What options are available for financing conservation efforts and what role do consumers play in protecting biodiversity?
Interactive Study Guide
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Guiding Question 11.5
What options are available for financing conservation efforts and what role do consumers play in protecting biodiversity?
Why You Should Care
What role can you play protecting biodiversity? Often, the best way is to vote with your wallet. Many commodity products like coffee, chocolate, and lumber are available certified by different organizations as “fair-trade” or “sustainable.” Although fair-trade refers directly to providing a fair price for local growers, it usually encourages them to produce their trade items in ways that have less of an impact than commercially grown crops. Most of us don’t normally have occasion to buy exotic items like ivory, but making sure that you are not buying protected products or organisms will reduce demand for the items and therefore the likelihood that species will be over-harvested. Making your next vacation a visit to an ecotourism resort can be a great way to stimulate local economies and provide monetary reasons for local residents to preserve their ecosystems. It’s easy to believe that your single efforts don’t matter, but the dramatic increase in “green” products is evidence that enough people have shown an interest that corporations have taken notice.
Businesses and corporations as well as governments can provide major monetary incentives to protect biodiversity. This includes debt-for-nature swaps, debt forgiveness to governments in exchange for preserving habitat, and the buying of conservation credits—support provided for preserving biodiversity in one area by companies that have developed another.
Select the conservation method that best matches the following examples:
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"Buffer" strips are stands of woods left on either sides of streams that run through agricultural fields. The trees prevent fertilizer and pesticide run-off into surface water, erosion, and wind damage to crops. They also provide a corridor for species to move between suitable habitats. Although profit is lost because that land is not being planted, the cost of decontaminating the water or building retaining walls to contain soil erosion offsets the loss.
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The Sierra Club organizes concerned citizens around various conservation causes, like encouraging the closure of coal mines that pollute mountain watersheds.
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A bioblitz is an organized event in which trained scientists pair up with amateur naturalists to identify and describe as many species as possible in an area, usually one of conservation interest.
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A concerned scientist living in Panama realized that her work on the ecology of the cloud forest was of little use to the local inhabitants of the area if she could not do something to preserve it without impacting their quality of life. She hired local workers to build lodges on private land outside the protected area and installed minimal amenities: water from a mountain top cistern and privy toilets. Scientists and others can now come and stay at the lodges, take tours led by local people, and eat food prepared by host families. The charges for the visit and tour guides are nearly twice the average daily wage, in an area where people usually make money by working to clear land.
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Fur coats and other clothing made from fur has been out of mainstream fashion for decades, especially if the fur comes from threatened species like seals or big cats. There is no indication that fur will ever be back in style.
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Over the past 20 years or more, Costa Rica has greatly expanded its national parks system with funds it saved by recovering some of its financial obligations to the United States.
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Short-Answer Questions
A friend tells you about the ivory jewelry he found in an outdoor market in China. How would you answer the following questions he has about ivory?
1) Is it illegal to buy ivory?
2) I’ve heard that elephants are becoming overpopulated in parts of Africa. Why is it illegal to buy ivory?
3) What about the stockpiles of ivory that have been confiscated? Why not sell them and use the funds to support conservation efforts?
4) How could you tell if this was real ivory or that it comes from endangered elephants?
5) If elephants were native to the United States, what protections would they have?
1) Yes, the CITES bans the trade of elephant ivory. Whether or not this applies to ivory that pre-dates CITES is debated.
2) There are two species of elephant in Africa; one is severely threatened. Since you can’t tell what kind of elephant a piece of ivory came from, its sale shouldn’t be sanctioned. Furthermore, even though some populations are becoming overpopulated, because of the low reproductive rates in elephants, harvesting ivory should never be sanctioned.
3) There are many potential reasons, but a good one is that selling the ivory would encourage demand for more.
4) DNA fingerprinting could reveal whether or not this was true ivory and, if so, where the elephant providing the ivory came from.
5) The ESA would protect elephants: Killing them would be prohibited, and assurances would be made that their habitat was protected.
