{"id":2172963,"date":"2024-01-23T06:00:06","date_gmt":"2024-01-23T05:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/?p=2172963"},"modified":"2024-01-19T07:58:00","modified_gmt":"2024-01-19T06:58:00","slug":"community-forestry-is-a-conservation-solution-in-nepal-qa-with-teri-allendorf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/community-forestry-is-a-conservation-solution-in-nepal-qa-with-teri-allendorf\/","title":{"rendered":"Community forestry is a conservation solution in Nepal: Q&A with Teri Allendorf"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nepal\u2019s community forestry program has been hailed as a success for helping increase the country\u2019s forest cover from 26% to 45% in 25 years. As part of the program, pioneered in the 1970s, communities manage their forests for their own use and benefits based on an operational plan approved by the divisional forest officer, a representative of the provincial government. Community members are allowed to collect wood up to a limit prescribed by the government based on the availability of wood and the prevailing conditions of the forest.<\/p>\n

Teri Allendorf, who holds a Ph.D. in conservation biology, has worked on issues of local communities and conservation since 1994 and has closely observed community conservation projects in Nepal, including community forestry. Allendorf, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal, currently leads Community Conservation Inc., an organization dedicated to promoting community-based approaches around the world.<\/p>\n

\"Allendorf<\/a>
Allendorf in Lumbini, Nepal, in 2022. Image courtesy of Community Conservation.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Mongabay\u2019s Abhaya Raj Joshi talked to Allendorf over a video call recently about the state of community forests in Nepal, their challenges and future prospects. The following interview has been edited for clarity.<\/p>\n

Mongabay<\/strong>: Could you tell us a bit about how Community Conservation as an organization was born and what is its main philosophy?<\/p>\n

Teri Allendorf:<\/strong> Community Conservation was founded by Robert Horwich, an ecologist and primatologist. He had gone to Belize to see the endangered howler monkeys in 1984 when he first met the local community and he started working with them.<\/p>\n

When he started working with the communities, he switched from being a natural scientist to a community-oriented conservation scientist after coming to a conclusion that communities are the solution to the biodiversity crisis.<\/p>\n

Talking about me, I got my Ph.D. in the \u201890s and was in the U.S. Peace Corps [an independent agency and program of the U.S. government that trains and deploys volunteers to provide international development assistance] in Nepal. I also made the switch like Rob did. This means that we understood that communities are really necessary to conserve biodiversity.<\/p>\n

To put our philosophy in a sentence, we\u2019d say it\u2019s \u201cCommunities are the solution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mongabay<\/strong>: How does it relate to Nepal, especially in the context of community forestry?<\/p>\n

Teri Allendorf<\/strong>: Communities have always been the solution. So, if you remember the Himalayan degradation theory in the \u201970s, they literally predicted Nepal would have no forest left by 2000. They said there would be no elephants or rhinos by the 1980s.<\/p>\n

Certainly, protected areas are what mainly saved the tigers and the rhinos, but if you look at the increase in forest cover, it has doubled, up to 46% from the low of 23%. A huge portion of that is because of the communities, and the pieces of land linking the protected areas are governed by communities.<\/p>\n

So, I think Nepal is amazing because it\u2019s a country where you can look over a period of 50 years and really see what communities have done.<\/p>\n

I think the current-day issue in Nepal is that sometimes you\u2019re in that world where conservationists and social scientists talk all about the problems. Because that\u2019s how we think. We\u2019ve got to make this better, we need to talk about equity. There\u2019s not enough income, the right access. There\u2019s all these that have always been issues and probably will continue to be. But if you look at the trajectory, it\u2019s amazing. What Nepal has accomplished is because of so many champions. It wasn\u2019t easy. No government ever wants to give up power to communities.<\/p>\n

\"Women<\/a>
Women from the Binayi Community Forest User Group collect lantana for green manure. Image by Chandra Shekhar Karki\/CIFOR via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Mongabay<\/strong>: In Nepal, everything is politicized and questions have been raised about the way community forestry is run and the way it elects its leadership. So, do you think that is going to affect the future prospects of the program?<\/p>\n

Obviously, politics is core to anything happening in governance or the management of natural resources. So yeah, we see it every day and we\u2019re kind of in the middle of it because it\u2019s always been political. I\u2019m not a political scientist. So, I wouldn\u2019t want to say too much about it. But obviously every time we go to the field, I try to remain unaware because for me, which party someone belongs to is not critical, but you have to know all that stuff.<\/p>\n

I would say over time there\u2019s always issues like that. Like now, we tend to be politicized because of decentralization and the way the government and the politics have gone, but you had elite capture back in the \u201890s, right? So, there\u2019s always this issue of who\u2019s controlling the resources and who has the power.<\/p>\n

Mongabay<\/strong>: So, what do you think is one thing that made the community program work, because a lot of other efforts in conservation, such as the management of protected areas and in the economic front, also the country couldn\u2019t make a lot of progress during that same period \u2014 but community forestry was an exception. What was the one thing that made it work?<\/p>\n

Teri Allendorf<\/strong>: Because it meets a whole bunch of people\u2019s values. So, if you look at individuals and communities and what they need, they need to help the environment. They need natural resources. That\u2019s the forest. They rely on that for the air they breathe.<\/p>\n

People know they need to protect the forests. I always say we don\u2019t need to convince people to conserve natural resources and the environment. We have to help support them to provide ways.<\/p>\n

Communities are not homogeneous. When I look at people\u2019s values and attitudes and communities, it\u2019s not that every individual feels the same. It\u2019s just that those values are there and different people hold them in different ways. But everyone basically wants their environment to be better.<\/p>\n

Mongabay<\/strong>: To clarify your statement, could you please give a tangible example for our readers?<\/p>\n

Teri Allendorf<\/strong>: In Nepal\u2019s Bardiya [in the western part of the country], I met a woman, Laxmi Gurung, in 1994. I was wandering into the communities doing my interviews for my Ph.D. We sat down and I asked her, \u2018Why do you think we need protected areas?\u2019 and she started talking about the elephants. When I asked her if the elephants come and eat her harvest and cause problems, she said, \u2018Yeah, but they\u2019re so amazing.\u2019 She said, \u2018They\u2019re strong and just awesome to look at.\u2019 I just appreciate that.<\/p>\n

She was surprised when I told her that we don\u2019t have elephants in the U.S. So, we can say that she was valuing the elephants without even knowing that they were rare and needed to be protected. If you walk into any village, the people will give you the whole diversity of values for their biodiversity from recreational, aesthetic, to even economic and social.<\/p>\n

\"Allendorf<\/a>
Allendorf with a community-based anti-poaching unit in a village in Chitwan National Park\u2019s buffer zone in 2014. Image courtesy of Community Conservation.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Mongabay<\/strong>: What about the lack of conservation expertise in the local communities? Conservationists say that community forest user groups focus on harvesting timber alone and don\u2019t know much about conserving the wildlife?<\/p>\n

Terri Allendorf<\/strong>: First, let me talk about the incentive for working on conservation projects. We\u2019ve seen that people volunteer to participate because it gives them a social standing. For example, when we trained members of the communities as conservation volunteers, their social standing improved. The same model has been applied to the community-based female health volunteer program, which is another success story for Nepal. I would love to see the same sort of idea applied to conservation so that each community has conservation experts.<\/p>\n

So, when people say communities are only interested in making money from timber, it\u2019s like saying they don\u2019t want to or they\u2019re not really interested in other revenue generation things. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s true. I think certain individuals want to make money and extract money if they can, but then there are going to be people who say that\u2019s not sustainable.<\/p>\n

The reason people don\u2019t link community forests with wildlife is because the government isn\u2019t talking about that piece of it and they\u2019re not supporting it at the local level.<\/p>\n

Mongabay<\/strong>: There\u2019s also this issue of caste in Nepal. People from the so-called \u201clower castes\u201d don\u2019t have access to resources and the so-called \u201cupper class\u201d people run the show.<\/p>\n

Teri Allendorf<\/strong>: Well, certainly it\u2019s something that needs improvement. But it\u2019s something that has improved greatly since the 1990s. We can see progress in ensuring that the requirements of the poor are met.<\/p>\n

Mongabay<\/strong>: In Nepal\u2019s southern plains, we have a network of interconnected protected areas that provide corridors for animals such as tigers and elephants to move from east to west and vice versa. But a crucial corridor in the east joining the Parsa National Park and Koshi Tappu Wildlife Reserve doesn\u2019t have a protected area. How can communities step in to address this issue?<\/p>\n

Teri Allendorf<\/strong>: There are different models people are starting to use these days for protection happening in more nontraditional ways. And I think that that\u2019s our vision for that corridor. If you look at the maps, you can see where the good forests are, and during our interviews with people, they said they are ready to work on conservation. We can link these community forests across the landscape. They can be sharing data about what wildlife they have and do their own camera trapping. It doesn\u2019t have to be a national park or NGO staff doing this.<\/p>\n

Mongabay<\/strong>: In Nepal, we\u2019re seeing this mass exodus of young people going abroad for work and study in the past decade. With so many people leaving the country, what would be of the next generation of community forest champions?<\/p>\n

Teri Allendorf<\/strong>: Yeah, it\u2019s hard to know. I think the glass is half-full and half-empty. We can think about all the problems that we\u2019re going to have and we are having, on the other hand. If you look around the world, the more exposure and education and income people have, they often go home. They often want to go back to their roots. They often want to support projects where they came from to do good things.<\/p>\n

So, the more exposure Nepalis have to the wider world, I think the more they\u2019re going to want to bring those things back home.<\/p>\n

That just reminds me of Wisconsin where we, at one point, were losing all the family farms as all the young people were moving out and the big corporations were buying. We thought we\u2019re going to have no small farmers left, and the whole culture is going to be destroyed.<\/p>\n

But in the last few years, we had all these young people come home. They bought a bunch of small farms and they did like goats and cheese and middle-class type farming, right? They were producing corn and things.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m trying to stay positive, as people like their environment. They will protect it if they have the chance to do so.<\/p>\n

This article<\/a> by Abhaya Raj Joshi was first published by Mongabay.com on 20 December 2023. Lead Image: A rufous sibia, a bird commonly found in Nepal\u2019s forests. Image by Martha de Jong-Lantink via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).<\/i><\/p>\n

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