What are the most effective methods of protecting, and hopefully restoring, the planet's biodiversity?
This is a key question underlying the work of
Tanya O'Garra, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. Tanya is an environmental economist with over 15 years’ experience conducting research on the valuation of ecosystem services and the collective management of shared natural resources. She has recently published a study on the effectiveness of community-based approaches to conservation and natural resource management.
David Austin: We really appreciate you joining us today. I was wondering if you could start just by giving us an overview and framing the problem of biodiversity loss for us.
Tanya O'Garra: Sure. So, thanks David. It's a real pleasure to be here. We are currently in the midst of what some scholars refer to as the sixth mass extinction event. What this means is that biodiversity, which is a term that we use to describe all living things on our planet, it's declining at a faster rate now than at any time in human history.
With some studies finding that the extinction rate is up to 1,000 times higher than anything previously experienced. And to put this in perspective, the previous mass extinction event took place about 65 million years ago and saw the end of the dinosaurs. It's generally attributed to a giant asteroid crashing somewhere around the Gulf of Mexico.
The current extinction event is actually being driven mostly by human activities, and I'm referring to agriculture, road building, urban sprawl, pollution, over consumption of resources, climate change and so on.
According to the 2019 global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services, 75 per cent of the Earth's land surface and 66 per cent of the ocean area has been significantly altered or impacted by human activities, and additionally, close to 90 per cent of the world's marine fish stocks are either exploited, fully exploited, over exploited or depleted.
We can all agree that these are quite shocking statistics and, and that something needs to be done if we still want to leave a world with forests and coral reefs and charismatic species to our children.
But focusing in on the Asia Pacific region most of the species losses are concentrated in the tropics, and the Asia Pacific region is particularly critical in this regard. Just to set the context, the Asia Pacific region is home to some of the most diverse terrestrial and marine ecosystems in the world. It contains 17 out of the 36 world's biodiversity hotspots. That's almost half, and more than half of the world's remaining mangroves are found here.
And yet we are experiencing devastating biodiversity losses on land. And in the marine environment due to over extraction of resources and pollution.
The implication of all this is profound both in terms of the losses, the intrinsic value of what we're losing when we lose nature, but also in terms of human wellbeing because we depend on, on nature for almost everything, for our economic activities, for recreation, for our health, for our culture, for our wellbeing. Healthy ecosystems also provide an essential climate regulation service, so they are very effective at absorbing and storing carbon. And we urgently need this in our efforts to deal with climate change.
And just to wrap up this doom and gloom scenario I'm painting here, there is hope and hopefully we'll talk about that in a moment.
But a recent assessment by the World Economic Forum puts our dependence on nature at about US$44 trillion per year which is just over half of global GDP. Homing into the Asia Pacific region, that proportion is more like 63 per cent. So as much as 63 per cent of Asia Pacific's GDP is at risk due to biodiversity and nature losses.
Biodiversity loss can be considered an existential threat alongside climate change.
David Austin: I know that you've been exploring other ways to either mitigate or restore biodiversity, and one of them is the community managed areas.
What do you mean by community managed area? What, what's the definition of that as far as how it plays out in real life?
Tanya O'Garra: Community-based management is not a new concept. It's been around since time immemorial. And it really refers to indigenous or local communities living with their land and interacting with the land, managing it as best as they can.
And community managed areas have a significant role to play in, in contributing to global biodiversity and climate targets. But also very importantly, they have a significant role to play in contributing to environmental justice. And I really want to highlight this point.
I think it's critical because ultimately these communities that we may be calling on to help us deal with our global challenges have played a marginal, if any, part in the twin climate and biodiversity crisis that we're currently experiencing. And indeed, the negative biodiversity trends that I've just been describing have on average been less severe or even avoided in areas held or managed by indigenous and local communities. And in 2018 there was a study published in Nature Sustainability, which mapped out indigenous lands at a global level, and they found that 28 per cent of the global land area, that's 28 per cent, is traditionally owned, managed, used, or occupied by indigenous peoples. And they found, additionally, they found that 67 per cent of indigenous people's lands could be classed as natural.
In other words, having a very low level of human interference. And this compares with 44 per cent of other lands on Earth.
So why does this matter? Well, first of all, we're talking 28 per cent, I'll keep coming back to that number because it is really quite substantial. But also, intact ecosystems, not only do they have far higher biodiversity levels than human affected ecosystems, but they also act as major carbon sinks.
They absorb and store large amounts of carbon dioxide. So, areas managed and occupied by indigenous communities may provide both biodiversity and carbon sequestration benefits.
But I want to make a side point – this study, and it's a brilliant study, but it only considered indigenous land and not land held by non-indigenous communities with longstanding relations to the land. So, if we also considered these other local communities that are not classed as indigenous, but which occupy use and manage lands, then the extent of global land area occupied by these as well as indigenous communities is likely to be far higher. So, the potential contribution of community managed areas is likely to be very substantial.
And this in the context of the recent global Biodiversity Frameworks 30 by 30 target is notable because the 30 by 30 target is a commitment made by many countries around the world to protect up to or at least 30 per cent of the global surface of the planet for reasons of habitat protection, carbon storage and to avoid further land use changes.
So, the fact that 28 per cent of the land areas occupied by indigenous communities should be seen as a hopeful sign if we were to consider them partners in our drive to deal with the biodiversity crisis.
David Austin: Thank you. I think that helps give us a better idea of what you're describing and to move from that general concept of the role of community managed areas to what is termed community-based natural resource management or CBNRM approaches. Can you help us understand what works and does not work in CBNRM?
Tanya O'Garra: So, when we talk about what works and what does not work, there's two possible questions.
One is about what works in what local communities have been doing since you know, hundreds of years ago. And the other question, which is really what I'm addressing is what works in terms of the kinds of support provided by external partners like conservation organisations? What works in terms of them helping communities that have lost some of these traditions that have been often separated from their lands?
What works in helping them regain revive their traditional practices and also revive their interest in sustainably managing the land because ultimately there have been histories of colonialism, appropriation of indigenous and local lands, exploitative systems, migrant migration from rural to urban environment that have caused these traditional systems of management to be weakened and undermined and lost.
There has been this increasing effort by conservation organisations to help bring back this community-based natural resource management.
And when we talk about, we don't know much about what works and what doesn't work, what we really mean is that there have been many studies, there have been a number of studies examining factors that correlate with success in these projects, but there had been no studies using causal methods that could ascertain whether the intervention by the conservation organisation actually caused the desired outcome. So, we had a sense of what kinds of things might be present when an intervention or a project led to improved fish catch, for example. But we weren't sure that those factors actually caused the effect or whether they just happened to be present at the same time.
This requires certain study designs to actually attribute an effect to an intervention and the most well known as the randomised controlled trial. But randomised control trials are not always possible. They're very expensive and sometimes you want to assess whether something works, without randomisation, you can't do randomisation. So, what you use is known broadly as a quasi-experimental design. Essentially these are statistical methods in which you select your study site, so they look as if you implemented a randomised control trial in the first place.
These are the kinds of methods that can be used to start identifying causally, does a community-based management intervention by a conservation organisation lead to the desired conservation outcomes?
David Austin: And do we have an answer? Do we know?
Tanya O'Garra: So, I wouldn't claim an answer. Our study, which is a collaboration between myself and partners from different conservation organisations and institutions around the world. What we did is we evaluated using these quasi-experimental methods, a community-based marine management initiative. And this particular initiative is known as the Fijian locally Managed Marine Areas Network. And I'm going to refer to it as FLMMA because it's quite a mouthful. But this is, as I say, it's a marine community-based management initiative, and it is, is currently estimated to include around 350 villages throughout Fiji, and these villages are supported by a variety of partners, including conservation organisations, government, scientists from the University of South Pacific and the FLMMA Secretariat.
And what we did is we quantified whether villages that were part of this network. And this is a network again, in which the partners help the villagers to revive and strengthen their traditional management approaches and so forth. What we wanted to identify is did participation in the network lead to social and conservation outcomes? We used this particular method known as propensity score matching to select FLMMA villages and control villages, so villages that were not part of this network, so that we could compare them and approximate causality. So, any estimates of impact could approximate causality. We did an additional thing which has not been done so much in the impact evaluation literature, which is we examined the mechanisms or the processes through which FLMMA anticipates its efforts to lead to impact.
And what we found interestingly, evaluating 146 villages across Fiji, is that participation in FLMMA led to improvements in all of the mechanisms, so the processes that are expected to deliver the final outcomes.
And these are increased participation in decision making, improved knowledge about your marine resources, improved management and access to finance and financial support. And so, villages that belong to FLMMA benefited in all these respects, and this is good news. The only thing is that we found that these mechanisms were not translating to the final outcomes.
There's lots of lessons to be derived from this. The first lesson is we really need to evaluate these projects and interventions so that we can learn whether they're working. It's a really good idea to look at the mechanisms that we expect will lead to the final impact because it allows for a diagnosis when we find that things aren't working, or it allows for the beginning of a diagnosis at least.
But we also contribute to our deeper understanding of does community-based management work. Now, I hesitate to say that our finding suggests that it doesn't work. This seems like a very dangerous conclusion to be drawn on the basis of one national level evaluation. We need to conduct many more studies across far broader range of community-based managed areas to really understand what's going on and how we can improve the efforts to support communities in helping us deal with the global biodiversity and climate challenges.
David Austin: What would the policy recommendations be to scale that up? Do you have any suggestions there?
Tanya O'Garra: That's a really good question. I would not start with the scaling up question yet. The first question I would address on the basis of our findings is why is it not working? That's really the first thing to be done before any scaling. The first thing is why are our efforts not leading to the expected outcomes?
And the kinds of questions that they might ask themselves during these meetings and these workshops are things like, well, we managed to increase participation, but participation isn't increasing many of these different outcomes. So, should we be focusing on participation of certain groups, for example, whose participation matters? Should we be more nuanced in how we encourage participation?
Another one is that despite increased management, or improved management, management was not leading to improved ecological conditions or improved fish catch.
So, the question is, why should we be thinking about management in more depth? Should there be more monitoring or more frequent monitoring, for example, Other broader questions they might ask themselves, are there other mechanisms we haven't even thought about or, or that should be implemented?
Things like behavioural pathways or behavioural interventions that might stimulate behaviour change in fishers and local community members. So, things such as the social marketing campaigns and edutainment. Is this another mechanism that is missing from our causal framework or our theory of change?
And finally, I think a really important one for them to discuss is, are there outside factors that are overriding all local efforts? And this is a really important one to consider. Is it possible that pollution from agricultural runoff or illegal fishing, is it possible that the impacts from these are overriding all local efforts? And therefore, have to be dealt with before the local efforts can lead to anything.
So that's the first thing that's needed before scaling. Once those diagnoses have been acted on and the intervention adapted, then we can start thinking about scaling this intervention.
David Austin: Okay. Thank you. I'd like to change gears a little bit and ask you your thoughts on Singapore's locally managed or protected marine areas. What can you share with us about that?
Tanya O'Garra: I've only been in Singapore for not that long, about a year. And I admit that when I arrived, I definitely did not associate Singapore with protected areas or, or locally managed marine areas. However, I was very pleased to discover that it does have a marine park. It's the Sisters Islands Marine Park which is currently closed to visitors but will be reopened in 2024.
And that was established in 2014 as Singapore's first and only marine protected area. I've also discovered that there are a number of nature reserves and there are two that encompass coastal ecosystems. One in the north, that's the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve. And then there's the Labrador Nature Reserve, that's a really nice nature reserve.
And these efforts to protect coastal and marine ecosystems in Singapore are extremely valuable because urbanisation and development impacts, including the extensive land reclamation that has taken place over the last decades have led to the loss of about 85 per cent of all mangroves and 60 per cent of coral reefs in Singaporean waters.
However, while ecosystems and habitats have declined in abundance in Singapore due to these various pressures, the diversity of species appears to have been maintained over time. In other words, the extinction rate has barely fluctuated which suggests quite high resilience of these species.
And not only resilient in terms of numbers of species, we also find that mangroves and corals are showing clear evidence of recovery from development impacts over the past decade. So, this is really good news for Singapore.
So, marine protected areas, nature reserves, they'll all contribute towards the act of recovery of the marine environment. And this is really important to safeguard the country's natural heritage for future generations. But it's also important to highlight that these sites protecting our natural heritage is also really important for public education purposes. So that people can appreciate the incredible marine biodiversity in their backyards. And this includes things like the critically endangered hawksbill turtles, which are found off nursing Singapore's shores.
There are other benefits, so there's scientific knowledge that is generated from the Sisters Islands Marine Park. This knowledge can provide really important insights into the kinds of conservation strategies that support healthy marine life in heavily used marine waters with heavy maritime traffic.
And these lessons learned are incredibly valuable to highly urbanised or urbanising cities and regions around the world that are also seeking to conserve their natural heritage. So, I'd say that not only do protected areas and natural reserves in Singapore do the job of protecting biodiversity, but they serve many purposes that can be capitalised on over time.
David Austin: It's nice to hear that there is still some resilience to our marine ecosystem. If I could broaden it out now a little bit to Southeast Asia, what do you think are the opportunities and challenges facing Southeast Asia's adoption of CBNRM?
Tanya O'Garra: Well, Southeast Asia has a long history of customary use, and management of land and marine resources with at least one third of the forests occupied and used by indigenous and local communities. Now actually, the precise coverage is unknown. But in fact, I'm collaborating on a project that will be mapping community managed forests in Southeast Asia.
So, watch this space. Hopefully, in a couple of years we'll have precise estimates. But returning to your question by strengthening the rights of these communities to use and manage their lands and coastal areas, and by supporting them in efforts to manage their resources, Southeast Asia can not only protect their incredibly valuable and diverse biodiversity and the nature-based carbon stock across huge areas of land and water, but it can do this sustainably and equitably.
Of course, there are many challenges ahead. Firstly, for community-based management to be effective, it must be built upon codified rights of local and indigenous communities to use and manage their lands. Without these rights, uncertainty and mistrust may counteract any desire of these communities to contribute to conservation efforts. So, rights are almost a first step.
Secondly, there are many current pressures on our environment that are best addressed using a combination of scientific knowledge and traditional knowledge. So, recognition of the importance of traditional and indigenous knowledge is essential, and that requires substantial change in how we think about knowledge and implementing new tools and techniques to manage our resources.
Thirdly, as I mentioned previously, if these communities are to help address the global biodiversity and climate crisis, then they need resources and support, and they need to be involved in all stages of the process. So, we can't expect them to take on the challenge of addressing these crises without rights, without support, without resources.
And without being fully engaged in the process, I'd say these are the major challenges that lie ahead. But the reality is that none of them are new. We just need to decide to tackle them now.
David Austin: Thank you so much Tanya for sharing all this with us. But if people want to learn more, where can they go to find out more information?
Tanya O'Garra: Well, thanks David. Well, my research is summarised in the latest Research Spotlight on the Global-
is-Asian website, and the title of the article is
Local Communities as Stewards of Biodiversity.
David Austin: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much. It's been a really educational conversation. I really appreciate it.
Tanya O'Garra: Thank you so much. Bye.