There’s more to conservation than wildlife

Conservation activities can benefit local people, but they can also do them serious harm. In Peru, for example, the creation of a national park to conserve local crop varieties benefited the local indigenous people, who help to manage the park, as well as biodiversity. This is in sharp contrast to the fate of the San people in South Africa. Their human rights have frequently been ignored and many have been driven from their ancestral lands to make way for protected areas.

A major study published by CIFOR and the International Union for Nature Conservation (IUCN), ‘Rights-based approaches: Exploring issues and opportunities for conservation’, suggests that conservation-related conflicts need not, and should not, happen.

The book includes an eclectic range of case studies, examining everything from water rights in Jordan to the rights of Sherpa communities in Nepal and forest dwellers in Bolivia. ‘The case studies help shed light on the way in which rights holders, such as indigenous people, and duty bearers, which might include government agencies, can work constructively together,’ says co-editor Terry Sunderland, a CIFOR scientist and member of IUCN’s Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy.

The book helped to shape IUCN’s first comprehensive resolution on rights-based approaches to conservation. It calls on IUCN’s 1000-plus members to develop rights-based approaches to conservation. It encourages government agencies and civil society organisations to monitor the impact of conservation activities on human rights. And it encourages its members to establish mechanisms to ensure that private sector interests respect human rights and take responsibility for the environmental and social damage their activities cause.