McNeely, Jeffrey A.

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PublicationsRealising REDD+: National strategy andpolicy options edited by A. Angelsen withM. Brockhaus, M. Kanninen, E. Sills, W.D.Sunderlin & S. Wertz-Kanounnikoff (2009),xxiv + 362 pp., CIFOR, Bogor, Indonesia.ISBN 9786028693035 (pbk), also availablefrom http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/publications/pdf_ﬁles/Books/BAngelsen0902.pdfREDD+ is widely perceived as the nextbest thing in forest conservation. Linkingthe ﬁnances from carbon trading with sus-tainable forest management and with arecognition of biodiversity and livelihoodsprovides a seemingly perfect scenario.REDD+ has emerged as global initiativebut a global system for implementation hasnot yet been fully ﬁnalized. Discussions aretaking place through the United NationsFramework Convention on Climate Change(UNFCC) and are likely to continue for thenext fewyears. This bookprovides a valuablereference on the realities of REDD+, out-lining what it currently is and what it couldbecome.In this book REDD+ is used as anumbrella term for local, national and globalactions that reduce emissions from defores-tation and forest degradation and enhancecarbon stocks in developing countries. Theplus symbol signiﬁes an enhancement ofcarbon stock through positive measures offorest regeneration and rehabilitation, nega-tive degradation, negative emissions, carbonuptake and carbon removals. The purpose ofthe book is to inform the development ofnational strategies, policies and demonstra-tion activities for implementation of REDD+as well as providing a reality check for thosedesigning the global REDD+ architecture.Given the potential importance of the initia-tive, all involved in biodiversity conservationand its funding are likely to ﬁnd thispublication of interest. There is a lot to digestin the multi-authored chapters and as ananalytical overview and source book it servesits purposes very well. The national casestudies provide a reality check against thebackground analyses of causes of defore-station and discussions of policies andinstitutions.At present, mechanisms for incorpora-tion of REDD+ into a post-2012 climateregime consist of three mechanisms atnational level. In the ﬁrst preparatory orreadiness phase, countries prepare a na-tional strategy based on consultation withinterested parties, start building capacityin monitoring, reporting and veriﬁcation(MRV) of changes in forest carbon stocksand begin demonstration activities. Build-ing capacity in MRV is considered in itselfto be very challenging for the majority oftropical forest countries that stand to ben-eﬁt from REDD+. Building capacity andfostering dialogue are currently the maincomponents of the ofﬁcial UNFCC process.At the same time actual REDD+ proj-ects are planned in a number of countries.As noted in this publication CIFOR hasidentiﬁed about 60 potential ﬁrst generationREDD+ projects. Looking at the threecountries with the largest existing forestcarbon stock, Indonesia has 35 projectsplanned with one already operating, Brazilhas 20, with two projects operational, andthe Democratic Republic of Congo has fourplanned. DRC’s projects include support forcommunity managed reserves in the easternpart of the country. In Indonesia pilotprojects have been developed, for examplein protected areas in Central and EastKalimantan, with the involvement of thecentral and provincial governments. Chal-lenges in the Indonesian projects include theneed to build capacity, and deal with rightsand responsibilities of local communities,land tenure insecurity faced by smallholdersand forest rent enjoyed by large landholders.So will REDD+ work when previousattempts to tackle deforestation have fun-damentally failed? Sunderlin & Atmadja inchapter 4 suggest that the substantial levelsof new funding, up to USD 10 billionannually in initial phases, gives ‘forestsa chance to survive against the proﬁts offurther conversion (opportunity costs) thathave been the bane of forest protectionworldwide’. They suggest that three ele-ments for success are necessary: learnfrom past failures in forest conversionand management, consider political willand, because of the possible paralysis ofpolitical will, mobilize popular supportwith new alliances across all sectors callingfor an end to deforestation. A revival of1980s rainforest campaigning? The differ-ence this time seems to be that the differentbodies are working together—tropical for-est governments, bilateral aid agencies,NGOs and investment banks working toa common agenda rather than in outrightopposition! The FFI–Macquarie taskforceis noted as a partnership between an inter-national environmental NGO and a ﬁnancialinstitution.And there is now money on the table.At the Oslo Climate and Forest Conferenceon 27 May 2010, for example, Germany,France, Norway, the USA, Britain, Australiaand Japan pledged USD 4 billion to ﬁnanceREDD+ through 2012, and Denmark andSweden pledged a further USD 73 millionmore to the effort. A newmonitoring agencywill be established in Cancun to monitorimplementation.As noted in the book, for many involvedin forest conservation REDD+ is not a newconcept, but rather a new funding sourceto ﬁnance pre-existing goals. So the chal-lenges are still immense, but overall thetone of the book is cautiously optimisticand given the scale of the world’s environ-mental problems perhaps that is all we canhope for.SARA OLDFIELD Botanic Gardens Conserva-tion International, Richmond, UKE-mail sara.oldﬁeld@bgci.orgNature’s Matrix: Linking Agriculture,Conservation and Food Sovereigntyby Ivette Perfecto, John Vandermeer andAngus Wright (2009), x + 242 pp., Earthscan,London, UK. ISBN 9781844077816 (hbk),GBP 85.00; ISBN 9781844077823 (pbk),GBP 24.95.The readers of this journal will already bewell aware of the parlous state of biodiver-sity. Nature’s Matrix makes a very reason-able argument that the biodiversity crisiscannot be separated from the production offood and the political unrest that character-izes much of the tropical world that isrichest in biodiversity. It highlights theignorance of fundamental ecosystem pro-cesses and the role that humans play indetermining their productivity, and arguesthat accepting the current dominant polit-ical ideologies as universal and sacrosanctis highly arrogant and hardly supported bythe evidence. The authors’ solution: recog-nize the small farmers as the most powerfulallies in the effort to conserve biodiversity.They draw on evidence, mostly from LatinAmerica, in support of this argument,drawing on the familiar examples of shadecoffee in Central America, cacao in Brazil,and rice cultivation in parts of Asia to makethe point that it is far better to manageagro-ecosystems to prevent problems fromarising than depend on agronomists tosolve problems after they have appeared.‘Agronomists seek to solve problems, agro-ecologists seek to prevent them,’ a point theauthors—agro-ecologists all—seek to dem-onstrate with this book.ª 2010 Fauna & Flora International, Oryx, 44(3), 459–461 doi:10.1017/S0030605310000645https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0030605310000657Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 11 Jul 2017 at 09:43:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available atWhile much of the book seems to bringback the now-discredited so-called noblesavage approach, it makes the reasonablecase that a social movement for foodsovereignty will be based on productionsystems that will conserve biodiversity andbuild on the functioning of the local eco-systems. Fair enough, but what about themany parts of the tropics where the land isbeing abused. Haiti is only the most dra-matic example but many others could bequoted. The book applauds the ‘fundamen-tal right of farmers to land, water, seeds andother means of production,’ yet says littleabout the many conﬂicts over these keyinputs, especially as populations increaseand large corporate farmers become moreattractive to those providing food to thegrowing urban consumers. While it is rea-sonable to support social movements forfood sovereignty, ignoring the impacts ofthe wealthy is likely to make such supportmore difﬁcult rather than easier.A more important concern for the read-ers of this journal is that the authorsrepeatedly cite extinction as a normal pro-cess, and consider the charismatic mega-fauna as doomed to probable extinction,despite all the efforts seeking to avoidsuch a fate. They want us to be more con-cerned about bacteria and other soil micro-organisms (which undoubtedly do deservemore attention), while downplaying themammals that ‘happen to look more orless like us.’ Bats, mole rats, sperm whales,and indeed most other mammals hardly ﬁtthis description, but this is a minor issuecompared to some of the fundamental eco-logical arguments the book makes. Forexample, to argue that ‘species diversitytends to decrease as the intensity of man-agement of the ecosystem increases’ onlyholds for agricultural lands; many pro-tected areas being managed to maintainhigh biodiversity require intensive effort toachieve their goal. Perhaps recognizingthose seeking to conserve biodiversity as‘resource managers’ rather than ‘conserva-tion practitioners’ would give the authorsa broader perspective. Their repeated argu-ment that stopping extinctions is bad con-servation policy will not convince many ofus, especially when so many extinctions arethe result of human actions that could beavoided. The current rate of extinction iswidely agreed to be about 100 to 1,000 timesthe normal background rate, but this fairlyfundamental ﬁgure is not cited or refuted inthis book, which instead argues that agro-ecosystems are ‘critical repositories of bio-diversity.’ While this may well hold formany species, it can hardly be accepted asa generality for biodiversity (which is neveractually deﬁned in the book). Certainlywell-managed and diverse agriculturallandscapes can support numerous species,and do so in many parts of the tropics.Thus the argument of maintaining diversityin the agricultural landscape is well takenand deserving of support. But this is onlypart of the story, as over half of the planet’sland is not used for agriculture and needsto be managed better to conserve biodiver-sity. Further, the Millennium EcosystemAssessment identiﬁed invasive (non-native)species as one of the ﬁve major drivers ofecosystem degradation, yet this book seemsto welcome these additions to ecosystems(considering them as part of ‘migrationrates’) as a way of replacing the speciesthat have unfortunately been driven toextinction.Bottom line: the book argues that ‘aserious conservation programme should fo-cus on the type of agriculture practicedwithin the matrix, rather than on whathappens solely in the fragments of naturalhabitat.’ But this either–or argument makesthe choice too stark. Rather, we need tomanage the matrix as a whole, giving ap-propriate attention to all parts of the land-scape and working closely with the peopleliving on the land, with some of us devotingparticular attention to those areas richest inbiodiversity while others seek to managetheir agricultural lands to contribute to theoverall social goal of maintaining the livingwealth of our planet.JEFFREY A. MCNEELY IUCN, Gland,Switzerland. E-mail JAM@iucn.orgIsland Bats: Evolution, Ecology, &Conservation edited by Theodore H. Flemingand Paul Racey (2010), vi + 547 pp., TheUniversity of Chicago Press, Chicago, USA.ISBN 9780226253305 (hbk), USD 65.00/GBP45.00.As someone whose work deals exclusivelywith British bats, this book opened the doorto an entirely different dimension of the batworld to me. The result of a symposium onisland bats held at the 2004 annual meetingof the Association for Tropical Biology andConservation, the book is a collection ofnew research surrounding this vast subject.The introduction of the book providesa useful background of how various re-search surrounding tropical island biologyhas contributed to our understanding ofevolutionary, ecological and conservationalthinking. It also offers a fundamentalinsight into the problems facing tropicalisland ecosystems, both historic and recent,as well as summarising the features ofisland bats and other species, thus pro-viding a practical foundation of knowledgeon the subject that prepares the reader forthe beeﬁer topics of research that the bookgoes on to present.Part one, discussing evolution of islandbats, contains four chapters that presentnew research and hypotheses surroundingthis subject. The section begins with a chap-ter from Heaney and Roberts, who explainhow different methods of measuring ge-netic variation in Philippine fruit bats canbe combined to provide a clearer picture ofevolutionary history of populations of thesespecies. The next two chapters both look athow sea barriers have affected dispersal andgenetic variation in fruit bats in southernWallacea and the Caribbean respectively,demonstrating how bat dispersal has onlybeen possible during periods of very lowsea level. In the ﬁnal chapter in this section,Fleming et al. propose and test four hypoth-eses on dispersal by undertaking statisticalanalyses of data from three phyllostomid batlineages. They relate this work back to theresearch presented in the ﬁrst chapter, givingthis section of the book a well-rounded feel.Part two is the largest section of thebook, containing seven chapters exploringthe ecology of island bats. The ﬁrst chapterin this section provides an excellent startingpoint by exploring endemism in islandspecies and the factors that inﬂuencelong-term persistence. Chapter 6 goes onto present an extensive study on the roles ofpteropodid bats in re-establishing tropicalforests of Krakatau, concluding that thesigniﬁcance of the role of bats has beenpreviously underestimated. Interestingly,the authors also demonstrate the potentialimplications of this study on other oceanicislands and fragmented habitats. Williget al. continue the theme of looking at theeffects of island characteristics on batecology, as well as introducing the subjectof hurricane-induced disturbance into themix. Chapter 8, the only chapter focusedon roosting ecology of island bats, looks atthe roles of cave roosts in protection fromweather events and energetic advantages,while the next three chapters go on toexamine further the impacts of naturaldisasters on bat ecology. In a stark changeof subject, and the only chapter to presenta socio-biological subject matter, the lastchapter in this section presents a fascinatingstudy of the effects of ﬂying fox consump-tion in Guam on neurodegenerative diseaseamongst the local human population.The ﬁnal section of the book containsfour chapters that examine the all-too-relevant subject of conservation of islandbats. The ﬁrst three chapters of this sectionpresent discussions surrounding the mainª 2010 Fauna & Flora International, Oryx, 44(3), 459–461Publications460https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0030605310000657Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 11 Jul 2017 at 09:43:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at

Book Review: Nature's Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Conservation and Food Sovereignty: Nature's Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Conservation and Food Sovereignty by PerfectoIvette, VandermeerJohn and WrightAngus (2009), x + 242 pp., Earthscan, London, UK. ISBN 9781844077816 (hbk), GBP 85.00; ISBN 9781844077823 (pbk), GBP 24.95

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