4.20 Sustainable use of wildlife

Rowan Martin

The foundation of sustainability is this: users are more likely to conserve resources when it is in their interest to do so. In the majority of cases ecological considerations are secondary.

The greatest threat to conservation of biological diversity in most countries arises from competing forms of land use; not, as is commonly perceived, from the overexploitation of wild resources. Tenure systems, legislation and economic incentives should be complimentary in creating a climate which is favourable for sustaining wild animals and their habitats.

The foundation of sustainability is this: users are more likely to conserve resources when it is in their interest to do so. In the majority of cases ecological considerations are secondary. The probability that use will be sustainable and resources conserved is greatly increased when the following considerations are taken into account and principles applied.

Tenure principles

Tenure is the most important issue affecting sustainability of resource use. The term "tenure" includes all aspects of ownership, proprietorship and rights of access to resources. Rights may be vested in the state, the community or the individual: the crucial point is to avoid open access resource systems. Sustainable use is more likely when the following occur:

• rights of access are clearly defined and accepted;
  
• the ability to enforce those rights exists;
  
• the unit of management and accountability is small and efficient; and
  
• its members share a common understanding and purpose.

a. Conservation of ecosystems has a higher priority than stabilizing individual species populations. There is a need to shift attention away from individual animals and species to the ecosystem. This will require focusing on environmental impacts, which includes social and cultural impacts, rather than on consumption versus non-consumption issues.

b. Any use of a wild species will cause a change in an ecosystem. It is unrealistic to expect that use can be conducted without any appreciable or detectable alteration to ecological communities.

c. The ultimate criterion of sustainability is the persistence of the species. Species populations can be regarded as being sustainably used if their genetic and demographic characteristics under exploitation do not affect population viability. Expressed in another way, provided a species population is not reduced to the level that extinction is a real threat, then use can be regarded as sustainable. In ecosystems characterized by large environmental fluctuations this may be the only criterion of sustainability.

d. All species populations can be used: there is no arbitrary population size threshold below which use should be prohibited if such use would be beneficial to the conservation of the species and the ecosystem. Sus-tainable use relies on an offtake proportional to the size of a population; even very small populations can withstand limited harvests.

e. Use may, and often does, improve the status of the used population. This is the basis of the argument for use as a conservation tool; the clear corollary is that non-use is the risky option. The precautionary principle should be applied in this sense: it is risky not to use resources, therefore we should use them.

f. While it is often stated that declining populations should not be harvested, this cliché can be refuted with numerous examples. If a wildlife population is declining and the primary cause is not harvesting but some other reason (e.g., competition with cattle), very often the promotion of legal use will secure the desired reversal. The institutional context under which harvesting is applied is critical.

g. It is often stated that any population which has undergone a significant decline in numbers as a result of over-harvesting needs to be 'rested' or should be subject to a moratorium on use. This is not scientifically defensible. When a population is freed from exploitation it will increase (assuming harvesting was the factor causing its decline) to some new level. If harvesting is then re-initiated at a sustainable rate, the population will go on to re-stabilize at some new level with an adjusted age structure. The time taken to reach this final state from the time the moratorium was imposed is the same as if the sustainable harvest proportion had been imposed at the outset.

h. Holding a species at a constant level (or, conversely, attempting to maintain a constant harvest) is likely to adversely affect the resilience of ecosystems. The assumption that the environment is stable or static makes no allowance for the large environmental fluctuations of the arid and semi-arid ecosystems which characterize much of the globe.

i. In consumptive use systems, offtakes should generally be tailored to reduce biological risk. However, this common wisdom should not be an endorsement for misapplication of the "precautionary principle". In competitive land-use situations, injudicious use of the precautionary principle may result in disadvantages for biodiversity conservation.

Economic principles

a. If the economic returns from use of a species are reinvested in its conservation and management this will generally be beneficial for the status of the species.

b. All species should have value. Attempts to destroy markets for species and species products seldom result in the correct incentives for conservation.

c. Use is more likely to be sustainable when:

• the benefits derived from use are greater than the costs of conservation;
  
• the rate of return from sustainable harvesting at least equals the return from alternative options including 'mining' the resource to secure its total capital value in the short term. Short-term economic policies may provide perverse incentives, which act against sustainable use; and
  
• there are well-regulated legal markets with strong links to legal producers.

Application of the principles

In most developing countries the option of zero use is unrealistic. Use will take place illegally and unsustainably if simplistic attempts are made to ban it. The challenge is to make use sustainable; this requires an adaptive management approach.

Adaptive management entails:

• a basic hypothesis about the workings of the system to be managed;
  
• a clear statement of management objectives; and
  
• the establishment of a monitoring system to provide the information needed to modify the management system or the objectives, or to revise the hypothesis if necessary.

The preferred options for use of wildlife should emphasize value-added systems such as photographic tourism and sport hunting, where the use involves no more than low-level "skimming" from populations.

Where use entails the removal of large numbers of animals, either for a commercial harvest or to deal with problems of overabundance, attempts to impose constancy on naturally fluctuating ecosystems should be avoided because of the dangers of brittle pathologies for species and ecosystems.

It may be better to subject populations to a blitz in one year and allow them to rest for several years or to introduce an element of randomness into the harvest, rather than attempting to fine-tune management to annual population estimates. The syndrome of cautious fiddling with species populations should also be avoided; this makes it impossible to detect or evaluate the effects of management actions.

Wherever possible, emphasis should be shifted from single species commodity production to multi-species value-added management. A single species situation can always be treated as a singular case within a multi-species system.

The wildlife industry in Zimbabwe is based on multi-species systems. It avoids the pitfall of competing in the commodity production market where cattle would probably produce meat and hides more efficiently from the same land. Although consumptive use is a feature of the wildlife industry (hunting, culling of species populations above carrying capacity, cropping of some ungulate populations for meat and hides), the industry is resilient because of a diversity of management options, many of which can be practised simultaneously. If the market is temporarily poor for one option, another can be pursued.

4.21 Sustainable farming, forestry and fishing practices

Roy Hagen

The sustainability of human life depends on the sustainable use of natural resources. We must all work towards making our resource production and harvesting systems more sustainable.

Sustainable resource use

Sustainability is a widely accepted goal of natural resource management, but it is a difficult concept to define precisely; there is no universally accepted definition. Sustainability depends on what one is trying to sustain. It depends on whether one is talking about sustainability over several decades or over several millennia.

Agriculture, forestry and fisheries are based on the use of the natural resources of soil, water, plants and animals and the genetic diversity of plants and animals. Resource use systems can be said to be sustainable if, over time, they maintain the natural productivity of these resources, the genetic diversity of the plants and animals concerned, and the ecosystem functions of recycling of nutrients, water, carbon, and oxygen.

The question of sustainability can quickly become complicated. If one adds the caveat that sustainable systems must not rely on the use of non-renewable resources, then that eliminates nearly all of the farming, forestry and fisheries systems of the developed world. Nearly all of them, in fact, rely in some fashion on the use of fossil fuels, which are not renewable. The world is going to run out of them; most of the reserves of fossil fuels will be depleted in the next century. One of greatest challenges facing humankind is to make the transition to renewable, and therefore sustainable, energy sources.

Sustainable agriculture

Unsustainable agriculture is one of the greatest threats to natural resources, natural areas and biodiversity. If productive agriculture cannot be sustained, farmers are obliged to convert more and more of the remaining range, forest and savanna lands into new fields — generally on more marginal sites where agriculture is inherently more difficult to sustain. This can lead to an accelerating downward spiral resulting in desertification, severe land degradation and impoverishment of rural people.

Sustainable agriculture depends first and foremost on the maintenance of soil fertility. Soil fertility depends primarily on the maintenance of soil organic matter, suitable soil pH and on adequate levels of the essential nutrients needed by crop plants, in a form available for absorption by plant roots. Maintaining adequate levels of soil organic matter is key to a soil's cultivation and structure, its water-holding capacity, its ability to hold nutrients in an available form and its pH balance. This is especially true in highly weathered tropical soils. The maintenance of soil organic matter is much more problematic in the tropics, however, because organic matter breaks down or oxidizes faster in high temperatures than it does in a cool, temperate climate. This is one of the reasons why slash-and-burn cultivation is unsustainable in certain conditions.

Soil fertility depends on the way the individual farmer manages his or her croplands. It depends on what the farmer does to prevent soil from eroding away. It depends on the quantity and type of crop residues, animal manure and other organic matter that are returned to the soil. Finally it depends on the farmer's ability to replace the soil nutrients that are inevitably lost over time through crop harvest, leaching, erosion, etc.

Erosion of shallow soils down to bedrock can permanently destroy a site's agricultural potential. Even erosion of deep soils can quickly diminish soil fertility because erosion first removes the topsoil where organic matter and soil nutrients are concentrated. Adverse effects of erosion are only felt over a period of years. Farmers can minimize erosion through a wide array of techniques that include agronomic practices, different types of tillage (including no-tillage), physical erosion control structures, contour vegetation strips, agroforestry techniques, etc. The extent to which erosion control measures should be subsidized is an issue that is frequently debated.

Ironically, maintaining good soil fertility is itself dependent on soil fertility. Badly degraded, infertile soils do not yield enough biomass of crop residues to restore or maintain good levels of soil organic matter. Degraded soils low in organic matter commonly become very acid. Nitrogen-fixing herbaceous and agroforestry species are typically incapable of fixing nitrogen in very acid soils. It is much easier to sustain the fertility of fertile soils than to restore badly degraded soils.

Adequate levels of essential soil nutrients can generally be maintained on small areas, such as garden plots, through the addition of locally available fertilizers such as animal manure, compost, etc. For larger areas, especially for cereal crops, this is generally not possible, especially in terms of soil phosphate. Over 60 per cent of the phosphate used by cereal crops is typically concentrated in the cereal grain and is removed at harvest, rarely to be returned to the soil. The maintenance of adequate levels of soil nutrients over the long term will generally require some minimum level inputs of chemical fertilizers or other mineral inputs (such as rock phosphate).

Of course, inputs must be purchased. To purchase fertilizers, farmers must produce a crop surplus that goes well beyond their subsistence needs. One can thus argue that subsistence-level agriculture cannot be ecologically sustainable except at very low population levels that allow long fallow periods to restore soil fertility through natural processes. While 'modern' agriculture may not be sustainable because of high levels of inputs of fossil fuels and environmentally hazardous levels of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, subsistence-level agriculture is probably also unsustainable at today's population levels. This is an issue that has not received adequate attention.

New diseases and insect pests are continually evolving. Sustainable agriculture also depends on a diverse genetic base for crop plants that allows for the development of new resistant varieties over time. This genetic base is rapidly diminishing for many crops. Unlike soil fertility maintenance, this is an issue that individual farmers can do little about. It must be addressed by national governments and international scientific, environmental and policy groups.

Sustainable forestry

There is no commonly agreed definition of sustainable forest management, especially of natural forests. Some would argue that forest management should not change the forest in any way. This is largely impractical unless one simply wants to preserve a watershed or a natural area. Even the definition of what is 'natural' can be, and frequently is, hotly debated. It is now recognized that most natural forests are far more dynamic than was previously thought and are continuously changing due to 'natural' processes.

Managing a forest will inevitably change it, especially when forests are managed for wood products. Disagreement concerns the level of acceptable change. Again the question is: what does one want to sustain? The following ideas are proposed:

• the ecosystem functions of recycling of nutrients, oxygen, carbon, water, etc. should be sustained;
  
• the genetic and species diversity of the plants and animals, i.e., the biodiversity of the forest, should be largely sustained;
  
• for extractive use of a forest, the production and yield of a range of products should be ecologically and economically sustained, although the specific mix of products will inevitably change over time as markets and needs for these products change.

Sustainable fishery practices

Sustainable fisheries depend primarily on controlling how and when fish are harvested and on maintaining the quality of fish habitat, primarily the quality of water, breeding areas, feeding areas and, sometimes, cover. Over-fishing will rarely drive a species of fish to extinction — people will usually stop fishing when fish populations become too low. A given species can be eliminated, however, through changes in water quality or pollutants, through destruction of spawning grounds or by the introduction of exotic species that out-compete and replace the native species.

Fisheries can be severely depleted (and potentially destroyed) by over-fishing, to the point where the sustainable harvest is at an extremely low level when compared to the potential productivity of the fishery. When fishing pressures build up, the only way to avoid over-fishing is to have effective controls on who fishes and/or on how and when they fish. Open access fisheries can easily lead to a classic "tragedy of the commons". Control may be vested in the hands of a local community or a national or international organization, but someone must control access if the fishery is to remain productive.

If access to the fishery can be controlled, then sustaining a near optimum harvest depends on the following:

• indigenous and/or modern biological knowledge of the fish to be managed;
  
• some type of monitoring to determine the condition and productivity of the fishery; and
  
• a management system to adjust the conditions of harvest as a function of the monitoring.

Techniques for managing a fishery include the following:

• limiting the number of people who may fish;
  
• controlling the fishing techniques that may be used;
  
• controlling the mesh size of nets to prevent the harvest of immature fish;
  
• controlling the areas in which fishing is permitted, to protect spawning grounds, estuaries or other critical sites;
  
• controlling the timing of open seasons; and
  
• imposing size limits on fish that may be kept.

4.22 Ecotourism

Peter Valentine - with a contribution by Gerardo Budowski

The evolution of ecotourism provides a new tool which can be extremely valuable for conservation initiatives, but not without careful attention being paid to a number of important details

Tourism can be very beneficial for conservation. Tourism has generated a large industry in almost every country and is a potent force for change. The evolution of ecotourism provides new potential for conservation initiatives, but not without careful attention being paid to a number of important details.

The term "ecotourism" refers to tourism based on the natural environment and conducted in an ecologically sustainable manner. There have been many types of nature tourism in the past — people enjoying an interaction with nature, from big-game hunting to wildlife viewing and photography — but most were not ecologically sustainable and some had a serious impact on the environment. The idea of ecotourism is to develop a form of tourism which is based on enjoying nature but also helps protect the environment. It recognizes that, if we are not careful in our management, even apparently harmless activities (such as wildlife viewing) can seriously damage the environment. Damage can include disturbance to wildlife (which may lead to increased mortality), soil erosion from vehicle or boat use, pollution from various activities associated with the access of tourists and supporting infrastructure and ecosystem damage due to selective harvest of species as souvenirs.

Understanding ecotourism

Successful ecotourism involves a close and mutually supporting partnership among three key elements:

• the natural environment (conservation areas, parks, customary land, tribal land, private land);
  
• the local communities associated with the natural environment; and
  
• the tourism system associated with the natural environment (tourists, operators and other components of the industry which enable the tourists to enjoy the environment).

Box 17 Enipein Marine Park The village of Enipein, in Micronesia, established a marine park over part of their land and water. In conjunction with a development support programme the villagers built traditional canoes, using the skills of elders and training young men in the process. Once the canoes were built, an ecotourism venture was started by bringing tourists from the larger centres out to the village and giving them the opportunity to canoe along the mangrove waterways and within the reef lagoon of the marine park. Local guides helped the tourists appreciate the natural environment, talked about the traditional canoes and told some of the local stories. A feast was provided at the end of the day with traditional foods and local ceremonies. The villagers were paid US$35 per tourist. In this example everyone benefited: the environment was managed carefully as a park (which meant restrictions on some uses); the villagers maintained their traditional skills, learned new skills and gained cash income (all villagers are partners in the income); and the tourists enjoyed a wonderful experience and enhanced their appreciation of the environment.

Expected outcome of ecotourism

The key content of the tourism experience — arranged by both tour operators and conservation managers — is also crucial in the partnership. Successful ecotourism should do the following:

• promote positive environmental ethics (teach and encourage appropriate behaviour);
  
• concentrate on the intrinsic values of the specific ecosystem rather than on facilities and services — visitors should come to the area because of some special properties of the local ecosystem;
  
• involve a direct experience with nature;
  
• be supported by high-quality preparation on the part of both providers and participants — gratification is based on appreciation and/or education, not on thrills;
  
• not degrade or exploit the natural environment either directly or indirectly; and
  
• contribute to the management and protection of the natural environment.

Box 18 An eco-facade for tourism? Many claims concerning the benefits of ecotourism are exaggerated, or owe more to labelling and marketing than to genuine reality. Often projects are planned and carried out without local consent or support and end up threatening local cultures, economies, and natural resource bases. Critics of ecotourism regard it as an eco-facade: a tactic to conceal consumptive and exploitative practices by 'greening' them. One of the most serious impacts of ecotourism is the expropriation of virgin territories — national parks, wildlife parks and other wilderness areas — which are packaged for ecotourists. Ecotourism caters mostly to urbanized societies and the new middle-class alternative lifestyles. Searching for untouched places, 'off the beaten track', travellers have already opened up many destinations which previously were totally undisturbed. In socio-economic terms, diverse local activities have been replaced by an ecotourism monoculture. Contrary to claims, local people do not necessarily benefit from ecotourism. Tourism-related employment is greatly overrated: locals are usually left with low-paying service jobs such as porters or food and souvenir vendors. In addition, they are not assured of year-round employment; workers may be laid off during the off-season. As with conventional tourism, most money is made by foreign airlines, tourism operators, and developers who repatriate profit to their own more economically advanced countries. (From an article by A. Pleumarom in Environmental Justice Networker, No. 6, Winter 1995.)

Key issues to consider in developing a partnership

Based on several recent reviews of ecotourism and protected areas, a number of principles and concerns need to be considered in any partnership between tourism, local people and natural environments. Some of these concerns are exemplified in the following questions:

• Is there a strong role for local people in the partnership?
  
• How can local people gain benefits from tourism? (Local people could organize material goods for sale, especially those already made in the society such as clothing items, household items or decorative items; local people could develop guiding skills to take tourists into the park and help them understand it; local people could sell food to tourists, either fresh or dried, and so on.)
  
• What are the possible impacts of tourism on the natural environment? (In a coastal area these could include too many mangrove crabs and crayfish taken to feed the tourists; damage to coral from anchors, garbage and pollution; too much fresh water used; improper disposal of sewage; and roads and buildings which may disturb or destroy highly valued land or wildlife.)
  
• What are the possible impacts of tourism on local people, especially on quality of life, customs and access to resources? (Tourists may offend local customs; prevent local access to resources; or deplete resources.)
  
• Are there appropriate mitigative measures for the negative impacts of tourism? (These could include mooring buoys for boats on reef-diving trips; guidelines for the behaviour of tourists in public places.)
  
• How can communities be well informed about visitors and the impacts of tourism? (An example is workshops in village communities.)
  
• How can local people develop realistic expectations from tourism? (People may think that tourism will make everyone rich; a workshop could ensure that more accurate information is provided).
  
• How can money from tourism help protect and/or manage the natural environment? (A user-pays system of charges may be adopted.)
  
• How can appropriate activities be encouraged and inappropriate activities discouraged? (Guidelines and an enforcing system can be developed by the various stakeholders in tourism and conservation.)
  
• How should tourism operators and local people establish the appropriate size and type of tourism development? (It is very easy to destroy ecotourism by allowing damaging activities or too many tourists.)
  
• How can preference be given to local businesses and guides? (This can be written into the local development and/or management plans as policy and ensured through regular monitoring.)
  
• Is training available for local people, especially in natural history interpretation? (Local guides with knowledge of local biodiversity are generally highly valued by ecotourists.)
  
• How can monitoring of both the status of natural environment and societies be developed? (Every ecotourism partnership needs to establish a system which is effective for its own needs.)

Ecotourism and conservation: avoiding conflicts and building a mutually profitable relationship

Gerardo Budowski

What do conservationists resent and fear about the increase in ecotourism?

In Spanish there is a distinction between "ecologistas" and "ecólogos". The former are militant, often emotional fighters in the name of conservation. On the ecotourism issue, they resent the increasing number of tourists in natural areas because of their effects on the fauna and flora, local people, etc.; they assume that any hotel development will automatically disrupt the landscape and produce dangerous levels of pollution. Ecologistas usually have a scientific approach; they would like to see long-term planning and resent improvisation and laissez-faire attitudes. They feel that the arrival of more tourists will only benefit a small sector, often foreigners. They resent the glamour of tourism while the national parks service (or equivalent entity) struggle with few staff and scanty resources to face the tourist avalanche.

What do actors in the ecotourism industry reply to the conservationists?

They reply that ecotourism is a 'no chimney' industry, which provides jobs and wide circulation of dollars "before they get immobilized" (for instance in a bank). They claim that the arrival of tourists actually benefits and enhances protected areas instead of harming them, because of the new value derived. Without ecotourism, many natural areas — particularly forests and swamps — would be replaced by crops or grazing areas. They feel that the increase of ecotourism actually contributes to conservation, better knowledge of fauna and flora and the increase of local training and the production of publications and other diffusion materials. They make financial contributions to conservation and provide jobs as guides to many local biologists. They take credit for what are often new ways of 'developing' natural resources without destroying them, such as white-water rafting, careful design of ground (or aerial) trails, producing publications and training local people.

What do the ecotourists want?

There are many types of ecotourists, such as foreigners and nationals, young adventurers and elderly people, who need a high level of comfort. They basically want to enjoy a pleasant, instructive experience and are willing to pay for it according to their means. They want good guides, environmental 'sensitivity' by all the actors, security, good publications, maps and well-marked roads and fair pricing for the services rendered. They are willing to cope with unfavourable climatic factors but not with false promises about what they will see in their tours. Besides admiring nature and its biodiversity, they are often interested in local people and cultures and want an opportunity to establish contact.

How do you find common ground and a mutually rewarding relationship?

What is needed — and often lacking — is good communication among all actors. The local communities, the ecotourism industry and those claiming to defend the cause of conservation should get together, discuss problems and look for joint efforts and solutions. There are many options to explore, such as:

• training nature guides; this is obvious since guides who are experts in fauna and flora are usually 'natural' conservationists (special emphasis should be placed on training local guides, including language training);
  
• supporting national conservation efforts. National parks and other protected areas are great attractions to ecotourists; ways can be found to channel ecotourism benefits to support park management ability and proper facilities for visiting ecotourists;
  
• producing publications and other visual aids;
  
• organizing conferences, workshops and training activities;
  
• carrying out research on topics such as ecosystem resilience, attitude of local populations towards tourists, etc.;
  
• creating a local association for 'responsible ecotourism'; and
  
• giving awards to the actors of the ecotourist industry who are best fulfilling conservation requirements.

WTO (World Tourist Organization)/UNEP with IUCN, Guidelines: Development of National Parks and Protected Areas for Tourism, WTO, Madrid, 1992.

4.23 Compensation and substitution programmes

Barry Spergel

In a broad sense, all integrated conservation and development projects can be viewed as providing compensation or substitution to local people for conserving biodiversity.

Conservation can be furthered by programmes that provide compensation and substitution for:

• lost economic values of natural resources in a protected area to which people have been denied access; and
  
• voluntary agreement on the part of local people not to exploit cer-tain resources (such as forests) that remain in their possession.

• local people should not have to bear major economic sacrifices to protect biodiversity resources of global benefit; and
  
• compensation or appropriate substitutes will reduce local people's economic need to exploit protected resources.

Finding funds

The compensation or substitution approach begins by finding the funds to support the programme. Possible funding sources to pay compensation or substitution include:

• allocations from the national government's budget;
  
• grants by international donor agencies;
  
• a share of the annual revenues from park entry fees, tourist facilities, sustainable wildlife utilization or sustainable harvesting (this is the case of the Amboseli National Park in Kenya);
  
• new taxes or fees (e.g., French law permits local governments to impose an additional one per cent tax on all land sales in "scenic areas", to be used to compensate other landowners for agreeing not to develop their properties); and
  
• fines from corporate polluters (e.g., funds from the Exxon-Valdez oil spill were used to compensate native Alaskan communities on Kodiak Island for giving up certain development rights and transferring land parcels to a national wildlife refuge).

Calculating the amounts

Should the amount be based on the value of the subsistence benefits currently being derived, or the prospective commercial value of logging, mining or other economic development activities that are foregone? Will people accept compensation for less than the full commercial value of a resource because they receive intangible (e.g., cultural) benefits from its preservation? A complex process of negotiation is usually required to reach agreement on what constitutes fair and appropriate compensation. This is even more important with substitution programmes, since only rarely will it be possible to provide people with comparable tracts of unoccupied land. A guiding principle for substitution programmes should be to try to provide land, infrastructure and/or technical assistance that will enable people to earn the same incomes as before. Detailed rules and procedures for doing this have been worked out in some cases (e.g., the Lesotho Highlands Water Project), although in practice such rules may be controversial or complicated to administer.

Determining the beneficiaries

Should compensation be provided to all individuals suffering economic loss as a result of conservation activities? Or should compensation only be paid to those who have legal rights to occupy or use the land and other resources, or to those who enjoy customary or de facto rights? Should there be a cutoff point for recognizing a right to compensation, in order to exclude recent or future migrants to an area? If resource rights are held by a group rather than by individuals, should compensation or substitution be offered to the group or to the individual members? Offering compensation to the group rather than individuals may result in elites within the group monopolizing or diverting benefits; offering compensation to individuals, on the other hand, may be socially divisive, culturally inappropriate or result in compensation payments being quickly used up. In each case the answers to these questions will depend on cultural, political and legal factors.

Designing distribution mechanisms

Should compensation payments and non-cash substitution be distributed in one lump sum, or in a series of payments? The answer will partly depend on the source of the funds for compensation; a lump sum grant may be feasible from a government budget or an international donor agency, while a stream of revenues over time may be more practical from entry fees or resource 'rents'. Even where compensation is available in a lump sum, it may be better to invest it to create an endowment or trust fund which will generate a steady stream of interest or investment income over a long period of time. National-level, multi-million dollar biodiversity conservation trust funds have recently been established in almost 20 countries to support a variety of long-term conservation activities. These funds are generally governed by a board of directors composed of NGOs, government agencies, international donors and scientific experts. One of the purposes of these trust funds has been to offer socio-economic benefits and technological assistance to communities living near protected areas. Similar trust funds could be established specifically for the purpose of administering compensation payments over long periods of time to fund social benefits, infrastructure and technical assistance to people adversely affected by the establishment of a protected area.

Addressing adverse consequences

Potential adverse consequences include:

• effects of compensation schemes on existing social, political and economic relationships;
  
• creation of a sense of welfare dependency as a result of living off of regular cash compensation payments, rather than developing (or being helped to develop) alternative income sources; and
  
• threats that unless agreed compensation is increased or additional compensation is paid in the future, people will not honour their agreements to conserve biodiversity; and threats by neighbouring groups that they will not conserve biodiversity unless they are paid amounts of compensation comparable to what the first group has been paid.
  

• distributing compensation as 'rent' paid over time, rather than as a lump sum, so that compensation can be terminated if people fail to conserve biodiversity;
  
• using compensation to pay for services which benefit the group as a whole but which do not take away individuals' incentives to earn a living, (e.g., improved education and medical care, various forms of technical assistance and improved infrastructure); or using the compensation payments to establish a revolving loan fund (rather than simply giving grants with no strings attached);
  
• ensuring that the mechanisms for distributing compensation and substitution programmes are participatory and transparent, and that people fully understand that rights to compensation and substitution are in exchange for obligations to conserve biodiversity; and
  
• focusing compensation on cases where biodiversity resources are of global value, where the threat of their destruction is imminent, and where providing relatively modest amounts of compensation is likely to produce major changes in behaviour that support conservation goals.
  

• Kakadu National Park in Australia, which leases land from aboriginal groups for five-year periods and pays them annual rent;
  
• North York Moors National Park in the UK, where farmers who own land within the park are given cash grants for managing woodland and maintaining wildlife habitats on their land;
  
• the BOSCOSA Project in Costa Rica, where cash payments are made to farmers on the margins of Corcovado National Park reserve in exchange for putting their forested land under a conservation easement;
  
• Amboseli National Park in Kenya, where the Maasai were to receive up to 25 per cent of park entry fees, plus an annual "wildlife utilization fee" for leasing out hunting concessions on their communally-owned land adjacent to the park (this project ran into problems because the government banned hunting and failed to provide compensation as agreed);
  
• the Falealuppo Rainforest Reserve in Western Samoa, where cash was donated to build a village school in exchange for the villagers' agreeing not to sell logging rights to their rainforest for a 50-year period; and
  
• the American Samoa National Park, where villagers lease their land to the U.S. National Park Service for 50 years in exchange for annual rent payments, but retain certain uses and co-management rights.