What Counts as a Smart Way to Protect Wildlife Today? | 100 People With Ideas

Groups like the Shan Shui Conservation Center want to tie nature conservation to the livelihoods of the people who live there. Where is the hard part?

On July 27, 2014, the Guanba patrol team photographed a wild giant panda and an Asian black bear. Only after pulling the memory card from the camera and seeing the two animals on screen did the team phone the township government with the news.

Photographing the panda and the black bear meant conservation in Guanba Gully was starting to work. Wild animals breed slowly, and it took the Guanba project four years to see wildlife populations recover and fish fry hatch.

The project belongs to the Shan Shui Conservation Center. Guanba was not named Sichuan province's first pilot small nature reserve until 2016, but the project itself began in 2009. Guanba is a village in Pingwu County, in northwestern Sichuan, more than 300 kilometers from Chengdu, and one of the largest habitats for wild giant pandas in the country.

Of the 40,000 small nature reserves across the country, most exist in name only, with no working system behind them and no source of money. Guanba is one of the few "success stories."

Every month, a patrol team of 25 villagers takes turns walking the whole Guanba Gully watershed. They check whether outsiders have come in to mine or forage illegally, and clear out poachers' snares. They also change the batteries and memory cards in the 25 infrared cameras set up across a range of more than 40.3 kilometers.

These villagers, none of whom ever had professional training, have learned to set up infrared cameras and can now read tracks and find animal trails.

I

Feng Jie, who runs Shan Shui's Southwest Mountains program, remembers that at the first meeting he called after arriving in Guanba, two or three people showed up from the entire village. The villagers had no interest at all in "nature conservation."

Pingwu is a poor county, and close to a fifth of the village could not reliably feed itself. For decades, villagers here lived off the mountains, making their living from logging, foraging under the forest canopy, hunting and fishing.

That rough way of getting by ended in the 1990s, when the state banned logging; the Wild Animal Protection Law, passed around the same time, also began to stop villagers from hunting. With their income cut off, villagers were left with digging for medicinal herbs, poaching and electrofishing.

In 2009, Shan Shui designed a plan for the Pingwu county government that tried to join two things together: better living conditions for villagers, and nature conservation. In practice that meant signing conservation agreements with the people of Guanba, using money to "buy" conservation results.

At first Shan Shui raised the money itself, paying for the patrol team it had helped the villagers form. Only three years later did the government start putting in more. It now allocates 50,000 yuan a year as ecological compensation for protecting the collective public-welfare forest, and the patrol team's income shifted to that source. The 50,000 yuan covers both the patrol team's wages and payments to villagers who report damage.

This approach is called conservation agreements, and Shan Shui did not invent it. Fourteen years ago, Conservation International signed the first such agreement with the government of Guyana in South America, taking on concession rights to protect 80,000 hectares of primary forest. It has since become a fashionable method: 51 conservation agreements have been signed in 14 countries and regions, covering 15 million hectares of ecological hotspots.

The payoff from paying people was obvious. A project no one had cared about drew a crowd once subsidies were attached.

Feng Jie and his colleagues talked the villagers into forming a beekeeping cooperative and built the "Panda Honey" brand. Beekeeping was not a traditional livelihood in Guanba, but it does far less damage than farming work such as raising sheep and grazing. Feng and his colleagues also required that nectar sources sit at least 3 kilometers from where people live, to keep the plants clear of pesticide and fertilizer.

To supply technical help and a way to sell the honey, in the first few years after the agreement was signed Feng Jie drove a newly bought car back and forth on the mountain roads between Chengdu and Guanba, a round trip that rattled on for 10 hours.

In the third year of "Panda Honey," the villagers reached the virtuous circle of "gaining from conservation." Beyond the beekeeping households, villagers holding shares in the cooperative took a cumulative 40,000-plus yuan in dividends, which for them counts as steady income.

II

Feng Jie, who has a master's degree in agricultural economics and management, joined the Shan Shui Conservation Center in 2009, at first as a "coordinator." Shan Shui was two years old then; its founder was Lü Zhi, a professor at Peking University. It had started as the local arm of the China program of the international environmental group Conservation International, then went independent and set up on the Peking University campus. This grassroots biodiversity group has pushed several "ecological special zones" in western China.

Shan Shui and Guanba village drew up five-year goals and a work plan together, with a fresh, detailed plan each year. At that point Feng Jie and his colleagues had finished their job as coordinators. Now villagers get in touch only when something goes badly wrong, or when they are organizing a big event.

"The money we [Shan Shui] provide keeps going down, but our company, and our training of local people in management and open accounting, has stayed the same. Because this project is about people, and people's abilities and decisions decide how it turns out," Feng Jie says.

Since Friends of Nature, China's first national grassroots environmental group, was founded in 1994, thousands of environmental groups large and small have appeared across the country. They share the goal of protecting the environment, but what they actually do varies widely.

Planting trees and releasing wild animals were the two methods most common among environmental groups in the early years, and tree planting was the mainstream one. Figures from the "Beautiful China" environmental forum show that in 2013, 80 percent of foundation money in nature conservation went to tree planting and grassland management. Releasing animals, by contrast, requires some basic knowledge on the part of the people doing it, so they can tell whether the animal they are letting go is native or invasive.

People have always seen these methods as the other side of "economic development": urbanization is bound to eat forest, and dams and roads shrink animal habitat sharply. At first glance, construction, logging and poaching all sit at the end of a chain of interests, and the usual response has been to call for "no trade, no killing," and to argue for protecting nature by treating the interests of local residents and of wild animals as separate questions.

NGOs like Shan Shui have tried to find another repair. In Lü Zhi's words, "All of our work is about how to make ordinary people the main force in conservation."

III

By 2016, Shan Shui had cut its funding to a minimum. "The system in the village can run on its own now, without Shan Shui. Their income can already pay for conservation work, and even all the monitoring is done by the villagers themselves."

"We only encourage and support local villagers in protecting their own home, and provide technical help and coordination. Local problems can only be solved by local people," Feng Jie says.

That matches an idea held by the ecologist Anthony Sinclair and the wildlife biologist George Schaller: "The ideal is that communities take part in protecting and managing their own resources on their own initiative — conservation depends in the end on their willingness and participation."

Feng Jie is clear about where Shan Shui, and he himself, stand: local residents are the main actors, and he is only their supporter. Over his years in Sichuan, Feng spent half his time with villagers and split the rest between the forestry bureau and township governments. So he had to learn to hear the real needs behind villagers' talk of daily necessities, and to master how to deal with partners, including the "hard skill" of drinking with township officials.

That is more or less his whole method of working every side: "It makes it easier to build good relationships locally, and to get the villagers' ideas into the heads of the township government and the forestry bureau. And the other way around, those ideas need carrying out too."

He thinks an environmental group that throws its weight around risks cutting itself off from local culture, and may also upset the balance among villagers, government and the group itself.

"Dr. Schaller once told me, 'Conservation depends in the end on a change of heart.' I was young and didn't understand — I always thought you should rely on scientific methods, or on policy and law. Now I think the places where conservation has worked are probably all places where people wanted to protect it themselves. And the reason they wanted to isn't a utilitarian one, or at least not a practical or material kind of self-interest," Lü Zhi said in an interview with Southern People Weekly.

China has 40,000 of these small nature reserves. In Sichuan alone there are more than 300 conservation projects like Guanba Gully. Most are small and scattered, too small in area to qualify for nature-reserve status.

But set against the closed national system of nature reserves, they are more open. Most of the country's 2,740 nature reserves were created by restricting or moving out the local community, leaving the land as animal habitat. Once villagers had been moved off land their families had lived on for generations, they were barred from entering the reserves to take natural resources, and got no compensation for it — "which easily turns local people against conservation work and the people doing it," Feng Jie says.

The national reserves are without doubt the strongest conservation force, and the government has put in a great deal of money and manpower. But what they cover is very limited: of 1,085 species, only 66 have more than 5 percent of their habitat inside a reserve. The rest are scattered through broken patches of forest, outside the system.

So the surveys and protection that environmental groups bring to the small reserves have become an important supplement.

Against official species lists that update slowly, the data collected by civil groups has produced plenty of surprises.

Maomeng ("Cat Alliance"), which focuses on wild cats, set up 32 infrared cameras in Sichuan and photographed more than 35 mammal species, including footage of a leopard walking into snow leopard territory, breaking a string of "first ever" records.

Huangye Xinjiang ("Wild Xinjiang") found seven previously unrecorded snow leopards around Urumqi, and took the country's first record of a living Asian wildcat. Zhuque Hui ("Vermilion Bird Society"), through 2,124 observation points set up nationwide, has recorded more than 1,197 bird species.

But environmental groups do not have much money, which makes conservation a matter of efficiency too.

From the start, these groups have had to answer the question of "how to get money." For most of the well-known ones, among foundations, companies, government and individuals, the main sources are foundations and companies. That, to a degree, means they have to be good at making noise.

Damao, who founded Maomeng, says that besides conservation itself, one important job of a wildlife group is "publicity," the best way to raise money. "Only if you tell people what you're doing do you have any chance of getting money for conservation." Like Maomeng, the Shan Shui Conservation Center has thousands of posts on its official account and its Weibo explaining environmental questions or announcing events online and off. After every trip into the field, nearly every member writes up what they made of it.

The shortage of money shows up most sharply among grassroots groups and self-organized projects that never managed to register. Many of them cannot pay a fixed salary and so cannot hire anyone full time. Their members are mostly company employees "doing it out of conviction," or local farmers, who do not live on project money alone.

As a result, turnover at many environmental groups is enormous.

In interviews with QDaily, though, both Shan Shui and Maomeng said their own turnover is low, with many members staying seven or eight years. Beyond a fixed but modest salary, they say, what holds people is belief in the work and personal interest.

IV

In the early 2000s, international support was the main source of operating money for NGOs. Ten years ago, when Shan Shui was new, neither its profile nor the government's attention to environmental protection was anywhere near today's level, but it still won money from international foundations, including CEPF (the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund).

Now the support from within Chinese society is stronger. For domestic NGOs, Shan Shui included, the biggest funders are now domestic companies and foundations, most of which give money against project proposals.

Sometimes what an environmental group and a company agree on looks like a "resource swap." The company provides money, and in return the group becomes an outlet through which the company extends its social influence and meets its social responsibility.

The Shan Shui Conservation Center takes money from society on one side, and supports grassroots civil groups on the other. Unlike the foundations, it provides not only money but professional help and company along the way.

As for "how to spend money more effectively," the thinking starts with where to put a project. Environmental groups mostly look at "hotspots," meaning places where endangered species are unusually concentrated. The Southwest Mountains, the Bohai Rim, Sanjiangyuan, the Jiangsu-Zhejiang area and the two Guangs all deserve priority. Among these, the projects that give the most for the money tend to be forest that has not been fully developed, where biodiversity has taken some damage but can be nursed back with the right methods. Like the Guanba that Shan Shui picked: it had "problems" at the time, but more "potential" to recover.

Still, the results of nature conservation are often hard to count.

Feng Jie says that once a large sum goes into a conservation project, it is all but impossible for a virtuous circle to appear within a year or two.

Normally, results can only be judged every two or three years, using indicators that measure the process or come at it indirectly:

In poaching areas, the number of snares patrol staff take down is one indicator. Changes in villagers' awareness, their income mix and their energy use can also serve as a signal, or as data.

Shan Shui runs a systematic evaluation every two or three years to judge conservation results. In the decade since the Guanba project began, it has done three of them.

The NGO landscape in China has shifted, though. On January 1, 2017, the Law on the Administration of Activities of Overseas Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) in Mainland China took effect.

By then, 18 months had passed since the law was formally adopted on April 28, 2016. Yet apart from provisions of principle — that a group must have a supervising unit, may not raise money inside mainland China, faces limits on moving funds into the mainland, and may not engage in "political activities" — the detailed rules had still not all been issued. That left many international NGOs working in mainland China stalled. International organizations including FFI (Fauna & Flora International) also began setting up independent local entities, to get out from under a law whose shape is still unclear.

Shan Shui has to respond to the change as well. "Our international cooperation has changed. As for the specific rules and how to work under them, we're still watching and learning, and at the same time looking for more domestic social resources," says Shi Xiangying, who heads Shan Shui's nature observation program.

Cover image from: BBC's Planet Earth

In-body images from: Shan Shui Conservation Center