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Sequoia and Sal, A Tale of Two Trees, ECS 2011
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FEATURES 
Sequoia and Sal-A tale of two trees
| June 2012 | Text by : Amulya Ratna Tuladhar Photograph by : ECS Media |
What can we say of the most majestic trees, Sequoia of California and Sal of the Terai? Big, large, great, fantastic? The adjectives quit and run.
Se
quoia, or the California Redwoods, is between 350 to 370 feet tall. This is three times the height of Sal, which is 120 to 150 feet tall, or this is one and half times the height of Dharahara, or 200 feet of Bhimsen’s folly in Sundhara and twice the tallest statue of Shiva at Sanga Bhanjyang at 143 feet!
quoia, or the California Redwoods, is between 350 to 370 feet tall. This is three times the height of Sal, which is 120 to 150 feet tall, or this is one and half times the height of Dharahara, or 200 feet of Bhimsen’s folly in Sundhara and twice the tallest statue of Shiva at Sanga Bhanjyang at 143 feet!
One would wonders, as in the case of a giraffe that, this means a lot of pressure to pump blood fifteen feet up to a giraffe’s head. How does the Sequoia send water 300 feet vertically up? A one-horse power 1500-kilowatt pump can barely pump 60 feet or seven stories up to our roofs, how do the trees manage?
When I was a graduate student at Virginia Tech, I used to measure the ‘blood pressure’ of White Pine for my thesis. Just before dawn at four, I would drive my 6-cylinder Chevrolet truck to the open cast coalmines of the Appalachian mountain bordering West Virginia. There I would excise the branches of the selected 8-year old pines and insert them into an air tight container and slowly squeeze the leaves with calibrated nitrogen gas pressure just like a doctor slowly releases pressure from the sphygmomanometer to measure our systolic and diastolic pressures.
The pressure at which sap would ooze out of the cut branch would be the water stress or negative pressure of the pine. In our vernacular, this is the measure of thirst or ‘suction pressure’ with which pines suck water from the roots to the tops of trees and foliage. Sequoias can suck up huge volumes of water and nutrients from deep loamy soils at valley bottoms to the tops of trees, 100 feet for Sal and 350 feet for Sequoia. In one year, a California Redwood can add one millimeter of growth to its cambium or living cylinder of tissue three hundred and fifty feet tall and fifty feet in girth, adding up to a ton of live wood growth per year and can constitute thirty seven thousand cubic feet growth of volume for a single tree.
Our Sal used to be among the tallest and largest trees of Terai. Quoting from an 1874 publication of Sir Dietrich Brandis, the father of Indian forestry imported from centuries of scientific forestry in Germany to manage British India forests, J. S. Gamble wrote in 1899 that, the “Nepal Terai has Sal, 100-150 feet tall with girth 20-25 feet and first branches at 60-80 feet.” By 1909 however, Upendranath Kanjilal in Forest Flora of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh noted that Sal seldom attained more than 80 feet height and 6 feet girth. In my 30 years as forester of Nepal, I have yet to see a Brandis dimension Sal in Nepal, not even in the inner recesses of the protected areas of Chitwan in Kasra and the ravines of the Siwaliks, which I scoured for evidence of radio-collared tigers while working for the Smithsonian Tiger Ecology Project in 1978.
Where have all these majestic trees gone? Sequoia, which are old, old trees, two to three thousand years old, date back to the time of Siddharth Gautam, the Buddha of Kapil Vastu, even before the birth of Christ. Some of the Nepalese oaks are 400 years old and have recorded in their tree rings, the global effects of pollution emanating from the Industrial Revolution of Europe since 1700. Sal can be 150 to 200 years old, enough to have seen Jung Bahadur Rana romp around elephant hunting in Karrah Khola of Hetauda for fun and reprieve from the perennial conspirators who were out to kill him in Diamond Shumsher Rana’s ‘Seto Bagh’.
The sequoia that reigned supreme knew of the Red Indian natives that crossed the Bering Straits in the Aleutians from Asia to America, centuries before white man Columbus bungled into West Indies, later named America, in 1492. Several centuries later, the Gold Rush arrived that brought the white cowboys and prospectors streaming from the East Coast to California, the West Coast, and so began the demise of Sequoia.
In Nepal, Sal or Sakhuwa was the tree Maya Devi leaned upon to give birth to Buddha on the way to her maternal home in Tilaurakot. So was born the Kshatriya royal lineage of the Shakya, after the etymological root of the tree Sakhuwa, in whose kingdom they ruled until internecine royal warfare drove them to flee to the mountainous refuges of Kathmandu Valley.
“In the 1840s, when American settlers arrived in Northern California, the redwood forest amounted to 2 million acres of virgin old-growth trees. Loggers began cutting the trees with axes or handsaws to make houses, barns and railroad ties. By 1920-30s, the introduction of logging machinery, chainsaws and Caterpillar tractors increase the speed of logging and old growth redwood forests began to disappear. Most forest became owned by timber companies which carried out clearfelling, and now with 96% of redwood forest gone, only about 90,000 acres remain in patches of protected land,” lamented a Sequoia tree climber in The New Yorker in 2011.
In Nepal, the secretive 8-mile thicket or Charkoshe Jhadi with malaria and tigers were an effective defense against enemies except for brief periods in winter and for the autochthonous Tharu tribals who had genetic immunity against malaria. But, after the 1816 debacle, when forests no longer served as effective bulwarks against the modern artillery and the more insidious ideas of modernization, the Sal forest started to assume economic importance for the British. After the 1857 Indian Sepoy Mutiny, the handful of British officers, their artillery and their mercenary local soldiers realized that they were too ill equipped to handle simultaneous insurrections over multiple Indian cities. Had it not been for Jung Bahadur galloping in uninvited to tame the Nawabs of Oudh, British Rule of India might have collapsed. So the Ranas were rewarded with a tract of Nepal Terai west of Butwal, the Naya Muluk, as a token of the eternal gratitude from the British.
More than the valiant buffoonery of Jung Bahadur is the role of Nepal Sal in consolidating the British Empire in India. From the early twentieth century, the British dispatched Collier and Smythies to scout for Sal extraction routes along the rivers draining out of Nepal Terai and to covet the Rana government of the hard, big cash value of large-scale Sal export. The Ranas readily bought this idea, railheads were established in river outlets to India, and one of these, the Collier’s railhead, can still be witnessed today in Bardia National Park. Sal was felled in massive quantities, hauled by bullock carts, dumped to the rivers and floated to booms to flatter terrain railheads from where these logs were transported to British India with the highest concentration of people and agricultural lands, the Oudh province or Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The British built a network of rail line along much of the Nepal border primarily for the strategic purpose of whisking their artillery at short notice and dispatch time to quell any uprising before they gathered steam to overwhelm the ruling but fewer numbered colonialists. Richard Tucker, an environmental historian and some doctoral scholars have back calculated the deforestation by multiplying the volume of each rail sleeper and the mileage of rail line.
What appeared as a strategic tool to suppress insurrections served as a disaster relief adaptation for rushing in food supplies in times of frequent famines. Kingsley Davis, a demographer, has documented the steady rise in the population of India following the large-scale reduction in mortality after the railroads, contrary to all the bad things we say about the British. In Nepal too, despite the bad things we say about the Rana lust for power and the shameful palace shenanigans of the Shah kings then, the increased overall national stability and relief from frequent wars, overall increase in food production from new technology foods such as maize and potato translated into steady - though slow by current standards - rise in the population of Nepal, from 3 million when Prithvi Narayan Shah took over to 5 million by the time Rana left office in 1950, 200 years later. “Tera santan le danda kanda dhakun” or ‘May your posterity populate the hills and vales of Nepal’: the exhortation of P.N. Shah had come true. ■
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Sunday, June 10, 2012
Landscape Conservation Approach in Nepal
Landscape Conservation Approach in Nepal
ISBN: 978-9937-2-3974-5
Citation: Acharya, K.P., Tripathi, D.M., Joshi, J.
and Gurung, U.M. (eds.). 2011. Leveraging the Landscapes: Biodiversity
Conservation beyond the Boundaries in Nepal (Edited) 2011. Nepal Foresters
Association (NFA) Kathmandu.
Published
by Nepal Foresters Association (NFA)
Copyright: © 2011 Nepal Foresters Association
(NFA).
Publication support: WWF, WTLCP and NTNC
Preface
Map of any part of the world is
full of boundary webs such as continents, regions, countries and numerous administrative/political
boundaries within. In natural world, these boundaries shaped, reshaped and
proliferated with the advancement of human civilization often trivialize the
most fundamental boundaries created by ecological functions and requirement of
species for their existence and regeneration. Worried by diminishing flagship
wildlife population, most of the conservation approaches practiced in the past
attempted to conserve such species within the boundaries of protected areas
without much attention to the ecological boundaries. The protected area systems
coupled with extensive people’s participation did remarkably helped in
conserving the world’s precious biological diversity. Constantly advancing
scientific understating and eventually maturing experiences on the field,
however, have called for a paradigm shift in conservation approach from species
and/or protected habitat focused biodiversity conservation to focusing on
ecosystem and the mosaic of interconnected habitat patches of wildlife
population along with the interplay between natural functions and human
activity; termed broadly as landscapes.
Nepal has been making an
impressive headway in landscape level conservation approach with it being one
of the prioritized concerns of the Government of Nepal as reflected in the
Three Year Interim Plan, National Biodiversity Strategy and the Terai Arc
Landscape Strategy 2010. Government of
Nepal in coordination with various conservation partners has been implementing
Terai Arc Landscape, Sacred Himalayan Landscape and Western Terai Landscape
Complex Project and making efforts in slotting in the essence of landscape
level conservation i.e. Connectivity and Coordination in its other conservation
programs as well. Needless to say, the
advent of new paradigm in conservation harbingers promising possibility in
achieving conservation goals. However, it is high time that we right-track and
fast-track the landscape level conservation practices in Nepal taking scrutiny
at its wobbly steps.
In an effort to contribute to
reflect on the on-the-ground experiences, current issues, achievements,
opportunities, and way forward; this publication “Leveraging the Landscapes; Biodiversity Conservation beyond the
Boundaries in Nepal” has been put forward by Nepal Forester’s
Association (NFA) with support from WWF Nepal, WTLCP and NTNC. This special
volume contains eleven papers from conservationists, scientists and field
implementers directly involved in landscape level conservation practices in
Nepal from policy level to implementation level.
The first paper discusses the
theoretical antecedents in global contexts that eventually led to the inception
of landscape level conservation approach in Nepal. It also describes some of
the works with theoretical perspective pioneered by individual researchers and
practical application involving conservation organizations. The paper concludes
with briefly pointing out some emerging issues such as climate change and
ecosystem services.
Paper 2, 3 and 4 shares the
on-the-ground experiences, achievements made, and lessons learned of the three
key landscape level interventions of Nepal viz. Western Terai Landscape
Project, Terai Arc Landscape and Sacred Himalayan Landscape respectively. The
papers also provide the overview of the intervention approach and highlight the
major issues, challenges and way forward. Similarly, Paper 5 assesses the role
of Annapurna Conservation Area as a landscape level conservation model in
biodiversity conservation and Protected Area management in Nepal. It also
presents a good example of NGO managed Protected Area management in context of
Nepal.
Paper 6 covers the
significance, success stories and implication of Community Seed Bank (CSB)
program implemented under Western Terai Landscape Project in mid and
far-western regions of Nepal. This paper highlight the CSB as a platform of an
effective rural institution at the community level that strengthens local
farmers’ access to diversity of crop genetic resources contributing to local
food security. It concludes that strengthening the network of CSB with
effective exchange of seeds and knowledge at landscape level could lead towards
sustainability and resiliency.
Paper 7 provides several field
level insights into when, how and to what extent Payment for Ecosystem Services
(PES) based forest management is feasible in Nepal, identifies possible
methodologies and approaches for piloting and develops specific criteria for selecting
PES sites. This paper looks into theories and principles of PES, analyzes
present practices, looks into future perspectives of PES in Nepal and
recommends an analytical framework to conclude and conservation policy makers
but also to politicians who can incorporate understanding of landscape
conservation in the re-structuring process of the state.nd conservation policy makers
but also to politicians who can incorporate understanding of landscape
conservation in the re-structuring process of the state.
Table of Contents
Preface
1.
Landscape Conservation Approach in Nepal 1
Dinesh Raj Bhuju and Amulya Ratna Tuladhar
Dinesh Raj Bhuju and Amulya Ratna Tuladhar
2.
Landscape
Conservation in Nepal: Achievement and
Lessons from Western Terai Landscape Complex Project 15
Ekraj Sigdel, Dinesh Karki, Jagannath Koirala, Basan Shrestha,
Prakash Man Shrestha and Bijendra Basnyat
Lessons from Western Terai Landscape Complex Project 15
Ekraj Sigdel, Dinesh Karki, Jagannath Koirala, Basan Shrestha,
Prakash Man Shrestha and Bijendra Basnyat
3.
Terai
Arc Landscape: A Sustainable Conservation Approach 30
Shiv Raj Bhatta, Ugan Manandhar, Santosh Nepal
Shiv Raj Bhatta, Ugan Manandhar, Santosh Nepal
4.
Conservation
Initiatives in Sacred Himalayan Landscape, Nepal 35
Ananta Bhandari
Ananta Bhandari
5.
An
Assessment of the Landscape Management Approach in the 42
Annapurna Conservation Area, Nepal
Siddhartha Bajra Bajracharya, Ratna R. Timsina and Kiran K.C.
Annapurna Conservation Area, Nepal
Siddhartha Bajra Bajracharya, Ratna R. Timsina and Kiran K.C.
6.
Community Seed Bank: Reaching to Poor
Farmers and Building
Climate Resiliency in Western Nepal 54
Shree Kumar Maharjan, Abishkar Subedi, Pitambar Shrestha, Assa Gurung,
Sajal Sthapit, Ram Rana, Ek Raj Sigdel, Dinesh Karki and Bhuwon Sthapit
Climate Resiliency in Western Nepal 54
Shree Kumar Maharjan, Abishkar Subedi, Pitambar Shrestha, Assa Gurung,
Sajal Sthapit, Ram Rana, Ek Raj Sigdel, Dinesh Karki and Bhuwon Sthapit
7.
Learning Perspectives and Analytical
Framework for Framing PES in Nepal 68
Laxmi Dutt Bhatta and Rajan Kotru
Laxmi Dutt Bhatta and Rajan Kotru
8.
Trans-boundary
Landscape conservation in the HKH Region:
An Overview from Global and Regional Perspective 89
Krishna Prasad Oli
An Overview from Global and Regional Perspective 89
Krishna Prasad Oli
9.
Role of
Corridors in Linking Transnational Protected Areas in
Terai Arc Landscape 101
Shyam Bajimaya
Terai Arc Landscape 101
Shyam Bajimaya
10.
Leveraging
the Landscape: An Assessment of Options 118
Krishna Prasad Acharya, Rishikesh Ram Bhandary and Buddi Sagar Poudel
Krishna Prasad Acharya, Rishikesh Ram Bhandary and Buddi Sagar Poudel
11.
Towards Integrated Landscape Planning:
A Paradigm Shift in Conservation Planning in Nepal 128
Dinesh Karki, and Bijendra Basnyat
A Paradigm Shift in Conservation Planning in Nepal 128
Dinesh Karki, and Bijendra Basnyat
Paper 1
LANDSCAPE CONSERVATION
APPROACH IN NEPAL
Dinesh Raj Bhuju1
and Amulya Ratna Tuladhar2
1Faculty of Science,
Nepal Academy of Science and Technology
GPO Box 3323
Kathmandu
2Khwopa College,
Tribhuvan University Affiliate
Dekocha, Bhaktapur
dineshbhuju@gmail.com
Summary
With the
beginning of 20th century, the governments around the world started
on setting the core habitats aside as the solution to the dwindling wildlife
population, the charismatic ones at first. This management approach of
protected areas did progress fundamentally from the twin tradition of
conservation and ecological discourse. As the scientific knowledge expanded and
practical experiences matured, we find the conservation approach undergoing a
fundamental shift. The protected areas are now planned with local people, and
featured with ecological corridors and other landscape characters to provide
more space for species movement and natural processes. Nepal set up its first
national park in 1973, but very soon it not only realized some of the adversities
faced by the local people living around the park but also the space constraint
for population distribution and dynamics. Taking the advantage of new
progresses in conservation biology, Nepal adopted landscape approach and
implemented in some of the key areas without much delay. This paper discusses
Nepal’s debut in conservation at landscape level with theoretical antecedents
in global contexts. Some of the works with theoretical perspective pioneered by
individual researchers and practical application involving conservation
organizations are described with examples. The paper is concluded with brief
mentioning of emerging issues like climate change and ecosystem services.
Key words: Chure Hills,
Landscape ecology, Sacred landscape, Terai Arc Landscape Project,
Trans-boundary
Introduction
Species know no boundary but their fundamental requirements to
exist and proliferate. The ecological intricacies as revealed by scientific
understanding of organisms living in the natural environs have called for
conservation beyond species and/or their protected habitat. Landscape level
conservation, thus, has been a realized management practice today. Nepal's commitment to save and secure biodiversity is evidently
reflected with the creation of an impressive network of protected area system.
As these areas are now turning out to be an island in the midst of human
dominated landscapes, landscape level conservation appears as a fitting
solution. The landscape conservation approach practiced in Nepal holds an
exciting possibility to effectively deliver conservation plans. This essay will
look into the theoretical antecedents of landscape conservation, its
application in Nepal, and its promise to deliver effective conservation.
Part
I: Theoretical Antecedents
Landscape Conservation Approach in Nepal is one of the sustainable
development solutions to the threats of biodiversity loss. The approach is a
practical, policy implementation mode that draws its theoretical roots from two
intellectual traditions: conservation
and ecology. Conservation has tried to harmonize the twin goals of protecting
Nature from human activities and finding ways to develop within the laws of
Nature. On the other hand, ecology has
tried to understand the relationship between living organisms and their
non-living environment so that human beings, as living organisms, can thrive
better in their environment. The
following paragraphs will outline key developments in these two intellectual
traditions to the point where they converge in the current ‘Landscape
Conservation Approach in Nepal’.
Beginning with the alienation of human beings from Nature as a
result of industrialization in the 1700s in the West, as a result of rural,
close-to-Nature livelihoods converging into the dense, squalid, far-from-Nature
livelihoods in the urban, Dickensonian factories, people of all strata began to
hanker for a reengagement with Nature (Adams, 1990). This reengagement of
Nature was perforce variegated according to mainly spatio-temporal variables
but an entry into this understanding can be made by adopting political economic
stratification as an optic. According to the political economy optic, following
Marxian category of a ‘superstructure’ of political and cultural processes on
the ‘base’ of economic processes and structures in society and nature/society
relationships, the class that controlled political economic processes, the
ruling class of industrialists, politicians, feudal landlords, princes and
regents, and residuals of colonial power structures had better access to opportunities to re-engage
with nature than those at the bottom: menial labor, farmers, women, underclass
and oppressed, and marginalized ethnic groups who were forced to trade all of
their labor output for bare survival in the machine mode of the industrial era.
The political economic elite in the West, thus, went back to
remnants of pristine Nature in Europe (very little available) by means of
country castles, manors, newly invented motor vehicles but the satisfaction
received was not enough. There was a
growing call for unsullied pristine Nature to wash away the spiritual grime of
dirty wealth from the protean industrialization. This phenomenon was seen in all walks of life
from painters such as Paul Gauguin exoticizing the earthy colors of Trinidadian
women to romanticizing, celebrating and idealization of Nature in Arts and
Literature. Such inchoate
socio-political strivings began to congeal into discrete intellectual
traditions to save Nature at a societal level in the beginnings of the
twentieth century.
In USA, for example, John Muir (1838-1914) was an early proponent
of the ‘Preservationist’ Movement who
argued for total hands-off from human
beings (meaning money-making industrialization, agriculture, mining, damming)
to save pristine Nature like the Yellowstone Geyser, the Old Faithful, Grand
Canyon and the Hecht-Hechty spectacular landscape of the Wild West of USA. His efforts represent the longing of the
powerful elite that got a hearing under President Theodore Roosevelt and the
first National Park was established in 1872. Till date, ‘National Park’ retains
the heritage of ‘protected’ areas, carrying the baggage of an antagonistic
attitude towards the grubby, money-making by industry and agriculture that
privileges the rights of the elite to their aesthetic and spiritual satisfaction with coercive laws, e.g. the
National Park and Conservation Act 1973 laws and military protection of Royal Chitwan National Park in Nepal.
For the super elite of Europe, the ex-colonialists, they did not
have access to much undisturbed Nature like the boundless Wild West their
counterparts of USA had; so they ventured to their colonial holdings in Africa,
Asia and South America, the Tropics, where half of existing known biodiversity
still exists. It is in Africa, the land of teaming wildlife of zebras, lions,
giraffes and wildebeest that the ex-colonial big game, trophy hunters morphed
their love of ‘shooting to kill’ to ‘shooting to photograph’. As these
ex-hunters were in the cutting edge of interaction with pristine Nature, they
were the first to be alarmed by the dwindling fate of the truly ‘wild’ wildlife
and they sounded the call for protection of the objects of their hobby: the
‘wild’ wildlife. To this the burgeoning fields of biology,
ecology, botany came to the service of managerial tropical science, which
offered a secular excuse to interfere in the affairs of their ex-colonies in
the name of science and nature preservation. Adams (1990) documents such
colonial roots of now secular conservation oriented international
non-governmental organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), IUCN,
UNEP, FAO, etc. All of these global organization got together to enunciate a
World Conservation Strategy in 1980, to teach the world how to save Nature and
justify continued interference of the First World in the affairs of the Third
World in the guise of global nature
protection (Redclift, 1992).
Along the way, over the last 200 years of inchoate First World
elite actions to preserve Nature for the satisfaction of their own kind only,
there began a more articulated engagement with the needs of the lower class for
socioeconomic upliftment, ‘progress’ in the West and ‘development’ in the Third
World. Even while John Muir was
convincing Theodore Roosevelt to set aside lands and laws to start the birth of
the National Park movement first in USA then worldwide, his contemporary
Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946), who went on to establish the US Forest Service
argued equally effectively for ‘conservation’- defined as the management
(not preservation) of Nature for the maximum satisfaction of the most people
for the longest time as the rallying cry for the establishment of the US Forest
Service at the start of the twentieth century but also to manage natural resources
rationally for both Nature and People (read low class people), including the
damming of the Colorado river to supply irrigation and electricity to the
people of California. During Pinchot’s time, ‘conservation’ was only a
political slogan, a pragmatic approach not buttressed with solid science or
policy dimensions. Over the last century, the science that contributed to the
backbone of conservation was ecology and the policy dimension was strengthened
by development in economics.
In ecology, a term coined by Haeckel in 1866 the systematic study
of the relationship between biota and abiota developed from the vocation of
natural history or observation of all nature in the tradition of Alexander von
Humboldt and Charles Darwin to a more systematic study of the relationship
between larger life communities in lakes and dune landscapes by S.A. Forbes
(1844-1930) and H.C. Cowles (1869-1939) while F.E. Clements (1874-1945) H.A.
Gleason (1882-1975) argued over succession concepts. Early studies of temperate
plant communities were enlarged by study of tropical forest communities as well
as community structure including animal world. Later into a more experimental
and mathematical study of individual organism in controlled environmentalists
by auto-ecologists such as G.F. Gause (1910-1986), A.J. Lotka (1880-1949) and
V. Volterra (1860-1940). In the meantime, animal ecologists introduced the
concept of ecological niche, e.g. Charles Elton (1900-1991). The latter half of
the twentieth century saw the development of ecology from the hierarchical
scales from individual, population, community to ecosystems, landscape, biomes
and now global systems like the Gaia.
The latter developments of post 1950s was aided by intellectual
contributions of Geography, the technology of air planes, rockets, photography,
satellites, which was first pushed by the Nazi Hitler’s desire for world
domination with the latest technology of aerial photography; to do this Carl
Troll came into the picture by developing ‘landscape ecology’ in 1939 (Troll,
1939) to study scales of lands rendered visible by aerial photos, hitherto not
possible by land-based platforms. The contemporary definition of ‘Landscape’
refers to a portion of land or territory which the eye can comprehend as a single view, including all the
objects so seen, especially in its pictorial aspects. When this ‘eye’ was
substituted by remote sensors such as air borne cameras and satellite sensors,
the landscape took on bigger dimensions, however, landscape has traditions in
both human geography and physical geography, referring to areas altered by a
unit of human processes or physical processes (Johnston et al., 1995).
Geography, with its long intellectual enquiry into the category of ‘space’ and
how it changes, ‘spatial heterogeneity’ has used ‘landscape’ as a geographical
category for over a century. With the
technology development of remote sensing driven by war industries and cold war
defense motivations and dollars, Landscape Ecology emerged as a sophisticated
applied science that can capture processes higher than ecosystems to global
processes; however, in many countries, landscape ecology is used to understand
sub-national processes of nature-society relationships. While general ecology
theory focused on the study of more homogenous, discrete community units
organized in a hierarchical structure, landscape ecology built upon
heterogeneity in space and time, and frequently included human-induced
landscape changes (Sanderson and Harris, 2000).
The recent emergence of landscapes as appropriate
subjects for ecological study resulted from three main factors: 1) broad-scale
environmental issues and land-management problems, 2) the development of new
scale-related concepts in ecology, and 3) technological advances, including the
widespread availability of spatial data, the computers, softwares to manipulate
these data, and the rapid rise in computational power (Turner et al., 2001).
Landscape ecology emphasizes the interaction between spatial pattern and
ecological process, that is, the causes and consequences of spatial
heterogeneity across a range of scales. The term landscape ecology was
introduced by the German biogeographer Carl Troll (1939), arising from the
European traditions of regional geography and vegetation science and motivated
particularly by the novel perspective offered by aerial photography. Landscape
ecology essentially combined the spatial approach of the geographer with the
functional approach of the ecologists (Naveh and Lieberman, 1984; Forman and
Godron 1986).
Two important aspects of landscape
ecology are: 1) it explicitly addresses the importance of spatial configuration
for ecological processes, and 2) it often focuses on spatial extents that are
much larger than those traditionally studied in ecology. The role of humans,
obviously a dominant influence on landscape patterns worldwide, is sometimes
considered an important component of a definition of landscape ecology. Indeed
in the landscape approaches characteristic of China, Europe and the
Mediterranean, human activity is perhaps the central factor in landscape
ecological studies. Landscape ecology is sometimes considered to be an
interdisciplinary science dealing with the interrelation between human society
and its living space- its open and built up landscapes (Naveh and Lieberman,
1984). Landscape ecology draws from a variety of disciplines, many of which
emphasize social sciences, including geography, landscape architecture,
regional planning, economics, forestry, and wildlife ecology.
One such use is the use of landscape ecology to develop landscape
conservation approach (Groom et al., 2006; Haufler, 1999; Brown et al., 2004).
Here, the basic categories of landscape ecology such as heterogeneous patches,
matrix, corridors, edges, edge-effects, ecocline and ecotones are used to
explore ways to recoalesce fragmented patches of protected areas. National park
approach to protected area, despite phenomenal development this century, covers
only 10% of the land area in the world, with some areas like Nepal approaching
20% and Bhutan nearing 60%. This was not considered adequate to address the
degree of threats to biodiversity worldwide and the ecosystem services
biodiversity provides for the very survival humankind. Increasing the areas
under protection is clearly too costly in terms of political capital, manpower,
money and legitimacy in the face of poverty of the millions that demands lands
for economic upliftment (Budhathoki, 2003).
Even partial protection by means of buffer zone management and
other options as community based conservation management, while increasing the
areas under partial protection, is not considered adequate for the dispersed
biodiversity and biodiversity outside of protected area system such as the many
species of medicinal and aromatic plants, non-timber forest products, and other
ecoregions of the Nepal Midhills. Now, climate change the prospect of global
warming is expected to be the biggest
threat to biodiversity over the next century (Groom et al., 2006) so there is
an urgency to join fragmented patches of protected areas so they can be
operated at higher levels of ecosystem harmony, including for example the
enabling of viable metapopulations of tiger and rhino in the Terai Arc
Landscape Project (TAL) (Karki et al., 2009; Wikramanayake et al., 2004;
Dinerstein and McDougal, 1998) and the snow leopards, Red panda and Himalayan
wildlife as in the case of Sacred Himalayan Landscape, Transboundary Landscape
Conservation and Mount Kailash Landscape Conservation (Sharma et al., 2007).
Part II Application
in Nepal
In the landscape conservation approach in Nepal, the key approach
is to relieve the bottlenecks to migration and movement of animals so that a
minimum viable population can be maintained with genetic diversity and
stability (Groom et al., 2006; Karki et al., 2009). This ecological objective
does present, however, novel policy challenges, since there are people living
in these bottlenecks, and some of them are rather poor and sometimes of
different ethnic groups, administrative and political jurisdictions or even
different countries, and operating under different sectoral outreach like
forest, agriculture or local development ministry as well as many local
non-governmental organizations and community based organizations. There is no
ready-made policy road map that has been tested, so active learning from
innovations made in landscape conservation approaches in Nepal bear
significance worldwide for greater cause of biodiversity conservation in the
larger context of sustainable development or the harmonization of the needs of
nature and the people. The following two figures summarize the changing approaches
biodiversity conservation leading to landscape conservation approach in Nepal,
extracted from Budhathoki (2005).
In the rest of the article, we will examine the case studies of
landscape conservation approach and analyze them from the perspective of their
contribution to landscape ecology, conservation
Fig.
1. Landscape conservation complexes in Nepal. Source: Budhathoki,
2005
Fig.
2. Shifting conservation paradigms from island networks. Source:
Budhathoki, 2005
policy, and their general contribution to the cause of global
biodiversity services to humankind and the sustainable development of poor
peoples of Third World and Nepal.
In Nepal, landscape approach has been
spearheaded by geographers and conservation biologists. Specifically since
1990s, Nepali conservation scientists have been looking to enhance conservation
in areas outside protected areas and calling attention to contiguous landscapes
that are fast being fragmented. Beginning with 21st century, these
theoretical approaches have been supplemented by policy related approaches
coming from sustainable development paradigms such as participatory management
and inclusion of marginalized groups of gender and Dalits and greater awareness
to address root causes of human development aspirations and social inequity
driving environmental degradation including the deterioration of landscapes.
Among the proponents are the UNDP/WWF/ICIMOD programs in Terai Arc Landscape
(TAL) Project, Western Terai Landscape Conservation Project (WTLCP), Sacred
Himalayan and Transboundary Conservation Projects in cooperation with
Government of Nepal line agencies such as the Ministry of Forests and Soil
Conservation and its departments.
Harka Gurung (1939-2006) was one of the
early eminent Nepali geographers who were interested in the combination of both
human and physical processes affecting the spatial variability of human
landscapes. As early as 1971, he wrote on the landscape patterns of Nepal as determined much by
its geographic setting and then the human activities (Gurung, 1971, 1989). The
emphatic ridges that run east-west and numerous south-flowing rivers have
defined the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the country’s physiographic
component, while the lateral disposition of the country has caused bio-climatic
variation from the arid west to the humid east.
As human attempts to adapt himself to the natural environment and in the
process leaves his imprint on the landscape. Thus, the three major geographic
regions, viz. Tarai, Hill and Mountain correspond to latitudinally arranged
ecological zones. Based on these natural settings, the major watershed, and
population dimension, Gurung proposed regional development plan, which surfaced
in the Fourth Five-Year Plan of 1970-1975 (Sharma, 2007).
The other groups of
leaders who have worked and contributed in developing and/or applying the
approach of landscape level conservation in Nepal are from landscape ecology
domain: forest ecologists, botanists, foresters and wildlife biologists.
In 1999, forest
ecologist Dinesh Bhuju initiated and led a research team to prepare baseline
information on the ecology of the Chure Hills, the southernmost hills of the
Himalaya also known as Siwaliks (Bhuju, 2000). To conserve the Chure Hills, at
landscape level, this study aimed to identify key areas, with two-prong
approach: 1) First determine areas with significant changes in land use since
1958, 1978 and 1992; and 2) gather ecology-based information on the Chure using
grid-based samples (Bhuju, 2000, 2006, 2010). The project, supported by
Resources Himalaya, a Kathmandu based research organization, Nature
Conservation Society of Japan (NACS-J), and WWF/Nepal surveyed Chure (total area: 1,886,000 ha, length: 840 km) from east (Mechi) to west (Mahakali) Nepal
covering all major watersheds (Fig. 3), and accumulated information on: i)
land-use change, ii) forest structure and regeneration, iii) tree species
association at different altitudes, iv) local knowledge on plant use, and v)
distribution of birds and other fauna. Once a backwater of conservation, Chure
is now in the national priority (see Proceedings of National Seminar on Chure
Environmental Study, June 15, 2010 organized by Department of Soil
Conservation and Watershed Management).
Fig. 3. Chure range in Nepal.
At
corridor scale of landscape conservation, NTNC (National Trust for Nature
Conservation) took up a UNDP supported project on the Tiger-Rhino Corridor in
2001 (Thapa and Basnet 2006). The project focused its study in Barandabhar Corridor
Forest adjoining to Chitwan National Park (CNP) and aimed at promoting
landscape level biodiversity conservation with strong community-based
management links to conserve endangered species. Very significantly, the
corridor is inhabited by relocated people from CNP.
The Barandabhar Forests serves as an important corridor of the Terai Arc
Landscape (TAL), a program initiated by Government of Nepal with the support of
WWF Nepal Program encompassing 11 protected areas of Nepal and India in 2001. Envisioning
to set a landscape level management model for safeguarding biological wealth
and vital ecological functions of western Terai districts (Bardia, Kailali and
Kanchanpur), Government of Nepal in partnership seven national and
international organizations including UNDP, launched a 8-year long project of
Western Terai Landscape Conservation starting from 2005.
A
cultural landscape study has also been conducted to describe and understand the
relationship of natural habitat and diverse ecosystem viz. agriculture, forest
and grassland ecosystems managed by human activities. Ram P. Chaudhary, a plant
taxonomist and biogeographer, got involved in an interdisciplinary research
undertaken by a group of biological and social scientists from Tribhuvan
University and University of Bergen, Norway between 2002 and 2006. The research
project made invaluable contribution in cultural landscape of Manang, a remote
Trans Himalayan region in Nepal (Chaudhary, 2006).
The
interpretation of landscape approach in Nepal, however, had been varying. In
1999, Ministry of Forests and Soil Conservation of Nepal proposed Shey
Phoksundo National Park (SPNP) for inclusion on the World Heritage Convention
for inscription for which it produced six criteria, three natural and three
cultural. The SPNP is a southern margin of Tibetan Plateau, but along with
adjoining Tscharka Bhot and Mustang. Therefore, conservation biologist Pralad
Yonzon (2001) argued with strong basis of landscape characters such as geology,
soil, climate and vegetation that the proposal was unempirical to truncate SPNP
(Dolpo) from similar and contiguous landscape of Mustang together with Tsharka
Bhot.
The importance of trans-boundary
cooperation in protected area management was realized in mid 1990s; however, it
remained at political level organizing few bilateral meetings with bordering
countries China and India and organizing
a few training activities (Paudel et al., 2008). The trans-boundary
landscape approach was finally adopted with the initiation of the Sacred
Himalayan Landscape. The SHL includes
five of the 19 eco-regions that comprise the Eastern Himalayan Conservation
Complex, and the high topographical relief, climatic variation, and its
position at the ecotone of several biogeographic regions confer the area and
the landscape, with a high level of biological diversity. Chandra P Gurung
(1950-2006), a geographer, who went on to be an eminent conservationist of
Nepal, played a key role in implementing the plan. This approach called for the
combination of attention on human processes of both cultural and economic
dimensions in addition to the standard ecological dimensions in the landscape
conservation approaches for Nepal both in the mountains and the plains (Gurung
et al., 2006).
A group of researchers associated with
ICIMOD (International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development) also advanced
the concept of trans-boundary conservation landscape. Chettri and Sharma (2006)
proposed developing a landscape with conservation corridors as connecting links
to existing protected areas (total number: 12; total area: 5,904 sq.km.) in the
Kangchenjungha complex that spread over a wide spectrum of ecological zones in
eastern Nepal, Darjeeling and Sikkim in India and western Bhutan. The landscape
provides contiguous habitat and unique situation where within a 100 km N-S
transect, habitats range from Tropical to alpine vegetation.
One
recent example of application of landscape approach in Nepal is Kailash Scared
Landscape Conservation Initiative (CDB-TU 2010). The Kailash Sacred Landscape (KSL)- Nepal
complex is a part of the proposed trans-boundary landscape with the international
boundaries with China and India. This trans-boundary landscape totals about
31,252 sq km of area around Mount Kailash, of which 42.5% falls in Nepal, 34.7%
in China and 22.8% in India. The
proponents of the initiative have set three categories as primary criteria for
delineation, viz. (i) ecological, (ii) cultural, and (iii) planning and
management. However, in application only the third criterion of management is
in effect as the KSL-Nepal includes four districts Baitadi, Darchula, Bajhang
and Humla, where Baitadi, a mid-hill district does not fit with the rest three
high mountain districts. On the other hand, districts such as Bajura, Mugu are
not included in the complex, though they contain similar geographic and
cultural settings like that of Darchula and other high mountain districts. The
application of landscape concept in KSL-Nepal, thus, indicates the fact that
the concept has much been used with development motives following the existing
district administrative set-up.
The main contribution of these authors
has been to argue for the inclusion of more areas for conservation outside the
existing protected areas due to endangerment of particular flora, fauna,
ecological and sometimes even cultural processes.
A review of landscape conservation approach in Nepal reveals a
heavy commitment to the social dimensions of conservation, ways of eliciting,
sustaining and, if possible, enhancing the effectiveness of local communities
to rehabilitate and restore the human altered landscape matrices outside the
protected areas of national parks and conservation areas for maximal ecosystem
health (WWF/Nepal, 2004; NPC/UNDP/UNEP, 2010; Gurung, 2006). The social
dimensions may include community forestry, buffer zone management in which
local communities are given a share of protected areas incomes to buy their
cooperation with legal guarantees of their rights. On a continuum of
interventions, help may be offered in awareness raising informal education and
publicity, trainings for capacity building, investment in gender mainstreaming,
or such social and economic upliftment that addresses the root diversity of
biodiversity degradation: poverty and social inequity.
At other end maybe explicitly ecology and biological
rehabilitation of such human altered landscapes from anti poaching efforts to
ensure safe corridor for migrating animals to the rehabilitation of greenery
and degraded landscape to the level of protected areas natural state. One of
the early investments in landscape management is the enhancement in the quality
and quantity of database to allow sophisticated management. This may include
inventorying of landscape close to its natural state as was done by Bhuju et
al. (2000) in Churiya or drawing of GIS map for transboundary landscape
conservation for Mt Kailash by ICIMOD.
IUCN, WWF and Department of National Parks and Wildlife
Conservation (DNPWC) have spearheaded the biology end of landscape conservation
form tiger census and tiger ecology and enhancement to restoration of tiger
prey habitat in the protected areas and the reduction of pressures on the
protected areas by enhancing tree resources outside protected areas. The
Government of Nepal and UNDP have a more livelihood sustenance and social
equity goals within human altered matrix outside protected areas whose
successful spinoff is the restoration of ecological services to biodiversity
and humans living there (WWF/Nepal, 2002).
Part
III Promise of effective conservation
In a 2004 review paper, Budhathoki (2005)
discusses the opportunities and challenges for landscape conservation
approaches in Nepal. He calls for a careful integration of national, regional
and local interests in planning and management of landscape conservation in
order to fulfill the integrated objectives of landscape level conservation.
Despite much experimental and
supposedly secular and non-ideological experimentation with different
governance regimes, institutional innovations to co-opt the locals in the
biodiversity conservation across a landscape, there is much negative
international and national baggage of being perceived as external (outside
country, outside village) interests on esoteric biodiversity benefits over
local (internal) needs to survive on the
local natural resources without interfering external legislation, policy, other
demands.
On top of this is the changing milieu
of decentralization in the country over the last few decades giving birth to
local rights for community forestry, local decentralization, and now calls for
institutionalizing federal decentralization of authority over the top-down
command and control management which INGO and central government and ministry
have been doing so far. In periods of political upheaval, all associated with
earlier repressive power structures, including military administered protected
areas are rendered in to paper parks, i.e. conservation only in reports with
nothing on the ground.
Landscape approach is, therefore, an
attempt to enlist a larger cross-section of people in between the networks of
protected areas in the cause of biodiversity conservation.
The emerging issues and options of
Payment of Ecological Services (PES) of Biodiversity Conservation, the
implications of Climate Change policy initiatives such as Reduced Emissions
from Degradation and Deforestation (REDD), the National Adaptation Plan of
Action (NAPA) to effects of climate change on Nepal’s biodiversity, the
implications of Federalism and the trend towards decentralization of authority
in nature conservation from the tradition of centralized command and control
policy administration just taking baby steps with partnership with community
participation in New Nepal. In one way new challenges and opportunities will
turn up. For instance, the trend towards federalism and the fears of political
fragmentation and decision making over a landscape opens up new opportunities
for developing payment for ecological services between and among landscape
elements in country for a federal set up or transboundary and global exchange
as in REDD and NAPA climate change adaptation protocols.
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