Communities in conservation: Protected area management and enhanced conservation in Bangladesh

In the last few decades, the natural resource base of most developing countries has decreased alarmingly because of enormous population pressure and extreme poverty. Bangladesh is no exception, having lost most of its forest in the last 30 years. The Government of Bangladesh (GoB) has adopted various approaches to conserve the country’s remaining biodiversity, including protected areas (PAs). However, the creation of PAs alone has not produced positive conservation results as expected, due to a purely ecological focus that excluded the needs of local forestdependent people. The introduction of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) for nature conservation in PAs is relatively new for Bangladesh compared to other South Asian countries, but it seems to have effected significant changes. The GoB recently adopted CBNRM in five of its PAs as part of a pilot programme in collaborative management. This paper is a case study of the changing trends in PA management, people’s livelihoods and attitudes in and around one of these pilot sites. We observed that some changes have already taken place in forest resource collection patterns and in the attitudes of people in the locality. People’s income sources and dependency on protected forests have also noticeably shifted away from forest areas in the Communities in conservation: protected area management and enhanced conservation in Bangladesh last year. Although gradual, people’s participation seems to be changing the direction of future forest conservation in Bangladesh. We conclude that bringing a larger number of people under various income-generating schemes, clearly defining the rights and responsibilities of the local people in PAs and ensuring more effective governance should be the next steps for the future of participatory management in the country

Local peoples' response to co-management in protected areas: A case study from Satchari National Park, Bangladesh

Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) is a rather recent and widely promoted, and hence, accepted paradigm for managing protected areas in most developing countries. Protected area managers in Bangladesh face challenges because of the complex sociocultural and political dynamics that result from the high population densities and extreme poverty of people living in or near lands designated for conservation. In recent years the government of Bangladesh, with active support from international aid and conservation agencies, has tried to develop a holistic approach to protected area management involving forest communities and user groups. This study seeks to explore the initial response to such intervention in a newly declared protected area in order to gain insights about wider implications in other parts of the country. The study was conducted between January 2006 and January 2007 in four villages located in or near Satchari National Park. Results suggest considerable change took place in household forest resource collection patterns, and people's dependency on non-forest income increased significantly during the project implementation period. The study also indicated that although changes occurred slowly, they brought improvements to the livelihoods of those relying on local forests

Bringing multiple values to the table: assessing future land-use and climate change in North Kona, Hawaiʻi

As ecosystem service assessments increasingly contribute to decisions about managing Earth's lands and waters, there is a growing need to understand the diverse ways that people use and value landscapes. However, these assessments rarely incorporate the value of landscapes to communities with strong cultural and generational ties to place, precluding inclusion of these values - alongside others - into planning processes. We developed a process to evaluate trade-offs and synergies in ecosystem services across land-use scenarios and under climate change in North Kona, Hawaiʻi, a tropical dry ecosystem where water, fire, biodiversity, and cultural values are all critical considerations for land management decisions. Specifically, we combined participatory deliberative methods, ecosystem service models, vegetation surveys, and document analysis to evaluate how cultural services, regulating services (groundwater recharge, landscape flammability reduction), biodiversity, and revenue: (1) vary across four land-use scenarios (pasture, coffee, agroforestry, and native forest restoration) and (2) are expected to vary with climate change (representative concentration pathway (RCP) 8.5 mid-century scenario). The native forest restoration scenario provided high cultural, biodiversity, and ecosystem service value, whereas coffee's strongest benefit was monetary return. The agroforestry scenario offered the greatest potential in terms of maximizing multiple services. Pasture had relatively low ecological and economic value but, as with native forest and agroforestry, held high value in terms of local knowledge and cultural connection to place. Climate change amplified existing vulnerabilities for groundwater recharge and landscape flammability, but resulted in few shifts in the ranking of land-use scenarios. Our results demonstrate that cultural services need not be sacrificed at the expense of other management objectives if they are deliberately included in land-use planning from the start. Meaningfully representing what matters most to diverse groups of people, now and under a changing climate, requires greater integration of participatory methods into ecosystem service analyses

Health and wellbeing benefits from nature experiences in tropical settings depend on strength of connection to nature

10.3390/ijerph181910149International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health18191014