Current Indicators of Conservation

The challenges facing each community implementing a project with BCN support are enormous. Yet in 1996, only three years since BCN's inception, preliminary monitoring results indicate that in 18 out of 20 projects, threats to local biodiversity are being reduced. Biodiversity monitoring and adaptive (responsive) management practices by local communities currently extend over 221,000 hectares with plans to expand to a total of 2.2 million hectares -- an area larger than the state of New Jersey.

Even more exciting is evidence that impacts of these biodiversity based projects are rippling beyond the project sites and are having a catalytic effect on community and national awareness of the benefits of conserving biodiversity. BCN-funded projects are stimulating wide-ranging transformations in conservation efforts and polices. Highlights include:

• Creation of the first Cooperatively Managed Marine Conservation Area in the Solomon Islands. Its rules governing the use of the marine resources around the Arnavon Islands, were approved and gazetted by the Isabel Provincial Assembly and are now part of the provincial by-laws.

• Passage of new legislation in Nepal permitting communities to keep 30 to 50% of tourist tax revenues from visitors to local protected areas.

• Requests for assistance from communities in Jumla, Nepal to the BCN-funded Humla Project to help them set up their own essential oil distilling operations, thus replicating the project on their own.

• Use of biological monitoring information to stop the building of a proposed road through the center of the Ikalahan Reserve in Central Luzon in the Philippines.

• Development of draft legislation in Fiji regulating prospecting for pharmaceutically active compounds from native flora and fauna by commercial companies.

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