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Community
Conserved Areas: A Bold New Frontier for Conservation
Indigenous,
mobile, and local communities have for millennia played
a critical role in conserving a variety of natural environments
and species. They have done this for a variety of purposes,
economic as well as cultural, spiritual and aesthetic.
There are today many thousand Community Conserved Areas
(CCAs) across the world, including sacred forests, wetlands,
and landscapes, village lakes, catchment forests, river
and coastal stretches and marine areas. The history
of conservation and sustainable use in many of these
areas is much older than government-managed protected
areas, yet they are often neglected or not recognised
in official conservation systems. Many of them face
enormous threats.
Fortunately,
there is also a growing recognition of CCAs and acknowledgement
of their role in the conservation of biodiversity. Some
governments have integrated them into their official
Protected Area Systems, and the Vth World Parks Congress
and the Programme of Work on Protected Areas of the
CBD accepted them as legitimate conservation sites that
deserve support and, as appropriate, inclusion in national
and international systems.
What
are Community Conserved Areas (CCAs)?
CCAs
are natural and/or modified ecosystems containing significant
biodiversity values, ecological services and cultural
values, voluntarily conserved by indigenous, mobile
and local communities through customary laws or other
effective means. CCAs can include ecosystems with minimum
to substantial human influence as well as cases of continuation,
revival or modification of traditional practices or
new initiatives taken up by communities in the face
of new threats or opportunities. Several of them are
inviolate zones ranging from very small to large stretches
of land and waterscapes. Three features are important:
- One
or more communities closely relate to the ecosystems
and species culturally and/or because of survival
and dependence for livelihood;
- The
community management decisions and efforts lead to
the conservation of habitats, species, ecological
services and associated cultural values, although
the conscious objective of management may be different
(e.g., livelihood, water security, safeguarding of
cultural and spiritual places).
- The
communiti(es) are the major players in decision-making
and implementation regarding the management of the
site, implying that community institutions have the
capacity to enforce regulations; in many situations
there may be other stakeholders in collaboration or
partnership, but primary decision-making is with the
communiti(es).
The
Significance of CCAs
CCAs
are an important complement to official PA systems.
§
They help conserve critical ecosystems and threatened
species, maintain essential ecosystem functions including
water security, and provide corridors and linkages for
animal and gene movement, including between two or more
officially protected areas.
§
They are critical to the cultural and economic survival
of millions of people.
§
They help synergise the links between agricultural biodiversity
and wildlife, providing larger land/waterscape level
integration.
§
They offer crucial lessons for participatory governance
of official PAs, useful to resolve conflicts between
PAs and local people.
§
They offer lessons in systems of conservation that integrate
customary and statutory laws.
§
They are often built on sophisticated ecological knowledge
systems, elements of which have wider positive use.
§
They are part of indigenous and local community resistance
to destructive ‘development’, e.g. rainforests
threatened by mining, dams, and logging industries,
ecologically sensitive high-altitude ecosystems threatened
by tourism, over-exploitation of marine resources by
industrial fishing, etc.
Globally,
400-800 million hectares forest are owned/ administered
by communities. In 18 developing countries with the
largest forest cover, over 22% of forests are owned
by or reserved for communities. In some of these countries
(e.g. Mexico and Papua New Guinea) the community forests
cover 80% of the total (Molnar et al., 2003). More land
and resources are under community control in other ecosystems.
By no means all areas under community control are effectively
conserved, but a substantial portion is.
The
Challenge
CCAs face critical challenges to their continued existence
and growth:
§
Many are disappearing, due to inappropriate development
and educational models, religious intrusions, and externally
driven change of local value systems.
§
Traditional institutions managing them have been undermined
by colonial or centralised political systems, whereby
governments have taken over most of the relevant functions
and powers.
§
As CCAs often contain valuable renewable and non-renewable
resources (timber, fauna, minerals, etc.), they are
often encroached or threatened by commercial users,
land/resource traffickers, or community members under
the increasing influence of market forces.
§
They remain unrecognised in most countries, and the
lack of political and legal support often hampers community
efforts at maintaining them through traditional means.
§
Communities’ internal conflicts, inequities and
weak institutions can make sustained management difficult.
These
and other challenges can be effectively faced jointly
by communities and formal conservation agencies, with
help from NGOs and others. This is beginning to happen
in countries where CCAs are formally recognised (see
some of the examples presented in the boxes).
Outcomes
of the Fifth World Parks Congress
The
participants at the Fifth World Parks Congress (WPC,
Sept. 2003) recommended that national and international
recognition of CCAs areas is an urgent necessity. In
its Message to the CBD, this largest ever gathering
of conservationists suggested to “recognize the
diversity of protected area governance approaches, such
as community conserved areas, indigenous conservation
areas and private protected areas, and encourage Parties
to support this diversity”. The Durban Accord further
“urged commitment to recognize, strengthen, protect
and support community conserved areas”.
The
WPC also developed specific Recommendations on CCAs
and on governance of PAs as means to strengthen the
management and expand the coverage of the world’s
protected areas, to address gaps in national protected
area systems, to promote connectivity at landscape and
seascape level, to enhance public support for protected
areas, and to strengthen the relationship between people
and the land, freshwater and the sea.
Outcomes
of Convention on Biological Diversity 7th Conference
of Parties (CBD COP 7)
Following
recommendations from the World Parks Congress, the CBD
has included in its Programme of Work (POW) on Protected
Areas a specific section (element 2) on “Governance,
Equity, Participation and Benefit Sharing”, and
embedded its key concepts also in all other elements.
The PoW includes several specific activities (in particular
nos. 2.1.2, 2.1.3, 2.2.2, and 2.2.7) that request the
signatory countries to:
- Developing
better practices and stronger patterns of accountability
in PA governance.
- Recognising
and promoting various PA governance types in national
and regional systems to support people’s participation
and community conserved areas through specific policies
and legal, financial and community means.
- Establishing
policies and institutional mechanism to facilitate
the above with full participation of indigenous and
local communities.
- Seeking
prior informed consent before any indigenous community
is relocated for the establishment of a protected
area.
- Better
appreciating and understanding local knowledge, the
priorities, practices and values of indigenous and
local communities.
- Identifying
and removing barriers preventing adequate participation
of local and indigenous communities in all stages
of protected area planning, establishment, governance
and management.
The
PoW also calls for studies, constructive dialogue, exchange
of information and experiences and joint research among
local and non-local experts. It asks for a more equitable
division of the costs and benefits of conservation for
indigenous and local communities and to make use of
conservation benefits to reduce poverty. Specifically,
among the targets to be reached and reported upon by
the parties to the Convention in the next years are
the following (emphasis added):
Target
1.4:
All protected areas to have effective management in
existence by 2012, using participatory and science-based
site planning processes that incorporate clear biodiversity
objectives, targets, management strategies and monitoring
programmes, drawing upon existing methodologies and
a long-term management plan with active stakeholder
involvement.
Target
2.1: Establish by 2008 mechanisms for the equitable
sharing of both costs and benefits arising from
the establishment and management of protected areas.
Target
2.2: Full and effective participation by
2008, of indigenous and local communities, in
full respect of their rights and recognition of their
responsibilities, consistent with national law and
applicable international obligations, and the participation
of relevant stakeholders in the management of existing,
and the establishment and management of new, protected
areas
Target
4.1: By 2008, standards, criteria, and best practices
for planning, selecting establishing, managing and governance
of national and regional systems of protected areas
are developed and adopted.
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