape conservation, its application in Nepal, and its promise to deliver effective conservation.
Part I: Theoretical Antecedents
Landscape Conservation Approach in Nepal is one of the sustainable development solutions to the threats of biodiversity loss. The approach is a practical, policy implementation mode that draws its theoretical roots from two intellectual traditions: conservation and ecology. Conservation has tried to harmonize the twin goals of protecting Nature from human activities and finding ways to develop within the laws of Nature. On the other hand, ecology has tried to understand the relationship between living organisms and their non-living environment so that human beings, as living organisms, can thrive better in their environment. The following paragraphs will outline key developments in these two intellectual traditions to the point where they converge in the current ‘Landscape Conservation Approach in Nepal’.
Beginning with the alienation of human beings from Nature as a result of industrialization in the 1700s in the West, as a result of rural, close-to-Nature livelihoods converging into the dense, squalid, far-from-Nature livelihoods in the urban, Dickensonian factories, people of all strata began to hanker for a reengagement with Nature (Adams, 1992). This reengagement of Nature was perforce variegated according to mainly spatio-temporal variables but an entry into this understanding can be made by adopting political economic stratification as an optic. According to the political economy optic, following Marxian category of a ‘superstructure’ of political and cultural processes on the ‘base’ of economic processes and structures in society and nature/society relationships, the class that controlled political economic processes, the ruling class of industrialists, politicians, feudal landlords, princes and regents, and residuals of colonial power structures had better access to opportunities to re-engage with nature than those at the bottom: menial labor, farmers, women, underclass and oppressed, and marginalized ethnic groups who were forced to trade all of their labor output for bare survival in the machine mode of the industrial era.
The political economic elite in the West, thus, went back to remnants of pristine Nature in Europe (very little available) by means of country castles, manors, newly invented motor vehicles but the satisfaction received was not enough. There was a growing call for unsullied pristine Nature to wash away the spiritual grime of dirty wealth generated from the protean industrialization. This phenomenon was seen in all walks of life from painters such as Paul Gauguin exoticizing the earthy colors of Trinidadian women to romanticizing, celebrating and idealization of Nature in Arts and Literature. Such inchoate socio-political strivings began to congeal into discrete intellectual traditions to save Nature at a societal level in the beginnings of the twentieth century.
In USA, for example, John Muir (1838-1914) was an early proponent of the ‘Preservationist’ Movement who argued for total hands-off from human beings (meaning money-making industrialization, agriculture, mining, damming) to save pristine Nature like the Yellowstone Geyser, the Old Faithful, Grand Canyon and the Hecht-Hechty spectacular landscape of the Wild West of USA. His efforts represent the longing of the powerful elite that got a hearing under President Theodore Roosevelt and the first National Park was established in 1872. Till date, ‘National Park’ retains the heritage of ‘protected’ areas, carrying the baggage of an antagonistic attitude towards the grubby, money-making by industry and agriculture that privileges the rights of the elite to their aesthetic and spiritual satisfaction with coercive laws, e.g. the National Park and Conservation Act 1973 laws and military protection of Royal Chitwan National Park in Nepal.
For the super elite of Europe, the ex-colonialists, who did not have access to much undisturbed Nature like the boundless Wild West of their counterparts in USA, their option was to venture to their colonial holdings in Africa, Asia and South America, the Tropics, where half of existing known biodiversity still exists. It is in Africa, the land of teaming wildlife of zebras, lions, giraffes and wildebeest that the ex-colonial big game, trophy hunters morphed their love of ‘shooting to kill’ to ‘shooting to photograph’. As these ex-hunters were in the cutting edge of interaction with pristine Nature, they were the first to be alarmed by the dwindling fate of the truly ‘wild’ wildlife and they sounded the call for protection of the objects of their hobby: the ‘wild’ wildlife. To this the burgeoning fields of biology, ecology, botany came to the service of managerial tropical science, which offered a secular excuse to continue interfering in the affairs of their ex-colonies in the name of science and nature preservation. Adams (1990) documents such colonial roots of the now secular conservation oriented international non-governmental organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), IUCN, UNEP, FAO, etc. All of these global organization got together to enunciate a World Conservation Strategy in 1980, to teach the world how to save Nature and justify continued interference of the First World in the affairs of the Third World in the guise of global nature protection (Redclift, 1992).
Along the way, over the last 200 years of inchoate First World elite initiatives to preserve Nature for the satisfaction of their own kind only, there began a more articulated engagement with the needs of the lower class for socioeconomic upliftment, ‘progress’ in the West and ‘development’ in the Third World. Even while John Muir was convincing Theodore Roosevelt to set aside lands and laws to start the birth of the National Park movement first in USA then worldwide, his contemporary Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946), who argued equally effectively for ‘conservation’- defined as the management (not preservation) of Nature for the maximum satisfaction of the most people for the longest time as the rallying cry for the establishment of the US Forest Service at the beginning of the twentieth century but also to manage natural resources rationally for both Nature and People (read low class people), including the damming of the Colorado river to supply irrigation and electricity to the people of California. During Pinchot’s time, ‘conservation’ was only a political slogan, a pragmatic approach not buttressed with solid science or policy dimensions. Over the last century, the science that contributed to the backbone of conservation was ecology and the policy dimension was strengthened by developments in economics.
In ecology, a term coined by Haeckel in 1866 the systematic study of the relationship between biota and abiota developed from the vocation of natural history or observation of all nature in the tradition of Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin to a more systematic study of the relationship between larger life communities in lakes and dune landscapes by S.A. Forbes (1844-1930) and H.C. Cowles (1869-1939) while F.E. Clements (1874-1945) and H.A. Gleason (1882-1975) argued over succession concepts. Early studies of temperate plant communities were enlarged by study of tropical forest communities as well as community structure including animal world and later into a more experimental and mathematical study of individual organism in controlled environmentalists by auto-ecologists such as G.F. Gause (1910-1986), A.J. Lotka (1880-1949) and V. Volterra (1860-1940). In the meantime, animal ecologists introduced the concept of ecological niche, e.g. Charles Elton (1900-1991). The latter half of the twentieth century saw the development of ecology along the hierarchical scales from individual, population, community to ecosystems, landscape, biomes and now global systems like the Gaia.
The latter, post 1950s, developments was aided by intellectual contributions of Geography, the remote sensing technology of air planes, rockets, photography, satellites, which was first pushed by the Nazi Hitler’s desire for world domination with the latest technology of aerial photography. To do this Carl Troll came into the picture by developing ‘landscape ecology’ in 1939 (Troll, 1939) to study scales of lands rendered visible by aerial photos, hitherto not possible by land-based platforms. The contemporary definition of ‘Landscape’ refers to a portion of land or territory which the eye can comprehend as a single view, including all the objects so seen, especially in its pictorial aspects. When this ‘eye’ was substituted by remote sensors such as air borne cameras and satellite sensors, the landscape took on bigger dimensions, however, landscape has traditions in both human geography and physical geography, referring to areas altered by a unit of human processes or physical processes (Johnston et al., 1995). Geography, with its long intellectual enquiry into the category of ‘space’ and how it changes. ‘Spatial heterogeneity’ has been a motif for analyzing ‘landscape’ as a geographical category for over a century. With the technology development of remote sensing driven by war industries and cold war defense motivations and dollars, Landscape Ecology emerged as a sophisticated applied science that can capture processes higher than ecosystems to global processes; however, in many countries, landscape ecology is used to understand sub-national processes of nature-society relationships. While general ecology theory focused on the study of more homogenous, discrete community units organized in a hierarchical structure, landscape ecology built upon heterogeneity in space and time, and frequently included human-induced landscape changes (Sanderson and Harris, 2000).
The recent emergence of landscapes as appropriate subjects for ecological study resulted from three main factors: 1) broad-scale environmental issues and land-management problems, 2) the development of new scale-related concepts in ecology, and 3) technological advances, including the widespread availability of spatial data, the computers, softwares to manipulate these data, and the rapid rise in computational power (Turner et al., 2001). Landscape ecology emphasizes the interaction between spatial pattern and ecological process, that is, the causes and consequences of spatial heterogeneity across a range of scales. The term landscape ecology was introduced by the German biogeographer Carl Troll (1939), arising from the European traditions of regional geography and vegetation science and motivated particularly by the novel perspective offered by aerial photography. Landscape ecology essentially combined the spatial approach of the geographer with the functional approach of the ecologists (Naveh and Lieberman, 1984; Forman and Godron 1986).
Two important aspects of landscape ecology are: 1) it explicitly addresses the importance of spatial configuration for ecological processes, and 2) it often focuses on spatial extents that are much larger than those traditionally studied in ecology. The role of humans, obviously a dominant influence on landscape patterns worldwide, is sometimes considered an important component of a definition of landscape ecology. Indeed in the landscape approaches characteristic of China, Europe and the Mediterranean, human activity is perhaps the central factor in landscape ecological studies. Landscape ecology is sometimes considered to be an interdisciplinary science dealing with the interrelation between human society and its living space- its open and built up landscapes (Naveh and Lieberman, 1984). Landscape ecology draws from a variety of disciplines, many of which emphasize social sciences, including geography, landscape architecture, regional planning, economics, forestry, and wildlife ecology.
One such use is the use of landscape ecology to develop landscape conservation approach (Groom et al., 2006; Haufler, 1999; Cooperrider et al., 1999; Brown et al., 2004). Here, the basic categories of landscape ecology such as heterogeneous patches, matrix, corridors, edges, edge-effects, ecocline and ecotones are used to explore ways to recoalesce fragmented patches of protected areas. National park approach to protected area, despite phenomenal development this century, covers only 10% of the land area in the world, with some areas like Nepal nearing 20% (Forest Minister Bohra Speech, Dec 8, 2010, at ICIMOD) and Bhutan nearing 60%. This was not considered adequate to address the degree of threats to biodiversity worldwide and the ecosystem services biodiversity provides for the very survival humankind (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). Increasing the areas under protection is clearly too costly in terms of political capital, manpower, money and legitimacy in the face of poverty of the millions that demands lands for economic upliftment (Budhathoki, 2003).
Even partial protection by means of buffer zone management and other options as community based conservation management is not considered adequate for the dispersed biodiversity and biodiversity outside of protected area system such as the many species of medicinal and aromatic plants, non-timber forest products, and other ecoregions of the Nepal Midhills. Now, with climate change the prospect of global warming is expected to be the biggest threat to biodiversity over the next century (Groom et al., 2006) so there is an urgency to join fragmented patches of protected areas so they can be operated at higher levels of ecosystem harmony, including for example the enabling of viable metapopulations of tiger and rhino in the Terai Arc Landscape Project (TAL) (Karki et al., 2009; Wikramsinghe et al., 2004; Dinerstein and McDougal, 1998) and the snow leopards, Red panda and Himalayan wildlife as in the case of Sacred Himalayan Landscape, Transboundary Landscape Conservation and Mount Kailash Landscape Conservation (Sharma et al., 2007).
Part II Application in Nepal
In the landscape conservation approach in Nepal, the key approach is to relieve the bottlenecks to migration and movement of animals so that a minimum viable population can be maintained with genetic diversity and stability (Groom et al., 2006; Karki et al., 2009). This ecological objective does present, however, novel policy challenges, since there are people living in these bottlenecks, and some of them are rather poor and sometimes of heterogeneous ethnic groups, administrative and political jurisdictions or even different countries, and operating under different sectoral outreach like forest, agriculture or local development ministry as well as many local non-governmental organizations and community based organizations. There is no ready-made policy road map that has been tested, so active learning from innovations made in landscape conservation approaches in Nepal bear significance worldwide for greater cause of biodiversity conservation in the larger context of sustainable development or the harmonization of the needs of nature and the people. The following two figures summarize the changing approaches biodiversity conservation leading to landscape conservation approach in Nepal, extracted from Budhathoki (2005).
In the rest of the article, we will examine the case studies of landscape conservation approach and analyze them from the perspective of their contribution to landscape ecology, conservation
Fig. 1. Landscape conservation complexes in Nepal. Source: Budhathoki, 2005
Fig. 2. Shifting conservation paradigms from island networks. Source: Budhathoki, 2005
policy, and their general contribution to the cause of global biodiversity services to humankind and the sustainable development of poor peoples of Third World and Nepal.
In Nepal, landscape approach has been spearheaded by geographers and conservation biologists. Specifically since 1990s, Nepali conservation scientists have been looking to enhance conservation in areas outside protected areas and calling attention to contiguous landscapes that are fast being fragmented. Beginning with 21st century, these theoretical approaches have been supplemented by policy related approaches coming from sustainable development paradigms such as participatory management and inclusion of marginalized groups of gender and dalits and greater awareness to address root causes of human development aspirations and social inequity driving environmental degradation including the deterioration of landscapes. Among the proponents are the UNDP/WWF/ICIMOD programs in Terai Arc Landscape (TAL) Project, Western Terai Landscape Conservation Project (WTLCP), Sacred Himalayan and Transboundary Conservation Projects in cooperation with Government of Nepal line agencies such as the Ministry of Forests and Soil Conservation and its departments.
Harka Gurung (1939-2006) was one of the early eminent Nepali geographers who was interested in the combination of both human and physical processes affecting the spatial variability of human landscapes. As early as 1971, he wrote on the landscape patterns of Nepal as determined much by its geographic setting and then the human activities (Gurung, 1971, 1989). The emphatic ridges that run east-west and numerous south-flowing rivers have defined the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the country’s physiographic component, while the lateral disposition of the country has caused bio-climatic variation from the arid west to the humid east. As human attempts to adapt himself to the natural environment and in the process leaves his imprint on the landscape. Thus, the three major geographic regions, viz. Terai, Hill and Mountain correspond to latitudinally arranged ecological zones. Based on these natural settings, the major watershed, and population dimension, Gurung proposed regional development plan, which surfaced in the Fourth Five-Year Plan of 1970-1975 (Sharma, 2007).
The other groups of leaders who have worked and contributed in developing and/or applying the approach of landscape level conservation in Nepal are from landscape ecology domain: forest ecologists, botanists, foresters and wildlife biologists.
In mid-1990s, Robert Zomer undertook a dissertation on remote sensing and GIS analysis of Makalu-Barun, using stereoscopic SPOT and Landsat imagery, and extensive ground truthing as a part of landscape ecology approach to provide high quality for landscape conservation approach to the newly established Makalu-Barun National Park and Conservation Area. Among his outputs were the appreciation of the important role of riparian corridors in biodiversity conservation within the Middle Hills of east Nepal and suggestions for further research on biodiversity within these patches and a specific recognition of the value of remnant riparian forests within the landscape and rural economy for conservation goals for the eastern Nepal Himalaya (Zomer et al., 2001 & 2002).
In 1999, forest ecologist Dinesh Bhuju initiated a survey to record the baseline information on the ecology of the Churiya, the southernmost hills of the Himalaya also known as Siwaliks (total area: 1,886,000 ha, length: 840 km) from east (Mechi) to west (Mahakali) (Bhuju, 2000). To conserve the Churiya, at landscape level, this study aimed to identify key areas, with a two-prong approach: 1) First determine areas with significant changes in land use since 1958, 1978 and 1992; and 2) gather ecology-based information on the Churiya using grid-based samples (Bhuju, 2000, 2006, 2010). The project covered all major watersheds (Fig. 3), and accumulated information on: i) land-use change, ii) forest structure and regeneration, iii) tree species association at different altitudes, iv) local knowledge on plant use, and v) distribution of birds and other fauna. Once a backwater of conservation, Churiya is now in the national priority (Bhuju, 2010).
Fig. 3. Churiya range in Nepal.
At corridor scale of landscape conservation, NTNC (National Trust for Nature Conservation) took up a UNDP supported project on the Tiger-Rhino Corridor in 2001 (Thapa and Basnet 2006). The project focused its study in Barandabhar Corridor Forest adjoining to Chitwan National Park (CNP) and aimed at promoting landscape level biodiversity conservation with strong community-based management links to conserve endangered species. Very significantly, the corridor is inhabited by relocated people from CNP. The Barandabhar Forests serves as an important corridor of the Terai Arc Landscape (TAL), a program initiated by Government of Nepal with the support of WWF Nepal Program encompassing 11 protected areas of Nepal and India in 2001. Envisioning to set a landscape level management model for safeguarding biological wealth and vital ecological functions of western Terai districts (Bardia, Kailali and Kanchanpur), Government of Nepal in partnership seven national and international organizations including UNDP, launched a 8-year long project of Western Terai Landscape Conservation starting from 2005.
A cultural landscape study has also been conducted to describe and understand the relationship of natural habitat and diverse ecosystem viz. agriculture, forest and grassland ecosystems managed by human activities. Ram P. Chaudhary, a plant taxonomist and biogeographer, got involved in an interdisciplinary research undertaken by a group of biological and social scientists from Tribhuvan University and University of Bergen, Norway between 2002 and 2006. The research project made invaluable contribution in cultural landscape of Manang, a remote Trans Himalayan region in Nepal (Chaudhary, 2006).
The interpretation of landscape approach in Nepal, however, had been varying. In 1999, Ministry of Forests and Soil Conservation of Nepal proposed Shey Phoksundo National Park (SPNP) for inclusion on the World Heritage Convention for inscription for which it produced six criteria, three natural and three cultural. The SPNP is a southern margin of Tibetan Plateau, but along with adjoining Tscharka Bhot and Mustang. Therefore, conservation biologist Pralad Yonzon (2001) argued with strong basis of landscape characters such as geology, soil, climate and vegetation that the proposal to truncate SPNP (Dolpo) from similar and contiguous landscape of Mustang together with Tsharka Bhot was unempirical (Yonzon, 2001).
The importance of trans-boundary cooperation in protected area management was realized in mid 1990s; however, it remained at political level organizing few bilateral meetings with bordering countries China and India and organizing a few training activities (Paudel et al., 2008). The trans-boundary landscape approach was finally adopted with the initiation of the Sacred Himalayan Landscape. The SHL includes five of the 19 eco-regions that comprise the Eastern Himalayan Conservation Complex, and the high topographical relief, climatic variation, and its position at the ecotone of several biogeographic regions confer the area and the landscape, with a high level of biological diversity. Chandra P Gurung (1950-2006), a geographer and an eminent conservationist of Nepal, played a key role in formulating and implementing the plan (Gurung et al., 2006). This approach called for the combination of attention on human processes of both cultural and economic dimensions in addition to the ecological dimensions in the landscape conservation approaches for Nepal both in the mountains and the plains.
A group of researchers associated with ICIMOD (International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development) also advanced the concept of trans-boundary conservation landscape. Chettri and Sharma (2006) proposed developing a landscape with conservation corridors as connecting links to existing protected areas (total number: 12; total area: 5904 sq.km.) in the Kangchenjungha complex that spread over a wide spectrum of ecological zones in eastern Nepal, Darjeeling and Sikkim in India and western Bhutan. The landscape provides contiguous habitat and unique situation where within a 100 km N-S transect, habitats range from Tropical to alpine vegetation. In recent days, a landscape level study has also been undertaken in Mt Kailash region.
BHUJU KAILASH WRITEUP HERE
The main contribution of these authors has been to argue for the inclusion of more areas for conservation outside the existing protected areas due to endangerment of particular flora, fauna, ecological and sometimes even cultural processes.
A review of landscape conservation approach in Nepal reveals a heavy commitment to the social dimensions of conservation, ways of eliciting, sustaining and, if possible, enhancing the effectiveness of local communities to rehabilitate and restore the human altered landscape matrices outside the protected areas of national parks and conservation areas for maximal ecosystem health (WWF/Nepal, 2004; NPC/UNDP/UNEP, 2010; Gurung, 2006). The social dimensions may include community forestry, buffer zone management in which local communities are given a share of protected areas incomes to buy their cooperation with legal guarantees of their rights. On a continuum of interventions, help may be offered in awareness raising informal education and publicity, trainings for capacity building, investment in gender mainstreaming, or such social and economic upliftment that addresses the root diversity of biodiversity degradation: poverty and social inequity.
At other end maybe explicitly ecology and biological rehabilitation of such human altered landscapes from anti poaching efforts to ensure safe corridor for migrating animals to the rehabilitation of greenery and degraded landscape to the level of protected areas natural state (considered the benchmark of normality)(Save the Tiger Project, 2009). One of the early investments in landscape management is the enhancement in the quality and quantity of database to allow sophisticated management (e.g. Zomer et al., 2002). This may include inventorying of landscape close to its natural state as was done by Bhuju et al., (2000) in Churiya or drawing of GIS map for transboundary landscape conservation for Mt Kailash by ICIMOD (Sharma et al., 2007).
IUCN, WWF and Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation (DNPWC) have spearheaded the biology end of landscape conservation form tiger census and tiger ecology and enhancement to restoration of tiger prey habitat in the protected areas and the reduction of pressures on the protected areas by enhancing tree resources outside protected areas. The Government of Nepal and UNDP have a more livelihood sustenance and social equity goals within human altered matrix outside protected areas whose expected spinoff is the restoration of ecological services to biodiversity and humans living there (WWF, 2002).
Part III Promise of effective conservation
In a 2004 review paper, Budhathoki (2004) discusses the opportunities and challenges for landscape conservation approaches in Nepal. He calls for a careful integration of national, regional and local interests in planning and management of landscape conservation in order to fulfill the integrated objectives of landscape level conservation.
Despite much experimental and supposedly secular and non-ideological experimentation with different governance regimes, institutional innovations to co-opt the locals in the biodiversity conservation across a landscape, there is much negative international and national baggage of being perceived as external (outside country, outside village) interests on esoteric biodiversity benefits over local (internal) needs to survive on the local natural resources without interfering external legislation, policy, other demands.
On top of this is the changing milieu of decentralization in the country over the last few decades giving birth to local rights for community forestry, local decentralization, and now calls for institutionalizing federal decentralization of authority over the top-down command and control management which INGO and central government and ministry have been doing so far. In periods of political upheaval, all associated with earlier repressive power structures, including military administered protected areas are rendered in to paper parks, i.e. conservation only in reports with nothing on the ground (Budhathoki, 2003b). Whose idea of landscape should rule becomes a contested issue (Walker and Fortmann, 2003).
Landscape approach is, therefore, an attempt to enlist a larger cross-section of people in between the networks of protected areas in the cause of biodiversity conservation.
The emerging issues and options of Payment of Ecological Services (PES) of Biodiversity Conservation, the implications of Climate Change policy initiatives such as Reduced Emissions from Degradation and Deforestation (REDD), the National Adaptation Plan of Action (NAPA) to effects of climate change on Nepal’s biodiversity, the implications of Federalism and the trend towards decentralization of authority in nature conservation from the tradition of centralized command and control policy administration just taking baby steps with partnership with community participation in New Nepal. In one way new challenges and opportunities will turn up. For instance, the trend towards federalism and the fears of political fragmentation and decision making over a landscape opens up new opportunities for developing payment for ecological services between and among landscape elements in country for a federal set up or transboundary and global exchange as in REDD and NAPA climate change adaptation protocols.
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