Balancing human needs
with preservation
in Madagascar
BY JANET BASU
Masoala is one of those
remote versions of paradise that seems utterly logical to
protect as a nature preserve. An isolated peninsula
sticking out like an opposable thumb on the east of the
island of Madagascar, it holds the nation's last large
rainforest, a lush and virtually unexplored wilderness
that is home to some of the rarest animals on Earth,
including wide-eyed lemurs and a serpent eagle once
thought to be extinct.
Yet the new
840-square-mile Masoala National Park, officially
dedicated Oct. 18-19 by the people of the Malagasy
Republic, is in a region where eventual destruction of
the wilderness seemed inevitable because local residents
were dependent on slash-and-burn rice farming to survive.
A former reserve here lost
its protected status years ago, and planners of the new
park knew they must draw its boundaries not only to
preserve rare species but to offer a better livelihood
for the 45,000 people who live on the peninsula.
"Unless the needs of the local people are
considered, they have no choice but to continue with
their traditional land use practices, leaving them in
poverty, with both the land and biodiversity
devastated," said Claire Kremen, a research
associate with Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology
(CCB). "The future of the park requires that people
be able to support themselves and better their lives
without the temptation to cut down the forest."
Kremen (Stanford B.S. '82)
holds a joint appointment with CCB and as an associate
conservationist for the Wildlife Conservation Society
(WCS). She led the planning team that designed the park
for an international consortium that includes the
Madagascar government, the WCS, CARE International, the
Peregrine Fund and the people of Masoala.
Integrated conservation
and development programs have been devised for existing
nature preserves, but Kremen said to her knowledge this
is the first time a major preserve has been designed from
its outset on both scientific and socioeconomic
principles.
In consultation with local
communities, Masoala's planners sought to preserve
natural habitats while respecting the traditional
boundaries of villages. A long-term management plan is
being implemented for the park and its surrounding
waters. To help villagers better their lives yet sustain
the forest, work is under way to build markets for
renewable resources, such as ecotourism, butterfly
farming and the sale of individually cut trees to buyers
of high-value "certified sustainable" wood.
Kremen said,
"Madagascar can be proud of this model
accomplishment. It is a great victory for biodiversity
and humanity, and an opportunity to protect the nation's
unique species far into the future. The establishment of
the Masoala National Park is an extraordinary and
inspiring story, of people coming together from many
disciplines, social strata, nationalities and ideologies,
to create a common vision for sustainable management of a
region of both exceptional biological richness and
economic potential."
Satellite maps and
ground truth
Planning for the park took
place during an intensive three-year campaign by a
consortium of the Malagasy Parks Board and Malagasy
Forestry Department and international non-governmental
organizations. Most of the scientific data was collected
by two teams: biologists led by Kremen and noted Malagasy
conservation biologist Vincent Razafimahatratra; and
village surveyors, 20 local Masoalans trained by Jocelyn
Rakotomalala of CARE.
The teams started with
topographic maps and satellite imagery provided by the
Missouri Botanical Garden and the U.S. Geological Survey,
to chart the rugged terrain and the vegetation of the
1,500-square-mile peninsula. At Stanford, Center for
Conservation Biology scientist Andrew Weiss and a crew of
undergraduates began the laborious task of entering
contours, hydrology and settlement data into a Geographic
Information System (GIS), a multi-layered set of maps
that was used by the planning team to analyze the
scientific and human dimensions of the park's design.
The biology and village
survey teams set out to find the "ground truth"
of these maps. The bulk of their work had to be conducted
over 15 months, by tramping over steep, steaming,
forested terrain with no roads, even between villages.
Locations were recorded in the field using
satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS)
instruments. Locations and data about the settlements and
biology were sent to the Center for Conservation Biology
and integrated into the GIS maps.
The task was to establish
a scientific basis for choosing which parts of the
peninsula to set aside as most crucial to support the
peninsula's rich diversity of species, and how much
forest to leave outside the preserve as a functional
buffer and support zone in which to develop sustainable
economic alternatives to forest destruction. Using the
GIS system, the project's scientists and managers could
produce analyses and maps that proved crucial in
presenting the park plans to the government and decision
makers.
The stakes were high.
Masoala is the largest untouched wilderness on
Madagascar, an island isolated from nearby Africa for
hundreds of millions of years and home to thousands of
species found nowhere else on earth. Some, such as the
red-ruffed lemur, the gigantic palm Marojejya darianii
and the carnivorous pitcher plant, Nepenthes masoala,
are found only on this peninsula.
At strategically located
sampling sites, Kremen, Razafimahatratra and a team of
dedicated Malagasy students conducted biodiversity
inventories of birds, mammals, selected insect taxa and
one of the world's most diverse collection of palms. They
assessed the potential influence on diversity of
gradients in rainfall, elevation, soil type, distance
along the peninsula and distance from the forest's edge
into the forest.
Butterflies show
the way
To find out how many
different types of terrain should be protected, they
relied in part on work that Kremen and colleagues at the
Natural History Museum in London had done earlier,
studying a group of brown "wood nymph"
butterflies that have differentiated into more than 60
different species across Madagascar. Each species
occupies its own niche; the butterflies are an indicator
that different types of soil, moisture and other
conditions support a different mix of plants and animals
in each of those habitat types.
It was the first time that
this application of butterflies as an "indicator
species" was used to design a nature preserve.
To find out how large an
area should be protected, the scientists assessed the
ranges needed by wide-foraging animals like red-ruffed
lemurs and the Madagascar serpent eagle, a species feared
extinct, but rediscovered by the Peregrine Fund during
the surveys.
Meanwhile, Rakotomalala
went to work with his village survey teams, many of them
local residents, often with little formal education
because of the remoteness of their region. They canvassed
the peninsula's populated region to learn the people's
source of food and income, and to map out the areas of
nearby forest that the villagers considered to be their
traditional territory, even if they did not officially
own the land.
Most of the people on the
peninsula cluster near the coastlines and on the eastern
border of the forest. Using the GIS maps, Kremen and her
colleagues found that 369 square miles already had been
deforested from slash and burn farming, and that the
forests on low slopes near human habitation were at
greatest risk from further deforestation. Forestry expert
Philip Guillery of the Wildlife Conservation Society used
the GIS data to predict which areas would be best for
sustainable tree harvesting cutting individual trees
and transporting them by rivers rather than by cutting
new roads.
These analyses showed that
the forested zones most useful for people also were the
areas where the forest already was seriously threatened.
The planners proposed that this land should be designated
as outside the core protected area, and used instead as a
multiple-use management area. "The multiple-use zone
would ultimately prevent the spread of deforestation into
the core protected area while providing a more than
adequate substitute for the slash-and-burn subsistence
economy in this zone," Kremen said.
The result was a proposal
for Madagascar's largest national park, a protected area
covering half of the peninsula with a corridor to the
mainland that may one day be extended to the next nearest
wildlife preserve. It included management plans for 380
square miles of multiple-use forests bordering the park
and protection for nearby coral reefs. The proposal's
core is an economic strategy that provides incentives for
local people to manage the forest and coastlines for
timber and non-timber products, to prevent large-scale
environmental destruction.
Guillery since has worked
extensively with a village whose woodcutters have taken
special training to learn sustainable tree harvesting
techniques. This year, they made a modest profit, part of
which the village leaders plan to invest in a clinic or a
school.
Meanwhile, Germaine Tsizas
of CARE, the national project director who pushed the
technical proposal through many layers of government,
escorted the elders of Masoala villages to other regions
of Madagascar to see the completely denuded and
unproductive landscape left by long-term slash-and-burn
farming. Most of the elders declared their interest in
learning new farm methods, and CARE is now working with
villagers to improve irrigated rice productivity, reduce
fallow times through crop rotation and diversification,
and bring farming produce to local markets.
Examples like these, plus
the respect for local preferences shown by the planning
team, meant that the park had strong local support when
the government held hearings on its fate.
The Masoala project was
backed by funds from the U.S. Agency for International
Development and has been strongly supported by the U.S.
ambassador to the Malagasy Republic, Vickie Huddlestone.
The Netherlands government currently is underwriting the
park's sustainable management project.
While the people of
Madagascar celebrate their new and largest national park,
several of the people who worked hardest to plan it were
not present. Razafimahatratra died of a heart attack in
June; Tsizas died in a drowning accident only weeks after
learning of the park's final ratification in July. Kremen
was on the other side of the globe, attending a meeting
of ecologists at the Bodega Marine Laboratory in Northern
California to discuss how preserves like Masoala can
serve as model systems to learn how to protect other
vanishing natural systems.
Kremen said the future of
Masoala's rich and fascinating wilderness is by no means
assured. Population pressures still could overwhelm its
residents, and global change could disrupt its
ecosystems.
"Everything depends
on the ability of CARE, the Wildlife Conservation Society
and the Malagasy government to implement the sustainable
management plans around the peninsula, and to adapt them
over time to changing circumstances," she said. SR
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