About this site
Providing tropical forest news, statistics, photos, and information, rainforests.mongabay.com is the world's most popular rainforest site. [more] |
Weekly Newsletter
Mongabay will never distribute your email address or send spam.
Share
|
|
|
View of the Tembeling River and surrounding rainforestin Taman Negara National Park, Malaysia. (Photo by R. Butler)
|
|
Non-governmental Organizations
Non-governmental organizations are a driving force behind conservation efforts today. These non-profit groups
fund and support all aspects of conservation from initial research to protected-area initiatives to implementation
through park management and community-based conservation schemes to alliance building between government agencies
and private interests. They support and coordinate grassroots movements, promote communication between all parties,
and sponsor education initiatives in both developing and developed countries.
Grassroots Movements
With the recent worldwide trend of governmental decentralization, control of forest resources is increasingly turned
over to local governments and non-governmental agencies. One result from decentralization is that forestry decisions
can be made on a local level, more in relation to local conditions and the benefit of local peoples. In recent
years, numerous local groups have assumed the role of promoting local sustainable use that more directly benefits
those living in and around the forests.
Local grassroots movements, where they exist, are often the most successful form of action. These movements are
sometimes able to create enough of a disturbance to delay loggers and developers from exploiting forest lands valued
by local people. Grassroots movements usually result from new or increased presence of pressures on the forest
from commercial interests. These movements put up protests, work to reform local laws and education, and are quite
often the site for innovation and experimentation for new ideas in forest conservation.
As a general rule, small grassroots projects have been more successful than foreign conservation projects directed
from a distance. There is good reason for this success, since local organizations are better able to weave conservation
projects into the local fabric of life, and their projects tend to be substantially smaller. These small projects
should serve as a model for the larger national and international projects. Before adopting a conservation or land-management plan, it should be proven to work on a local level. Otherwise the chances of success are small.
In the past, these small movements were sometimes brutally suppressed by the government. Nevertheless, small conservation
groups work feverishly around the globe. Greenbelt movements are strong in several tropical countries, resulting
in the reforestation of former forest lands. Among the most successful groups are the rubber tappers of Brazil.
Because the rubber tappers do not have title to the forest, they are working to set up "extractive reserves"
—protected areas where forest products are sustainably harvested by indigenous communities.
The Central American Tropical Agriculture Research Institute (CATIE) operates on the premise of educating local
peasants about sustainable use of the rainforests. The project conserves the forests by showing the residents the
economic benefits of leaving the ecosystem intact by collecting forest products in 11 categories: construction
material, dyes, fibers, food, livestock feed, medicines, natural insecticides, oils, ornamentals, and resins. In
addition to CATIE, there is a second Central American foundation working to educate locals about how to tap the
riches of the forest without damaging it; this is known as FUNDECOR (Foundation for the Development of the Central Volcanic
Mountain Chain). FUNDECOR (also see "other rainforest products" above) has contracts with more than 90
landowners to sustainably manage 30,000 acres (12,120 hectares) of forest. Engineers draw up management plans for
the landowners, suggesting which trees to cut, and train local loggers to fell trees in a direction that will cause
the least damage to the surrounding vegetation. The procedure cuts out the middle men so there are more profits
for the locals.
Review questions:
- Why are grassroots movements often successful in conservation efforts?
[print version | spanish | french | portuguese
| chinese | japanese]
Continued: Individual's role
This article was written by Rhett A. Butler [bibliographic citation for this page] and was last updated on the most recent date listed in the column on the right side.
Other pages in this section:
|
|
|
|
Recent news
A Tasmanian tragedy? : How the forestry industry has torn an island apart
(07/02/2009) This is by no means a new battle: in fact, Tasmanian industrial foresters and environmentalists have been fighting over the issue of clearcutting the island’s forests for decades. The battle—some would probably prefer 'war'—is over nothing less than the future of Tasmania. Some Tasmanians see the rich forests that surround them in terms of income, dollars and cents; they see money literally growing on trees, or more appropriately growing on monoculture plantations and government owned native forests. They see the wilderness of Tasmania as an exploitative resource.
Proving the ‘shifting baselines’ theory: how humans consistently misperceive nature
(06/24/2009) The theory of shifting baselines was first elucidated by scientists exploring urban children’s perception of nature in 1995. In the same year, marine biologist Daniel Pauly coined the term ‘shifting baselines’. Since then the idea of humans perceiving nature inaccurately, through ‘shifting baselines’, has taken the conservation world by storm: the theory appeared to describe a commonly noticed problem regarding people’s view of the natural world around them. However, the theory had yet to be tested in a scientific manner: were people actually undergoing shifting baselines or was something else going on? For the first time a new paper in Conservation Letters empirically tests the shifting baselines theory.
World Bank revokes loan to Brazilian cattle giant accused of Amazon deforestation
(06/13/2009) The Work Bank's private lending arm has withdrawn a $90 million loan to Brazilian cattle giant Bertin, following Greenpeace's release of a report linking Bertin to illegal deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, report environmental groups, Friends of the Earth-Brazil and Greenpeace. The loan, granted by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) in March 2007, was to expand Bertin's meat-processing in the Brazilian Amazon. At the time, the IFC promoted the loan as a way to promote environmentally responsible beef production in the Amazon, although environmental groups — including Friends of the Earth-Brazil and Greenpeace — criticized the move.
Wal-Mart bans beef illegally produced in the Amazon rainforest
(06/12/2009) Brazil's three largest supermarket chains, Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Pão de Açúcar, will suspend contracts with suppliers found to be involved in Amazon deforestation, reports O Globo. The decision, announced at a meeting of the Brazilian Association of Supermarkets (Abras) this week, comes less than two weeks after Greenpeace's exposé of the Amazon cattle industry. The report, titled Slaughtering the Amazon, linked some of the world's most prominent brands — including Nike, Toyota, Carrefour, Wal-Mart, and Johnson & Johnson, among dozens of others — to destruction of the Amazon rainforest for cattle pasture.
Climate pact must halt deforestation and industrial logging of old-growth forests, exclude carbon credits for forest conservation, say activists
(06/09/2009) A global framework on climate change must immediately halt deforestation and industrial logging of the world's old-growth forests, while protecting the rights of forest communities and indigenous groups, said a broad coalition of activist groups in a consensus statement issued today at U.N. climate talks in Bonn Germany. The statement said the successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol should not include mechanisms that allow industrialized countries to "offset" their emissions by purchasing carbon credits from reducing deforestation in developing countries, a position that puts the coalition at odds with larger environmental groups who say a market-based approach with tradable credits is the only way to generate enough money fund forest protection on a global scale.
More news on activism
More rainforest news
|
|
|