C. Results of World Bank/USAID-funded Geographic Priority-Setting Exercises in the LAC Region
E. Question and Answer Session
H. NGO Panel: "Practical Applications"
I. Closing Remarks: Jeff Brokaw, Environment Officer, LAC Bureau, USAID
The Donors Workshop on Funding for Biodiversity Conservation and Ecoregional Planning in the Latin American and Caribbean Region, which took place December 13 -14, 1999, in Washington, D.C., brought together a diverse group of staff from development banks, NGOs, foundations and bilateral and multilateral donors, to discuss funding trends in the region. Through presentations, plenary and panel sessions and working groups, the workshop aimed to 1) present information on funding patterns for biodiversity in LAC region for the period 1990-1997; 2) increase the level of information available to biodiversity donors and discuss significance of results; 3) encourage greater donor communication and awareness; and 4) increase awareness about ecoregion-based priority-setting and conservation.
Dr. Thomas Lovejoy, Chief Biodiversity Advisor at the World Bank, presented an overview of the challenges for biodiversity conservation in the LAC region, which include population pressure, an increasing number of infrastructure projects, fire and global climate change. However, the outlook is not all gloomy. Countries like Costa Rica have created a large number of new parks in the last 30 years, and the concept of biodiversity has infiltrated our public discourse, as evidenced by two major international conventions. We must continue to integrate biodiversity concerns into all infrastructure projects and industry practice. Non-governmental organizations and research must continue to be strengthened and supported throughout the region. Innovative approaches must be pursued and implemented.
Dr. David Olson of the World Wildlife Fund, laid out the context for ecoregion-based conservation, an approach whose scale may be best suited to achieving the conservation mission of saving life on earth. Through a workshop and consultation process, terrestrial and freshwater ecoregions were developed for the region, which were then prioritized using a number of biodiversity features such as species richness, species endemism, uniqueness at higher taxonomic levels, conservation status, etc. Some of the high priority terrestrial ecoregions include the: Choco region, Atlantic Forest, Yungas, flood forests of the Amazon, conifer forests of Mexico and Central America, Llanos, Pantanal, and temperate forests of the southern cone. Some of the high priority freshwater ecoregions include the: Amazon, Piedmont areas of the Andes, highland lakes, and xeric systems in the Chihuahuan Desert.
Dr. Georgina Bustamante from The Nature Conservancy (TNC), continued with an overview of the marine priority-setting exercise for the LAC region, which followed a similar process of consultation with local experts, workshops and prioritization using transparent criteria, modified for the marine realm. Seven marine ecoregions were selected as priorities: Cortezian, Panama Bight, Humboldtian, North Patagonian Gulfs, Buenos Aires-Uruguay shelf, northeastern Brazil and Central Caribbean. TNC applied a finer level of analysis to the Central Caribbean ecoregion, dividing it into 51 coastal systems (more manageable units for conservation action), of which 25 were selected as priorities.
The objectives and results of the funding analysis were presented by Dr. Gonzalo Castro of the World Bank. This study attempted to characterize biodiversity funding patterns by major donors from 1990-1997. A survey was sent out to 118 donors, with 64% of them responding. Although characterization and analysis of the data proved difficult, some patterns and results did emerge. In the time period under study, 3,348 conservation projects, totaling 3.1 billion dollars, were funded. The top ten funders, which account for 70% of the total, include, in descending order, the World Bank, the IDB, GTZ, GEF, USAID, Canada, PPG7, the Netherlands, KfW, and WWF. When one adjusts the country-level funding information by size, it appears that the southern cone countries receive less donor investment (although their national government investment may be higher than other countries in the region). WWF priority ecoregions that are not receiving as much money as other ecoregions include the Valdivian forests and the Llanos in Venezuela. Limitations of the database include its terrestrial bias, limited temporal scope (until 1997 only), errors due to incorrect project classification and lack of national-level funding information.
The opportunities for and challenges to greater collaboration were discussed by Jack Vanderryn of the Moriah Fund. In his experience with inter-governmental and donor collaboration, successful cooperation takes place when it: 1) is beneficial to each of the participants; 2) sets out a well-defined program that clearly spells out the responsibility (financial and technical) of each of the parties; 3) engages those with sufficient authority to commit their agencies/boards of directors; 4) provides learning opportunities for members; 5) acknowledges and seeks out all of the stakeholders involved in an issue; 6) fosters close personal relationships between program managers and works to eliminate friction; and 7) involves open exchange of information between parties. Other factors leading to successful cooperation include: 1) low staff turn-over at the various organizations/agencies; 2) flexibility on the part of donors; 3) the involvement of different components -- research, organizational capacity building, etc.; 4) a long-term commitment; 5) an investment in building the capacity of the recipient organizations. Constraints to collaboration between foundations and bilateral/multilateral donors are the: 1) different scales of contribution; 2) staff turnover at bilaterals and multilaterals; 3) bureaucratic processes; 4) complex project designs required by larger donors which don't leave room for collaboration; 5) different types of partner NGOs (activist vs. non-activist) with whom the two sets of donors work; 6) very different criteria for project selection.
The working groups reported back during a plenary session. Comments and recommendations included:
Funding database
The funding database is a useful first step and should be maintained but should include: socioeconomic data, information on funding trends, development spending data; potential threats to biodiversity; private sector funding; clarification of grant vs. loan funds; lessons learned; and national level funding, among other items.
More micro-level analyses at the country and regional level should be conducted, rather than at the continental scale.
Existing structures should be utilized wherever possible. Utilizing the Inter-Agency Planning Group (IPG), RedLAC and individual environmental trust funds was one proposed structure for maintenance of the database. Effort must be made to ensure that database is useful at the local level.
Likely candidates to maintain this type of information include: World Bank, Conservation Data Centers (CDC), World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC), Inter-American Biodiversity Information Network (IABIN), BCIS, and OECD Project.
Donors
Donors can stimulate priority-setting at the national level and encourage better coordination within national governments.
Constraints to donor collaboration include: changing political agendas, fear of transparency, short-term development agendas vs. long-term conservation agendas, reluctance to share information, different missions, weak environmental constituencies, and weak institutional capacity.
Increased focus must be directed towards defining and measuring impacts, which are crucial to project success.
Donors must better understand their individual strengths, interests and capabilities.
To achieve increased dialogue and collaboration, increase decentralization of donor agencies, encourage establishment of donor groups in-country, continue face-to-face meetings among donors, NGOs, foundations, etc.
Conservation Organizations
Conservation and environmental NGOs must learn how to better influence multilateral development bank loans and priorities.
The Banks and NGOs should encourage client governments to pass laws requiring environmental impact statements for all public and private infrastructure projects.
Walter Arensberg, moderator of the plenary session, brought up the following positive trends:
People are beginning to realize that environmental/biodiversity concerns must be mainstreamed into all activity.
Environmental trust funds are a growing phenomenon.
Emphasis on civil society is increasing.
There are more environmental agencies and ministries being created, although they still do not have the same influence as the ministries of finance or agriculture.
The private sector is getting more involved in these issues.
Climate change is gaining in importance and because of the recent occurrence of natural disasters, people are paying more attention to issues of conservation, reforestation, land-use planning, etc.
The following major points were brought up during the NGO Panel:
The Utility of Funding Analyses
- Conservation organizations do have a team approach and a common agreement on what the conservation priorities are. Better data and communication, in the form of this type of analysis, allow NGOs to achieve the goals of no gaps and no duplication of efforts.
- Funding analyses can assist in the design of fund-raising campaigns, marketing strategies and making sure that attention is paid to thematic areas under-represented.
- Funding analyses are one tool in a series of understanding of how money flows and can be useful for plotting trends, donor self-education and mutual education. Other tools must include an understanding of the best mechanisms for delivery of money and for priority-setting at local, national and subregional levels.
- In order for funding and other analyses to be really useful, must try to identify, specifically, the questions we want to address. We need to get specific about the most important biodiversity, evolutionary and ecological processes we want to conserve.
Priority Setting
- It is also important for governments to also give high priority to conservation if we're to make any headway. Funding analyses and geographic priority-setting can help governments make strategic decisions about conservation.
- We must keep in mind that there is no one universal right set of priorities -- we need to have a lot of them, but we must hold governments accountable to those priorities they've already agreed to implement.
- We must get better at integrating social and economic information into our priority-setting exercises.
The Role of Donors
- NGOs and donors have an obligation to get government agencies as well-informed as possible.
- Donors must keep in mind and commit to a long-term perspective and provide "loyal money."
- Donors need to also focus on destructive subsidies to plot the negative impacts of investment.
- Donors and NGOs must take care that funds actually get to the field and are not all diverted to building capital city conservation infrastructure.
- Biodiversity conservation must be couched in the region's efforts towards democracy, rule of law and citizenship rights for all people.
- Donors must be accountable, over the long-term, to the people with whom they've chosen to work.
Monitoring and Evaluation
- We must focus much more on indicators of success -- what works and what doesn't -- and take monitoring and adaptive management seriously and build it into all projects. Baselines must be established to which we can then compare results.
- Must develop specific objectives and targets and the ability to evaluate and monitor what we're doing. Once clear strategies are established, then all the relevant factors become evident and one can address possible negative funding.
- If a project's goals are clear, the amount of money that's required to achieve the goals will become clear.
On-the-ground Conservation
- A stronger, more powerful argument can be made for protection of entire watersheds than for protection of relatively small units. Therefore, we must look, not just at species, but at broader ecological functions and processes.
- We must get better at integrating biodiversity/environmental concerns with finance, agriculture, poverty alleviation strategies.
Jeff Brokaw, Environmental Officer for USAID's LAC Bureau, closed the workshop by encouraging donors to make a commitment to get to know each other better -- the strengths and weaknesses of each donor, and how the strengths can reinforce one another. Donors need to take advantage of untapped synergies that exist, to further promote the effective use of funds directed towards biodiversity conservation.
Monday, December 13, 1999
Good morning. We are so delighted that everyone could be here. A few words of opening introduction before we get under way with what I think is going to be a tremendous program today. My name is David de Ferranti, and I'm the vice president for the World Bank in charge of all of the Bank's work in Latin America and the Caribbean. I'm very delighted to have this chance to say a few words before the program gets under way. I'm delighted, because I'm very interested personally in the programs and the issues that will be discussed here today.
In the last eight months, I have been to almost every country in Latin America, and I have spent quite a bit of time outside the cities and major urban centers, visiting some of the interior parts of the continent. Through that, I've gotten learn a lot more and to have a tremendous amount of affection for the issues that you're going to be discussing today.
I recently was in Brazil for the discussion of the rain forest pilot program and have been in the rain forest. I have also recently visited Central America, and learned a lot more about the Meso-American Corridor. So I'm really happy that this event is happening and that I could have a few words of opening.
Many groups and organizations have made this possible, including the Biodiversity Support Program (a consortium of World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy and World Resources Institute), USAID, as a major funder, and I'm happy that the World Bank could help in a supporting role, and I'm also happy that we're in a supporting role in the sense that we can be guided by the deliberations here today.
It is my pleasure now to introduce Mike Deal, the Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Latin America and Caribbean Bureau of USAID. He's going to kick off the discussions and introduce the others on the panel. Once again, on behalf of the Bank, on behalf of the Latin American and Caribbean region of the Bank, and behalf of myself personally, welcome, and I'm very happy to be here and to have you all here today. Thank you.
Thank you, David, and good morning. USAID is very pleased to have worked with the World Bank in convening this conference and in conducting the analysis of funding for biodiversity in the Latin American and Caribbean region. It is particularly gracious of the Bank to have provided their facilities for this conference.
We think, along with the Bank, that this is very special event in that it represents the first time that such a diverse group of development banks, NGOs, foundations and donors, both bilateral and multilateral, have joined together to discuss the challenges facing biodiversity in the region. While the Summit of the Americas Process has permitted LAC countries, the donors and civil society, the opportunity to establish a common agenda with respect to poverty reduction, democratic strengthening, educational reforms, and other priorities for the region, no similar venue for conservation and biodiversity has emerged since the Sustainable Development Summit in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, some five years ago.
That's why the World Bank and USAID and many of you have decided that this conference was essential. We felt strongly that the major public and private players in the sector needed to gather together to better understand funding patterns for biodiversity in the region, to encourage greater donor communication and awareness, identify funding gaps, and discuss the strategic roles different types of donors can play in relationship to one another and the host governments in order to create the most effective overall biodiversity conservation effort.
Later this morning, Dr. Gonzalo Castro will present the results of an analysis of biodiversity funding in the region from 1990 to 1997 by the major bilateral donors, multilateral banks, NGOs, and foundations. This analysis will highlight the commitment of a wide variety of organizations represented here today to conserve and sustainably use the region's biological resources. Clearly, though, the funds from all donors available for the task are limited.
No matter how you measure it, the Latin American and Caribbean region is the repository of some of the richest biodiversity in the world. Of the world's twenty-five most biodiverse countries, nine are in this region. Of the 178 terrestrial ecoregions in the Latin American region, thirty-four are considered globally outstanding, and of the world's twenty-four hot spots, one-third are in the region.
The region's biodiversity, unfortunately, also faces significant and growing threats. The rate of habitat destruction is alarming and growing. As examples, the region has one of the highest rates of deforestation of any region in the world, and all indications are that these rates are increasing, not decreasing. Of the coral reefs in the region, one-third are considered to be highly degraded and critically threatened. Again, all the signs are that the rate of degradation is accelerating.
Species and whole ecoregions are being threatened with extinction, and the consequence will be dire. We are on the verge of losing biological resources that once gone, cannot be regenerated or replaced. The consequences are not only immediate for this generation, but permanent for all generations. For example, the loss of coral reef ecosystems has not only an immediate devastating impact on the communities that depend economically upon them, but those economic opportunities are lost virtually to all generations, and lost also is the potential but as yet untapped value the genetic material in those systems could have provided to future generations.
As a donor community, we must work together to improve our assistance to host countries in the conservation of the region's biodiversity. We can point to a few examples of successful coordination, such as in Central America with CONCAUSA and in the Brazil rain forest with the PPG7, but these examples are few and far between.
This afternoon, Jack Vanderryn will address the opportunities and challenges to greater coordination among the donors. Our hope is that this discussion will generate creative options for opening up new avenues for cooperation.
As with most research, the funding analysis presented at this conference will raise more questions than answers. I want to thank all of you, therefore, for your efforts over the next two days in critiquing the study we have sponsored with the World Bank and for developing recommendations for next steps. Your act of participation will help ensure that the results of this conference will not be an end, but a beginning that will help shape and improve cooperative efforts and partnerships in conservation. Thank you for your participation.
I would like to introduce Judy Oglethorpe, who will speak next. Judy is the executive director of the Biodiversity Support Program. Thank you.
Good morning. We in the Biodiversity Support Program are very pleased to be working in collaboration with the World Bank and USAID on this project. Just to start with, I would like to thank, in particular, the vision of Eric Fajer and Jeff Brokaw of the LAC bureau of USAID, and also Gonzalo Castro of the World Bank, all of whom provided funding for the project.
For those who don't know about the Biodiversity Support Program, it is a consortium of the World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy, and the World Resources Institute, totally financed by USAID. Our mission is to promote the conservation of biodiversity worldwide and to provide advice and information to USAID on biodiversity.
We work by taking individual approaches to biodiversity conservation, and we also work as a neutral partner within the conservation community, facilitating collaboration between organizations. We've done a lot of work on geographical priority-setting in the past. In the LAC region, we've worked on terrestrial, freshwater and marine priority-setting exercises in collaboration with many partners. In other parts of the world, we've undertaken work in Bulgaria, Ukraine, Papua New Guinea, and India. I've just returned from a priority-setting exercise in the Upper Guinea forests of West Africa, where we were providing part of the socioeconomic input. So the project that we're discussing today is particularly relevant to BSP and we view it with a lot of importance, because without adequate funding, biodiversity conservation isn't going to go anywhere.
I'd just quickly like to run over the agenda for this morning. When I finish, Tom Lovejoy will be giving us the keynote address. There will then be a short break, and we'll hear the results of priority-setting exercises in LAC for terrestrial and freshwater realms by David Olson from the World Wildlife Fund, and then the marine realms from Georgina Bustamante from the Nature Conservancy. Gonzalo Castro will then talk about funding for conservation and ecoregional planning in the LAC region, objectives and results. There will then be a question-and-answer session before we have lunch.
So with that, I would like to introduce Dr. Tom Lovejoy, Chief Biodiversity Advisor at the World Bank, who will give us the keynote address. Thank you very much.
I'm grateful for the opportunity to share some thoughts with you about the state of biodiversity in Latin America and the Caribbean and the challenge in front of us. Some of those thoughts inevitably will be ones that are not totally new, but you will notice that I chose a fairly dramatic title for this address, namely "Last Chance for Biodiversity in the Latin American and Caribbean Region." Well, that's sort of an idiotic title in one sense, because we all know that no matter what we do, even if we managed to make the whole region uninhabitable for people, there will be some biodiversity left. It might not be the biodiversity we would choose, but we're not going to eradicate it all.
At the same time, it is also a nonsensical title in the sense that if we do everything that we possibly could do right now to save all the biological diversity still in the region, it's not going to be the last time that we deal with threats and challenges to its survival.
But having said that, I think it might be useful just to look back a bit to see how much greater the challenges are today than they were, say, thirty-four years ago. I pick that because that was 1965, the year I first set foot in South America in the Amazon. In the Brazilian Amazon, it was estimated at that point there were about 2 million people living there, including the indigenous people, and there was one road, not just in the Brazilian Amazon, in the entire Amazon. And already people were remarking about the colonization pressure coming up the Belem-Brazilia Highway, and the deforestation which it triggered.
Today, the Brazilian portion of the Amazon has--it's an estimate only--approximately ten times the number of people, there are many roads and many infrastructure projects, gas pipelines, railroads, transmission lines. All kinds of infrastructure projects are creating opportunities for further deforestation if we don't manage the situation correctly.
So having painted a gloomy part of this picture with the Amazon, let me contrast it to some of the positive things that have happened. I think about Costa Rica, not in 1965, but in the early 1970s, which at that point had only three parks, one of which was about to be degazetted by the then-president, and, of course, the history of Costa Rica since then, although accompanied by a continuing high deforestation rate, has been one of the more inspirational stories in conservation and innovative approaches to the protection of biological diversity.
Of course, in that interval since 1965, we've also seen actually a term come to existence, "biological diversity," "biodiversity," to describe what brings us here today, and we have two major international conventions, the Biodiversity Convention and the Climate Convention, which, however weakly implemented so far, are a remarkable statement of consensus among the nations of the world that these are major problems for society.
But the story goes on, of course, on a day-to-day, minute-to-minute basis, and one can think of a couple of years ago, the extent of fire in the Amazon, not just the Brazilian Amazon, fire even more recently, and disturbing revelations by science that all of this has made the forest more vulnerable to future fire. So there's no short of challenge in front of us as we look at biological diversity and its management and conservation in the Latin American and Caribbean region.
We've had a lot of discussions in the last few months here at the Bank about our environmental strategy, and it's still a work in progress, but I think one of the important things that has emerged is the clear idea that biological diversity, while certainly very important in terms of global benefits, and that's why the Global Environment Facility supports biodiversity projects, is also almost always simultaneously coupled with local benefits. It is really very important to think about both the local and the global as we design an agenda for its conservation.
I think one thing is infinitely clear today, which was not clear to most people twenty years ago, and that is, one really can't think about this agenda without thinking very comprehensively and in an integrated way. It's virtually impossible to do the job correctly for biological diversity, unless all aspects of the human enterprise are engaged in the overall goal. To put it in a more simple sort of exemplary sense, when the Bank was funding the famous highway in Rondonia, most people thought of it, not actually the people who designed the project for the Bank, but most people in society thought of that as just a road. And if there was an environmental impact of the road, it was sort of something that you studied by looking at the engineering studies, and the little bit of soil erosion that it might engender or some stream drainages it might alter. It was not looked at in those days as something which would have huge spinoff of various sorts and sorts that were, in fact, hard to predict.
I think we have come from a time of thinking of infrastructure projects like that as isolated elements to needing to think of such projects as elements within overall packages for a region in which all the economic and social aspects are included to try and promote sustainable development without a major cost to biological diversity.
The project that comes closest to that in my mind at the moment is one that Alec Watson [from The Nature Conservancy] and I have been involved with, with the Inter-American Development Bank, in which the highway from Darien to Panama City will eventually be improved, providing contact with Panama City, but not access through to Colombia. But none of that infrastructure work will actually take place until the social and environmental elements of that project have been completed.
So there in that particular example you have one of these package approaches to a region. That doesn't mean we got it all right, but I think the overall concept of trying to integrate all the elements of human society and the human enterprise is essential to the conservation of biological diversity.
We also have seen some important efforts in recent times to define better practice for certain kinds of industry. I'm thinking here of the conference in Quito, looking at hydrocarbon development in the Amazon Slopes of the Andes on the first of July. There clearly are going to be whole series of things of that sort which can benefit the biodiversity agenda, and ones which will not be solved in a single better practice conference or in a single better practice example, but will require continuing attention from all of us to try and improve better practice so that it is less and less intrusive on the environment.
It's also clear that the agenda that brings us here today is one that really depends on a strong civil society. So the strengthening of non-governmental organizations and, for example, the creation of the NGO network in the Brazilian Amazon, the GTA, is really essential in the end to advancing what concerns us here. I might say that one of the really positive elements of trying to come to grips with the fire situation in the Brazilian Amazon a couple of years ago was the existence of this NGO network available to engage in a very effective way in training throughout the Brazilian Amazon on better practice in the use of fire.
I would also assert that continuing investment in science is important to our agenda. Certainly, as I think about some of the work that Woods Hole Research Center and its partner IPAM in the Amazon have done on vulnerability to fire, it really has helped everybody plan a more thoughtful, more effective conservation agenda. That is a single example which I'm sure can be multiplied many times over by many of you here.
The scale of this challenge, of course, is one that calls for innovation and creativity of a sort that we're beginning to see glimmerings of, but need a lot more of. I think, for example, of the Meso-American Biological Corridor, something which I think would have not been seen as doable a dozen years ago, one in which the Bank is actually finding ways to be supportive when it's very difficult for the Bank to do things other than on a single-country basis. And one sees the spread of the corridor concept elsewhere in the continent as a very important new, more ambitious way of looking at the biodiversity agenda. I would assert that it is, in fact, insufficient in itself, because ultimately we need to move from thinking about corridors to thinking of overall matrices of natural habitat everywhere within the region.
We also have seen some very innovative approaches to ecosystem services. Most of you know the story of the New York City watershed which cost one-tenth of the technological solution to the water-quality problem in New York City by investing and restoring biodiversity in that watershed. Far fewer of you probably know that this kind of thing is actually happening elsewhere within the region, in Ecuador, in Costa Rica, and I recently heard of a Sheraton Hotel in Central America which is now paying indigenous peoples in the watershed, which supplies the water to that hotel.
I think one of the big pluses that natural habitats have to give to society is one that we're only just beginning to recognize. We recognized it in bits and pieces in the past, in terms of flooding problems or in terms of soil erosion problems. I'm thinking here of disaster prevention, and nothing brought that closer to my mind than the ghastly occurrence with Hurricane Mitch in Central America. And although the job of quantifying what actually happened there has yet to be done properly, I don't think there's any question but that a major portion of the severe effects of that hurricane were a consequence of deforestation.
Anyway, what I've been talking about mostly in terms of forests applies to all habitat types in the region. It applies to Cerrado, clearly one of the more endangered habitats in the region, much like grasslands are in the United States. It certainly applies to freshwater biological diversity, which I think is the biodiversity which most often gets overlooked, and it applies to coastal zones and to marine biodiversity, and, of course, it applies to islands, because islands are usually where the crunch is seen earliest and most dramatically.
So as I think about all of this, I'm reminded of Kent Redford's alarm about the tyranny of the rain forest, that the spectacular biological diversity of the rain forest and perhaps the ease of communicating it, has overshadowed the importance of protection of biological diversity elsewhere. I think our challenge is, on the one hand, to bring those other forms of biological diversity to a more visible priority for the general public.
I would also assert there is actually a very important role for the rain forest that we may not have thought through as clearly as we can today. What I'm thinking about here is two recent signals about global climate change. One is that all tropical glaciers for which data exists, which are the ones in Peru and Bolivia and Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa, all of those at current rates of retreat will be gone in twenty years.
More recently, the release of data and analysis relating to the thickness of the Arctic ice cap, a little far away from the Caribbean and Latin America, but very important to it, the figures are that the ice cap, as measured by nuclear submarines going under the cap, which has been going on for decades, is 40 percent thinner than it was in the seventies. It is, on the average, six feet thick and thinning at a rate of four inches a year, which, if the world is all about averages, means that it's gone in eighteen years. Well, the world is not about averages in every place. Clearly there will be places where the Arctic ice cap would linger beyond eighteen years. There also will be places where it will shrink before eighteen years.
What is most spooky about all of this is the relationship between the ice cap and the huge ocean current known as the conveyor belt, which moves warm water from the Indian Ocean and South Atlantic up to between Greenland and Europe, where it cools and sinks and folds under itself and goes back to the Indian Ocean. That is just a fundamental piece of how our current climatic system works, and a loss of the ice cap could well weaken that conveyor belt or cause it to flip into a different mode.
I cannot give you a sort of firm prediction of what that will do. I have an Op Ed I've written about this over the weekend and I'm checking it out with real experts on climate and climate change, but it says to me that the whole issues of global climate change is much closer and imminent than we have thought, and that it's about time we figure out something we can do right away. My answer to that is that one of the easiest ways to get started is with carbon trading, both on the technology side and on the forest side, and that if we can just start doing it now and figure out later how to apply the credits to whatever is worked out by the Kyoto protocol, we can make a big difference relatively quickly. If you like, in the interval I can give you some of the numbers and what you can do with forests and carbon trading, because it is quite dramatic.
Anyway, what I'm saying here is that for the benefit of the biological diversity outside of the forested regions of the hemisphere, what happens with the forests themselves is actually very important to them. So if ever there was a need to come together for a more effective, more common strategy on approaching biological diversity in our region, it is now. I guess the really good news here is the kind of turnout and energy here this morning, a turnout that would not have been possible fifteen years ago. Thank you all for being here, and I look forward to getting to work. Thank you.
Dr. David Olson, World Wildlife Fund
The harpy eagle requires vast landscapes of unbroken tropical forests to survive through the next century. It is a symbol of the recognition that to halt the global extinction crisis we now face, we must conduct conservation planning over larger spatial scales and longer time frames than ever before, while still acting locally to implement these plans. With the vision and support of the World Bank and USAID, ecoregion-based conservation is rapidly emerging as the approach whose scale may be best suited to achieving the conservation mission of saving life on earth. This is because conservation strategies formulated at an ecoregion scale most effectively address the fundamental goals of biodiversity conservation:
representation of all distinct natural communities within conservation landscapes and protected areas networks
maintenance of ecological and evolutionary processes that create and sustain biodiversity
maintenance of viable populations of species
conservation of blocks of natural habitat large enough to be resilient to large-scale stochastic and deterministic disturbances and long-term changes).
These four goals have become widely adopted as a foundation for the science of conservation biology. Note that with the exception of the first goal, the remaining three address conservation of processes, as well as species and communities. They focus on such biological features as maintaining gene flow, local and hemispheric scale, animal migrations, predator-prey interactions, animal dispersals and natural areas of sufficient size to accommodate natural disturbance regimes such as fires, floods and hurricanes. The scales at which these processes operate require conservation planning and efforts at landscape and ecoregion scales.
Ecoregions are ecosystems of regional extent that harbor distinctive biotas. Many of the major conservation organizations throughout the world are adopting ecoregions as their primary conservation target. Hot spots, ecoregions, whether they're defined by World Wildlife Fund or The Nature Conservancy, we're basically talking about the same thing: distinctive units of biodiversity that occur at a regional scale.
Ecoregions occur at a spatial scale that corresponds to the major driving ecological and evolutionary processes that create and maintain biodiversity. It is a scale that addresses the maintenance of populations of the species and processes that need the largest areas, elements of biodiversity that cannot be accommodated at the site scale. They also encompass a logical set of biogeographically related communities, thus they better match the distribution of biodiversity than do political units, and they also promote coordinated efforts across political boundaries.
Ecoregion planning can also enable us to determine the best places to invest and to better understand the role that specific projects can and should play in regional conservation strategies.
The World Bank and USAID have supported several ecoregion-scale analyses of conservation priorities in Latin America and the Caribbean. The results of these analyses reflect the thinking of hundreds of regional experts who were consulted or participated in several priority-setting workshops, as well as a wealth of literature and existing data for the region. It's important to note that we advocate the conservation of biodiversity wherever it occurs. However, some units of biodiversity are so distinctive, unique, or threatened that they warrant immediate conservation attention or greater proportional investment at this juncture.
This is a map of 233 terrestrial ecoregions of Latin America and the Caribbean which has been developed through this workshop and consultation process. Each of these biogeographic units has been classified in terms of a major habitat type, whether it be a temperate grassland or a tropical rain forest. We do this for several reasons. The first is that we want to maintain representation of not only species, but distinctive ecosystem types. So in any kind of regional or global strategy we want to make sure that we are going to conserve the full range of distinctive ecosystem types, ranging from rain forests, deserts, to mangroves.
We also can tailor the analyses that we use for assessing biodiversity features and the conservation status or the level of threat to particular characteristics of these major habitat types. We need to address conservation requirements of deserts differently than we do tropical rain forests. When we make comparisons, we only make comparisons within the same major habitat type.
There are two major parameters that we look at when we're trying to identify conservation priorities for different ecoregions. The first is how distinctive is the biodiversity of a particular ecoregion at different biogeographic scales. So we look at a number of different biodiversity features, and those are listed here.
Species richness: Latin America harbors the richest terrestrial communities on the planet. Richness is a very important conservation target, but there's many other biodiversity elements that are also important conservation targets.
Species endemism: Species that are restricted to particular regions or to single ecoregions are very important conservation targets. They lend much of the distinctiveness to particular regions.
Also uniqueness at higher taxonomic levels, the level of families, of genera and so on. The Alerce forests of southern Chile harbor an extraordinary number of relict and primitive taxa that occur above the species level. These are very important conservation targets because they are found nowhere else on the planet.
We also try to identify areas that have unique or unusual ecological or evolutionary phenomena. These forests here are often dominated by very large trees. This is an unusual structural feature found in only a few forests around the world.
We also try to identify major habitat types, whole kinds of ecosystems that are rare on a global scale for which we have few opportunities to conserve anywhere on the planet. These include not only the temperate rain forests of the previous slide, but the Mediterranean climate shrublands and forests of California and Chile within this region.
This is an example of how we gather biodiversity data for each of these ecoregions. This [map] represents the number of species of birds for each of the terrestrial ecoregions of Latin America and the Caribbean. The warmer colors, the reds, represent areas that have the highest number of species. Southwestern Amazon in the Guianan lowland area are the two highest here, as well as some other ones.
Alternatively, if we look at birds which are restricted to single ecoregions, we get a different pattern. Again, this feature confers a great deal of the distinctiveness of a particular ecoregion. So this is bird endemism for the region, as an example.
We combine all these different features (endemism, richness, unique phenomena, etc.) into a single index -- the Biological Distinctiveness Index -- which ranges from globally outstanding, truly distinctive at a global scale, to regionally outstanding, distinctive within the neotropical region, or neoArctic region, or the continental scale, or within a smaller bioregion.
The other important parameter that we look at is the conservation status. How threatened is a particular ecoregion? What is the current biological integrity of the processes and species populations within a particular ecoregion? We look at a number of landscape-scale proxies which help us determine this on a general level. These include the percent habitat loss, the degree of fragmentation of natural systems, the number and size of large habitat blocks, degree of degradation, and so on. Again, these are combined into ranking from critical, endangered, vulnerable, to relatively stable, relatively intact.
We take what we call a snapshot of current features, the warmer colors being more threatened, critical, endangered, and so on. The green colors represent more relatively stable and intact. And this represents current conditions. We then look at threats to habitat loss, degradation, wildlife exploitation over the next twenty years, and we get a final status, which is represented here. As you can see, the green areas are shrinking, the red areas are becoming more prevalent as we estimate the trajectory of many of these threats.
We can then combine these two major parameters, biological distinctiveness and conservation status, into a priority-setting matrix. Biological distinctiveness is on the Y axis, conservation status on the X axis, and the highest-priority ones, as developed by the regional experts at the workshops, fall into categories of globally outstanding ecoregions, regionally outstanding ecoregions, which are ranging from critical to relatively stable. There's a great deal of debate that goes into this process, but overall, the general patterns are consistent as we go through this.
This is part of a recent Global 200 analysis that we've done in World Wildlife Fund, which tries to identify representative and outstanding ecoregions around the world, but it reflects the Level One and Level Two priorities that were developed through the terrestrial ecoregion analyses that were supported by the Bank and USAID.
These priorities match very well a number of other important conservation priority-setting efforts, including endemic bird areas of the world, focusing on distinctive units of biodiversity for particular taxa, as well as Conservation International's Hot Spots, again focusing on areas of high levels of endemism at a regional extent.
Despite our public relations programs, the conservation community really does have great concordance in conservation priorities for this region. We're just emphasizing targets in a little different fashion, but there is very good agreement among the conservation community.
Just to run through some the results briefly. Certainly some of the high-priority rain forest regions come out very high. The Choco region in Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, the Atlantic Forest region, very important, very distinctive, even on a global scale. The Yungas and Montane Forests of the Andes, some of the greatest concentrations of endemic species anywhere, very high levels of what we call beta diversity, species that are restricted to very local areas and when you move down the mountain chain you get whole new species appearing. Also the flood forests of the Amazon, very unusual. A forest with a great deal of endemism, varzea or Igapo.
But there were also a number of other types of ecosystems and ecoregions which are not well known, yet really harbor very distinctive biodiversity at global and continental scales, including the tropical and subtropical conifer forests of Mexico, Central America. These are truly extraordinary ecosystems. The Cerrado of Brazil and other countries in the region harbors of wealth of plant diversity. Flooded savannahs and grasslands such as the Llanos and the Pantanal. Some of the dry Puna harbors a very large number of endemic mammals, particularly in the southern and drier reaches.
Again, temperate forests in the southern cone are not well known among the conservation community, and so we're hoping that these kinds of efforts can really highlight the distinctive value of these systems, as well as less charismatic systems such as deserts. The Tehuacan Valley harbors an extraordinary wealth of endemic plants, as well as the Chihuahuan Desert. And, of course, the Mediterranean systems in Chile and in California, which are among only five ecoregions in the entire world and collectively they harbor 20 percent of the world's plant species. They're all highly threatened.
The freshwater biodiversity of Latin America and the Caribbean is truly extraordinary. It is more appropriate to call South America the fish continent than the bird continent in many ways. Almost half of all the described vertebrates are teleost fish, and a quarter of these are estimated to occur in the neotropics. Three thousand to an estimated 9,000 species are thought to live in the Amazon Basin alone, one of the world's largest and diverse freshwater ecosystems. And it's not only fish. There's a number of vertebrates, such as giant river otters, insects, a whole host of other species that occur in these remarkable systems.
Through our analysis of freshwater ecoregions through a workshop that was held in Bolivia, we developed a system of approximately 117 freshwater ecoregions which were categorized into major habitat types, a similar process as we did for terrestrial. The freshwater ecoregions differ from terrestrial ecoregions in terms of their boundaries and location and extent. This is because patterns of freshwater biodiversity often differ markedly from patterns of terrestrial biodiversity. Typically they follow catchment basins, watersheds, but not always. So we need to use separate ecoregion classifications.
We looked at richness, of course, Amazon being hyper-rich. We also looked at endemism and distinctive processes. This is Cuatro Cienegas in Mexico, with some of the most unusual endemism anywhere for freshwater species. Many snails and fish are restricted to a single pool of this size. What you're looking at here, although it looks like a coral reef, is actually the world's only known freshwater stramatolites, which are primitive algae, some of the oldest organisms on the planet. They're only found here and in Australia in one marine bay. It's an extraordinary place in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert.
We also highlight important ecological processes such as the migration of fish in and out of flooded forests, varzea forests, to feed on fruit. This is almost unique in the tropics, the extent of it in the Amazon.
We also look at the rarity of major habitat types such as these highland lakes that occur in Mexico and in the Andes, with very unusual species swarms, fish radiations that occur in them.
This is a look at the biological distinctiveness of the freshwater ecoregions that came out of this analysis. Some of the highlights are the Guianan Shield, the Llanos, the Piedmont areas of the Andes, the varzea, the Pantanal, and several ecoregions of Mexico are also quite extraordinary at a global scale.
We looked at a different set of parameters for the status. Here are some of them ranging from water quality to habitat fragmentation from dams and the loss of whole watersheds, which is important to consider in freshwater. We just can't look at the streams; we have to look at the processes, the entire watershed.
This is the final conservation status, showing that the central Amazon and the Guianan region really in the next twenty years are likely to be the most stable over time, but there is a rapid loss of other areas. Indeed, freshwater biodiversity is far more threatened than terrestrial biodiversity around the world, not only in the neotropics.
Summary of the results, certainly the large river systems are very important, Amazon being quite extraordinary, Piedmont areas of the Andes harbor a large number of endemic species in each of the stream areas. Some of the highland lakes, Lake Titicaca, also are quite distinctive on a global scale. Of course, some of the xeric systems in the Chihuahuan Desert and so on have very unusual freshwater biotas with unique evolutionary and ecological processes.
Some of the major threats that were identified were the loss of cataract and waterfall habitats, primarily through channelization and damming. This is a major problem not only for the loss of very specialized fish faunas, which live in these regions in rapids and cataracts, but also the damming and channelization have an enormous impact on these large-scale migrations of catfish and a wide range of other species that take place in the large rivers. They move literally hundreds or maybe even thousands of miles from one river system to the next as the seasons change and for breeding and spawning. As dams are put in place, this breaks down this entire regional system of movement. These fish are very important for local communities and fisheries throughout the region.
There's also an extraordinary loss of varzea and flooded forests and meadows throughout the region. These are very important, not only for maintaining biodiversity of fish throughout these freshwater ecosystems, but they're also extremely important for fisheries in local communities, as well, because these are really the feeding areas, the spawning areas of many fish.
Another very dire threat for the region is the loss of habitat, basically the loss of habitat in xeric or dry ecosystems, such as deserts and savannahs. Loss of riparian vegetation, the lowering of water tables which is occurring here in Cuatro Cienegas. There's a number of very rare species found only in this pool, which has been lowered quite a bit, primarily from a channel for agriculture. It's not being used anymore, but the water is still going. We need to really focus our attention on xeric and dry land, freshwater ecosystems, because they are truly going to be the first to go. Indeed, this region has experienced almost a third of its species being extinct.
Other problems include various mining and pollution sources. This is gold-mining operations in part of the Amazon. Cyanide is a byproduct which is not good for any living thing, including people.
It's not only fish; there are a number of larger charismatic freshwater vertebrates which are highly endangered throughout the range, including the giant river otters, some of the dolphins, manatees, Black Caiman, and so on.
The Latin American freshwater and terrestrial ecoregion analyses were some of the first ones that were undertaken, and they really were a catalyst for a number of other conservation initiatives that were ecoregion-based around the world. I'd like to emphasize that this has been an extremely important set of analyses for the conservation community in helping build support for these analyses, which I truly think is a better way to approach doing conservation planning for the reasons I mentioned before. We had a preliminary workshop on mangroves. It was hard to get the experts to identify priority areas, but they would give me priority activities in those regions for mangroves, but it's still a useful characterization of the mangrove ecosystems.
We've also undertaken, in collaboration with a wide range of partners, TNC, all sorts of different groups, characterization of freshwater ecoregions of the neo-Arctic or North America. We had the same experts go through Mexico again, so they should be pretty similar, I hope.
We've done a freshwater biodiversity analysis for Africa and a terrestrial one which is under way, which I don't have a slide for. Also terrestrial for the U.S. and Canada at this point, and we've been collaborating with CONABIO and others to continue to look at Mexico. All in all, we've put all of these together to develop a global system of terrestrial ecoregions of approximately nine hundred or so, for which we're now undertaking global assessments, global comparisons. This should be out in a few months.
Here's some major habitat types that National Geographic adapted from that previous map. So the same kinds of hierarchial framework classification scheme goes together. From this global-scale analysis, we've been able to do an analysis of representative and outstanding terrestrial ecoregions from around the world. This just came off the press, so it's not too fancy. It's called the Global 200.
Then we're working with the World Bank and a wide range of other conservation groups, to look at the risk of extinction in different ecoregions around the world based on endemicity of species and on a number of other biodiversity features. This is an ongoing effort.
Then when one gets down to a particular ecoregion, we're developing approaches on how to identify conservation priorities, develop conservation landscapes within each ecoregion, that was the Chihuahuan Desert with subregions within the ecoregion. Here are some priority areas that have been identified through a workshop process. Here are some of the primary targets that one focuses on when you get to working on developing a strategy for a particular ecoregion.
Thank you very much.
Dr. Georgina Bustamente, The Nature Conservancy
Good morning, everybody. Here is the cover of the book that's going to be launched tonight, Setting Geographic Priorities for Marine Conservation in Latin America and the Caribbean. I want to say a couple of words before starting my presentation.
I started to work for The Nature Conservancy five years ago, in 1994, just a few months after I moved from Cuba. This was my first independent project in the United States, and I want to thank the Biodiversity Support Program, The Nature Conservancy, and USAID for this opportunity, which I appreciate very much.
This presentation is going to be divided into the following points: the participants of the projects; the need and scope of this project; the biogeographic classification that we developed and applied to the project, with the help of the experts; the methodology; the main results; and some recommendations.
The participants: Of course, Kathleen Sullivan Sealey and myself were the principal investigators of the project, but we couldn't have done anything without the people that worked with us. First of all, our staff, The Nature Conservancy's Marine Conservation Science Center at the University of Miami, the students that contributed and supported us in this project, and twenty-six in-country experts from Latin America and the Caribbean. They were instrumental in this project. They provided the information, the data we needed to delineate, assess, and rank the ecoregions, and participated in a workshop that was held at the University of Miami in 1996. It was very successful, because they provided a very nice set of data. Also experts of The Nature Conservancy, the Biodiversity Support Program, and USAID.
We worked together in a very intricate fashion. We couldn't do it any other way because we needed the data from the experts. We recruited very good marine scientists and fishery scientists from Latin America and the Caribbean, and we developed a very long process of discussion and consultation during different workshops.
So what is our challenge? How to prioritize conservation investments in Latin America and the Caribbean? It is a huge area, 10 billion square kilometers of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) from the seashore out 200 miles to the outer border of the EEZs. More than 156,000 kilometers of coastline across about forty-five countries and territories, ranging from the Antarctic waters of southern Chile and Argentina, north to the tropical seas of the Galapagos and the Caribbean. Challenges include:
diverse climate, fauna, flora and habitat
diverse cultural and socioeconomic conditions
depleted species and populations
altered coastal habitats and biological communities
limited biological information about those habitats and communities
limited research resources
many endangered species (like the manatee)
impacted coastal habitats that are essential to marine resources.
protection of the shoreline, mangrove forests are among the habitats that are important for the protection of the shoreline
submerged outstanding biological communities such as coral reefs that are deteriorated by natural and anthropogenic impacts
biological resources that are depleted by intensive fisheries, and local communities that depend upon them.
among these fisheries, overfished fish spawning sites.
cultural and historic values
limited, but increasing, capacity
insufficient environmental education of the young generation, as well as insufficient environmental awareness of all of us
the poverty.
Our project aimed at setting geographic priorities for conservation in the coastal areas of Latin America and the Caribbean. This is just the first step, but an important one. For our methodology, we first had to define the biogeographic units of different geographic scales. We did that with the assistance of the Latin American and U.S. experts during the workshop. These are the provinces. There are nine provinces delineated. This is the ecoregion map, and this is the map of the coastal systems within the Central Caribbean ecoregion. You can see here that we defined nine provinces, thirty-eight ecoregions (4 or 5 within each province) and 51 coastal systems (the smallest scale level) within the Central Caribbean ecoregion.
After we defined these geographic units, we compiled the information on biological value and conservation status of those biogeographic units. With the help of the contributors, we compiled quantitative data, species lists, measures of biological value and conservation status of those ecoregions, etc., in order to assess and rank them.
Then during the workshop we assessed and ranked the ecoregions within each province (not across provinces, of course) using the data collected and using a very transparent and replicable methodology. This is just an illustration of the kind of data we used: quantitative data, species lists. We used the methodology developed by WWF and employed in the terrestrial exercise adapted to the marine environment which required the development of a large list of indicators. This is a ranking matrix of conservation status and biological value of the Tropical Northwestern Atlantic Province with the ranking of the 5 ecoregions. You see here in the high, left corner, the Central Caribbean.
I want to stop a little bit in the classification approach, because this was a very important part of our project. Let's go to the provinces. The province has thousands of square kilometers in size, huge areas, that cannot be managed as a unit. The classifiers, the attributes that we used to delineate them were ocean currents, temperature regime, and shelf properties of those areas. The outer limits of the provinces, we put them in the boundary of the Exclusive Economic Zone, recognizing that that's the area where the countries, the governments have jurisdiction over the resources.
Coastal biogeographic regions, which we called ecoregions, as in the terrestrial exercise, were delineated within each province. They have 100 square kilometers in size, and the classifiers or the attributes that we used as factors were oceanic circulation, upwelling, ocean currents, coastal geomorphology, and faunal distribution in those areas.
Which were the criteria that we used for ranking the ecoregions within provinces? We used measures of biological value and conservation status. They were assessed for biological value, the habitat and species diversity, the presence of breeding and nursery sites, the abundance of species populations, like sea birds, marine mammals, sea turtles, invertebrates, fishery resources, fish.
For measuring the conservation status, we used indicators of habitat alteration. For example, the percentage of the coastline altered, species loss, loss of breeding sites and nurseries sites for different groups of animals. Changes in abundance. Particularly we used the changes in fisheries resources, because you can find some fisheries statistics for most countries, but not all. We also used some indicators of the changes in the abundance of sea birds and mammals, and also indicators of potential threats.
These are the main results: with the important help of the 26 in-country experts, we described and mapped nine coastal biogeographic provinces. Then we delineated, described, mapped, and assessed for biological value and conservation status thirty-eight ecoregions, four to five for each province.
Then we selected seven priority ecoregions based on their biological value and conservation status. The seven priority marine ecoregions are:
the Cortezian, which is the Gulf of California, very important for that province
the Panama Bight, that includes the whole Pacific coast of Colombia, part of Panama, and part of Ecuador
the Humboldtian, which includes part of Chile and Peru, very important because of the abundant fisheries resources that you can find there and that are exploited by both countries
the North Patagonian Gulfs in Argentina with important fisheries resources, and abundant seabird and mammals populations.
the wide Buenos Aires-Uruguay Shelf that is a fishing zone where both countries share the exploitation of their resources. These two ecoregions are next one to each other and they came up as priority because of the importance in terms of fisheries resources and abundance of mammals and sea birds that feed upon them
the Northeastern Brazil
the Central Caribbean ecoregion within the Tropical Northwestern Atlantic province
We went further after the ecoregion analysis to apply a more detailed geographic resolution. We called it coastal systems. This is the smaller geographic area within the ecoregion. We went through a process of how to name it, first we named them ecologically sensible units, and finally we thought that "coastal system" was a good name to comprise what we wanted to show.
So what is a coastal system? They were defined and delineated based on their physical identity. They are discrete areas with distinct physical attributes. Their ecological integrity: we wanted to make sure that they comprised a mosaic of different habitats that are necessary to sustain the ecological processes of species and communities, like feeding, defense, reproduction, migration, because the marine animals move from one habitat to the other, so we wanted to make sure that we can have in a geographic unit all the important habitats for the species and community to perform their ecological processes.
The coastal system has a smaller size and so it is more manageable than the ecoregion. So we considered that the coastal system is the smallest biogeographic unit for conservation actions. These are the coastal systems of the Central Caribbean ecoregion. We delineated them along the coasts of the continental part of the central Caribbean and the islands, the Greater Antilles, because the Lesser Antilles are part of a different ecoregion. There were a total of fifty-one coastal systems in the Central Caribbean marine ecoregion.
We applied this analysis only to one pilot ecoregion because we didn't have enough funds to apply it to the rest of the ecoregions. So The Nature Conservancy selected this pilot ecoregion to apply this level of analysis. Those coastal systems only have ten square kilometers of size, which is better for management.
We then classified the coastal systems depending on their dominant habitat -- such as coral reef-dominated systems, sea-grass dominated systems. And within each of these categories, like the coral reef-dominated system, we divided them into different kinds of coastal systems, atoll, fringing reef, etc.
Then we went further. We wanted to select those systems that we considered to be priorities for conservation investments, and we did that with the information that was available and using expert opinion. The criteria for selection included the coastal systems type, because we wanted to make sure that all types were included in this portfolio or list of priority coastal systems; the urgency for conservation of each of the coastal systems; the conservation feasibility based on the presence of protected areas, of NGOs dedicated to their protection; and the position relative to the ocean currents, because the main flow of the currents come from the southeast, north to the Yucatan Channel. We wanted to make sure that, within each coastal system type, we had representation upstream, midstream and downstream. So these are the coastal systems that we selected as priority. You see that there are twenty-five -- almost half of the them -- that were selected based on those criteria.
So one of the most important results is that we have much valuable information. We have a set of data that the experts provided not only on conservation status, on biological value of the ecoregions, but also on political will and institutional capacity, which we did not use for the ecoregion ranking. We used it when there was a tie between ecoregions. We used that information also for the evaluation of the conservation feasibility in the coastal system. We have a transparent methodology, which is very important. And we have a new classification and ranking framework that was established and can be used in other areas of the world, even within the Latin American and Caribbean region.
What can we do next? We would like that this framework and classification approach and methodology be applied to the coastal system level of other ecoregions of Latin America and the Caribbean. That's our hope. For example, here we have this huge Cold-temperate South America province. There we have one, two, three, four, five ecoregions, very broad shelves, various types of habitats in southern Chile, a lot of fiords and channels and a lot of important biodiversity in these areas. It would be a nice place to start with, but, of course, this is just an example where we can apply the coastal system approach next.
We want to emphasize that this exercise initiated a process and provided a resource that can be updated with new information, of course, and as societal conditions change. It's not a static result, but one that can be modified depending on the existence of new information and the change of the societal conditions of the countries.
Finally, I would like to show you how The Nature Conservancy is applying the results of this project to build a regional portfolio. We are dividing the coastal areas into discrete coastal systems, assessing and ranking those coastal systems, to select them, identify, and map threats to marine biodiversity in the coastal system, and then develop a site conservation plan for the coastal system to abate threats.
The Nature Conservancy has worked mostly in protected areas, terrestrial and marine, but we want to expand the scope of our work to the coastal system level, because we think that the protected area is just a component of conservation action. And, finally, very important, we must obtain funds to do all that so that we can properly abate the threats. Thank you very much.
Environment Department, World Bank
Before I start, I just want to recognize Eric Fajer. This whole conference and the concept of finding out where funds for conservation are going are due to a great extent to Eric's vision. Eric is a visionary and he's a very smart person. Since we started this work, he has moved to Colorado, so that while we're here together, he's probably skiing out there.
The objectives of this study were to characterize the funding patterns for biodiversity in the LAC region since 1990, to increase levels of information available to donors and practitioners of conservation, and to encourage greater donor communication and awareness. This is a joint effort of USAID, the World Bank and BSP, but it would have been impossible without the support from all the donors who have contributed their data to this analysis.
The definition that we used for the study is compatible with the definition in the Biodiversity Convention, and we basically included all projects or project activities that are compatible with this definition. This definition is the variability of the ecosystems at species and genetic levels. However, in order to be able to operationalize the definition for this study, we defined explicit project categories that are supportive of this definition.
These were the twelve project categories that we have included: research; outreach and awareness; capacity-building; land acquisition; biodiversity within natural resources management projects; protected area projects; ex-situ conservation; policy; ecosystem or ecoregional management; sustainable enterprises; administration; and other activities in direct support of explicit biodiversity objectives.
So, if anything, we have tried to use a very conservative definition of biodiversity. I want to mention this one here, biodiversity within natural resources management projects. This includes those natural resources management projects in which there are very explicit biodiversity objectives, and only those components were included in this study.
A survey was sent to 118 organizations, including foundations, bilateral agencies, multilateral agencies, NGOs, and national trust funds. We didn't include national-level governments. The data was analyzed at the World Bank and BSP, and the funding and a lot of support has been provided by USAID.
We then followed up with phone calls to those that did not respond, to try to get them to respond to the survey. In many cases, we had to check individually with each donor to make sure that double funding was not included. Today we are at this workshop to validate and discuss these results.
The large database was organized in the following way:
| Donor type | multilaterals, bilaterals, NGOs, foundations or other |
| Donor level | primary only provides
funding secondary provides and receives funding (tertiary, which is only receiving funding, not really providing any new money on table were not included in the study) |
| Project category | twelve primary and secondary categories |
| Site category | the country, province, ecoregion and site level |
The results -- and many of you have the results in the folder that was provided this morning -- the response rate to the survey was 64 percent, but we made sure that all large funders were included. So in those cases in which a large important funder was not included, we followed up to make sure that they submitted their information.
The analysis of the data presented many challenges. Many donors only sent the raw data and we had to then try to classify the data. It's very clear that there's no consistency in the way donors maintain funding information. Some donors maintain it on a country level, at the project type level, at the site level, and the ecoregional level. So it wasn't very easy to make sense of all of that information. And the data quality varies and is difficult to categorize.
Nevertheless, some interesting patterns are starting to emerge. There are seventy-one funders that we have identified in this study for the LAC region. From 1990 to 1997, they have funded 3,348 conservation projects. The total funds spent in this period are 3.1 billion dollars, of which 2.776 billion, 89 percent, can be attributed at the country level, and about 1.9 billion, or 61 percent, can be contributed at the ecoregion level.
The remaining is what cannot be classified. For example, the other 11 percent here is money that is provided to a region or, let's say the Amazon, and we really don't know which countries are receiving that funding.
When we look at the ten largest funders for this time period, there are some interesting patterns that are emerging. The top two funders are the two multilateral banks, the World Bank with $544 million, and the Inter-American Development Bank with $307 million.
Then we have a series of bilateral agencies, bilateral and multilateral. We have GTZ, Germany Technical Corporation, with $286 million. We have the GEF through implementing agencies with $186 million. USAID, $179 million. Canada, $157 million. The Rain Forest Trust Fund, or PPG7, which is really bilateral money administered by the Bank, $155 million. The Netherlands, $151 million. KFW, $126 million. World Wildlife Fund with $98 million.
It is interesting to note that the only international NGO that makes it to the top ten is WWF. I attribute that to the fact that they have large network of organizations in Europe, and they are able to bring European money to the table that is not right here in these categories.
Notice also how none of these organizations fund each other. Therefore, the likelihood of double funding, at least at this level, is almost nonexistent. Of course, when we look at GEF, we have subtracted the GEF money that goes through the Bank, it is not included here, and the same with UNDP and UNEP. The total funding provided by the top ten [organizations] is 2.1 billion, that is about 70 percent of the total. However, many of these funding amounts also include co-funding that is not attributed to any of the funders that we have here. In other words, national level co-funding. So the universe here is actually smaller and we make it all the way to 89 percent of the total that can be attributed to funders in this study.
Now, this slide shows an interesting pattern. This is what we call the cumulative funding in U.S. million. What we do is we put the first funder here, 540 million. Then we added what the next one contributes, and we make it to 800 million, then we add the third, the fourth, etc. What you see is that very quickly you reach a plateau. So by the time you are at around number fifteen, you are already providing most of the money. What this means is that there is a serious, very large number of the smaller funders who in absolute terms are not contributing that much to the pot, but whose strategic type of funding, the type of projects that they are able to fund may be actually quite important because of the leverage they can provide.
Now when we look at the funding by project type, 99.9 percent of the data we were able to classify as a project type. What we see is that most of the money is going either to protected area projects or to biodiversity with the natural resources management projects. Then we have policy. Research also shows up, but it is a very tiny slice; it's about 5 percent. Capacity-building is very small, and then all of the rest are combined there.
Now, to contrast this, instead of looking at the amount of money, we look at the number of projects. And here the patterns change a little bit. Protected areas and natural resources management are no longer the largest. We have research capacity and policy again. What this means is that capacity-building projects and research projects tend to be smaller in size. So in terms total number of projects, they show up here, but in terms of the total money contribution, they don't.
Now, when we look at the funding by donor type, this is very similar to the top ten or to the cumulative funding that we showed earlier. We see that most of the funding, almost 50 percent, is coming from multilateral agencies. A big chunk next is coming from bilaterals, then we have NGOs, then we have foundations, and then we have other sources, primarily the national-level trust funds.
One of the questions that then arises is different funders are funding different things. And let's try to see what the roles are. That is what this slide tries to do. We have here the type of funding, natural resources management, protected areas, policy, etc., going down. We have the percentage of that total provided by either bilaterals in red, foundations in yellow, multilaterals in gray, NGOs in black, and others in white.
So what you see is that the pattern for the top ten is very similar. You always have the bilaterals and the multilaterals there, with the foundations and the NGOs playing different degrees of role. The ones that are really different, that strike out as different, are capacity-building, in which NGOs are playing a much larger bigger role in terms of percentage. Ex-situ conservation, in which foundations are playing a huge role, as compared to the others. Here's where foundations show up very clearly. The last one, land acquisition, in which it is mostly foundations and NGOs providing that funding. Bilaterals and multilaterals do not appear on the last one, because there are legal restrictions for them to provide funding for land acquisition.
So now we look at the same type of funding in absolute numbers. Instead of looking at what percentage is provided by whom, we again have the same categories, natural resources management, protected areas, etc., again in red -- bilaterals; in yellow -- foundations, multilaterals, NGOs and others.
What you see is that even though on the last two -- ex-situ and land acquisition -- those funders, bilaterals and NGOs were providing an important amount, the absolute numbers are very, very tiny. Land acquisition doesn't even show in the graph because it's so tiny. So very, very little money is really going to land acquisition.
Now we can try to look at funding by ecoregions. This is based on David Olson's work. Again, this is just to remind you what the ecoregions are. Before that, let's look at funding by country. Light yellow is small amounts of money. As you get closer to red, it's larger amounts of money. So this is absolute amounts of funding by country. Not surprisingly, Brazil gets most of the money, with about 1 billion dollars, in dark red. Another country that has been able to capture significant amounts of funding from outside sources is Mexico. I don't think these patterns are surprising. Brazil is perceived as being a major priority. There are many groups that are very active there, including, of course, the national government, and Mexico, perhaps because it's near the United States where many of the funds come from.
Then you have a series of countries, Central America, Bolivia, Argentina, North and South America, that are the next level of funding. Then you have those countries that are not getting as much money, Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru, Chile, Cuba, the Guyanas.
Now, when we correct this by country size, to give you the feeling of funding by country, adjusted for size, then the patterns change just slightly. What you see is that when you adjust by country size, the countries that have really been able to capture a lot of funds are Panama and Costa Rica. This is not surprising. Haiti also shows up with relatively high amounts of funding, being adjusted for size.
Then you have another level of countries, including those countries in Central America, Ecuador, and Venezuela that are also getting a good amount of money based on their size. Then you have the next, Brazil, Mexico. This slide is not clear, but the ones that are getting the least amount, when it's corrected by area, are Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile, which again is not surprising. This is the southern cone. These are countries that traditionally have not been the focus of international conservation funding. This is what Tom mentioned this morning when he said the tyranny of the rain forest. And, surprisingly, Peru. Peru is also receiving an amount of money similar to these countries.
Here I want to mention also that these three countries in the south happen to be those countries in which national governments are providing significant amounts of funding. So this really doesn't give you an idea of total funding going to these countries.
Another type of analysis is to look at funding by ecoregion. So about 45 percent of the data can be traced to the ecoregional level. You can see which ecoregions are getting the most money. There seems to be quite a lot of attention here, which is again, the Meso-American Biological Corridor. This again is not surprising. The Atlantic Forest is also getting some funds there.
But then we do the same thing, only including the Priority I ecoregions. So the question here is, the original question that we wanted to ask, which is, is money going to the priority ecoregions? Here you see funding only for those ecoregions, going from yellow, which is not a lot, all the way to red. It is very hard to draw any conclusions from this data. If anything, what we want is, because now we have the database, for funders interested in a given ecoregion to be able to find others that are also doing the same. We can do this with this data.
But there are some patterns that seem to emerge here. Evident Priority I ecoregions that are not getting as much funds include the Valdevian forest in Chile, the Llanos in Venezuela, and the Atlantic Forest in Brazil. Although there are three ecoregions that comprise the Atlantic Forest, so this is a little bit trickier to interpret.
When we now try to correct that by looking at aggregations, there's more money on top of what I just showed that can only be attributed to aggregations of ecoregions such as the Amazon, the Andes, or the Atlantic Forest. Then the Atlantic Forest shows up, so it may not be a problem there.
Now when we look at funding per year, we divided the entire 3.1 billion by year, and we compared this with previous studies conducted by Janet Abramovitz for LAC in 1987 and 1989. There seems to be an increase, although her study only included U.S.-based sources. However, what is interesting is that there doesn't seem to be a very clear pattern of growth in the funding. If anything, the funding in the nineties seems to have been fairly stable for all of this, at least from 1990 to 1997.
Now, what are some of the limitations of this data that we need to be aware of? It has a terrestrial bias, everything has been done based on terrestrial ecoregions so we can not attribute it to marine or freshwater. The analysis goes only through 1997, which is when the ecoregion-based conservation approaches were finally starting to take hold. So it wouldn't be very fair to expect that to have had an impact on funding until 1997. So we will have to get an update -- 1998, 1999, 2000 -- to see if this is finally having a stronger effect in terms of the data.
Project classification is not always straightforward. Sometimes we have to interpret what the funders really tried to say, so that is a source of error there. As I said, it does not include national-level funding either from governments or from local NGOs. And not all funds can be allocated to each analysis. So there is a lot of money which we can allocate to certain types of analysis, but not to all.
Initially, I thought the last slide will be one with conclusions, but the conclusions are really those that you have seen already as the results. So instead of that, I think that, if anything, this study raises more questions than answers. Fine, we have now a good idea where the money is going, who's funding what, and we have been able to characterize funding patterns in LAC. But there is a set of other questions that are much more fundamental for conservation that we have not been able to answer with this study, and that we hope that you will discuss during the next two days as part of the workshop.
One of them is, is the level of funding adequate? Is 3.1 billion dollars a lot or too little? There's no way for us to start answering that question.
What has the impact been in terms of conservation? What would have happened in the last ten years if the money had not been there? This is a fundamental question, of course, for which we don't have answers yet.
What determines the funding patterns? What are the factors that really have an influence on the funder to decide where those funds are going to go?
Has the funding been strategic? What would happen if, instead of putting the money for protected areas or natural resources management, the money had gone into the development of policy or local capacity-building?
Finally, have the roles changed? There are local NGOs that have emerged and that have become major players in conservation. The roles of international NGOs has changed. The role of foundations has also changed, etc.
So these are types of questions that we hope we will be able to start at least answering in the next two days, and the afternoon sessions today are designed so that we can discuss these types of questions. Thank you.
The following questions/comments were raised during the Question and Answer Session (summarized versions are provided):
Would the methods used in the geographic priority-setting exercises exhibit a bias in favor of or against small island systems? Although most of the maps presented don't even show the small islands of the Caribbean, the islands do have a fair number of endemic species and, in some cases, endemic genera, and families.
How was information on plants captured and what is the role of endemism versus other factors (given that, according the WWF-IUCN UNEP book, Centers of Plant Biodiversity, a great number of important plant centers are found within the island Caribbean)?
Was the influence of hurricanes (a fairly profound influence in the region) used in your threat classification?
It wasn't clear how the socioeconomic data either influenced the choices or would be involved in the changing of priorities as time went on.
Responses:
The Nature Conservancy recognizes that the small islands are under great pressure of development and tourism but they were not selected as a priority ecoregion. However, the Lesser Antilles ecoregion needs a prioritization exercise to find out which of the areas are under greater pressure and develop a site conservation plan for the islands. (G. Bustamante)
While most of the threats incorporated were human threats -- the presence of ports, pipelines, etc., the threats from hurricanes were captured through the percentages of coastline altered and mangroves cleared. Where there are no mangroves to protect the shoreline and long beaches, those areas are much more susceptible to damage by hurricanes (as demonstrated in Honduras with Hurricane Mitch). (G. Bustamante)
While damage from hurricanes can be severe, human beings can inflict worse damage in terms of irresponsible use of resources, and small islands are particularly delicate in this regard. We measured those impacts by looking at tourist development and recognizing that fishery resources have been heavily impacted, particularly in islands with a very narrow shelf. (G. Bustamante)
Endemism, though, is very rare in the marine environment because of the interconnectivity between all the islands of the Caribbean, so we cannot use endemism as an indicator of conservation status. For the marine resources, what is important as a measure of conservation status is the alteration of habitats, of coastlines, and degradation of resources, mostly coral reefs. But you can measure that very easily through the fisheries, exploitation, the amount of resources that are available already after a history of exploitation in the area. (G. Bustamante)
The island issue is a challenge that we face in many parts of the world, including the archipelagos of Southwest Pacific, around Indonesia as well as in Oceania. Taken individually, each island does not come out as particularly distinctive when compared around to other similar ecoregions. However, when one looks at the region as a whole, the amount of endemism taken together can be quite significant, and we have tried to balance these issues through our analyses. We pay a lot of attention to the amount of the level of biogeographic resolution. At what point do we split an ecoregion and what point do we lump ecoregions together? It's very challenging and there's no easy answer, but what we have tried to do is to maintain a similar level of resolution throughout entire regions and throughout the world as a whole, with the caveats that we do understand that in certain regions, northern Andes, parts of Mexico, the Caribbean and so on, when you look at the bioregion, the larger region, which is an aggregation of ecoregions, that really it is quite extraordinary because of the diversification of biotas within that area. (D. Olson)
We have also doubled endemism in our ranking systems [for freshwater and terrestrial priority setting exercises], because endemism is what truly contributes to distinctiveness. It is not just richness, so islands are favored in many ways. (D. Olson)
Getting plant data is very difficult because it hasn't been categorized in terms of ecoregions around the world. It's often available only in floras, and it's been quite challenging to get that information. What we do is we work with regional experts to gather information on plants in terms of ranges, then a percentage of endemism and so on. We're currently acquiring data through collaboration with the Smithsonian and Kew Gardens, New York Botanical and Missouri Botanical to get plant data for the entire world, all the world's ecoregions right now. We have consulted the Centers of Plant Diversity book quite a bit. (D. Olson)
At a country level, how would you establish a linkage between the ecoregional approach and operational schemes such as biological corridors or protected areas?
Response -- David Olson:
Ecoregional analyses, which look at patterns of biodiversity that go beyond country boundaries, really complement and strengthen national conservation strategies. It helps give conservation planners a sense of the relative importance or significance of biodiversity within their own country boundaries. It can really be a very helpful kind of strategic planning for developing strategies at the country level.
In terms of biological corridors, ecoregions are primarily doing three things. They're helping you establish representation of distinctive biotas within particular regions, that first fundamental goal of conservation. They're also helping us ask questions at larger spatial scales and over longer time frames, which is very important because we've often, in the past, focused on the site level. Only if we can look at entire landscapes will we be able to address the critical ecological processes that will ultimately determine the success.
We advocate that when one is developing a strategy, whether it be for an ecoregion or across ecoregions, that one look at the linkages within those regions as a whole to ensure that processes are maintained, and when we develop what we call conservation landscapes, we identify focal conservation areas, first and foremost, which could be protected areas, representative habitats, and so on. Then we look very carefully in the matrix, which we call areas outside of low-use or protected areas, to identify those places that are critical to maintain in some relatively natural form to enable organisms and processes to be maintained over whole landscapes.
So you can apply that within an ecoregion. You can apply that within a particular landscape within an ecoregion, or in some cases you can apply it throughout a larger bioregion, such as the Meso-American Corridor, which is going to be very important over much longer time frames to be maintained at some level, otherwise we will have islands of biodiversity which will blink out over the next several centuries.
What might we do from 1997 and onward with regard to the bilateral funding trends, specifically with regard to U.S. Government assistance? What trends might we be seeing with the move to close the number of USAID bilateral missions in globally important countries, such as Peru? How can we utilize the information on funding for greater benefit of biodiversity conservation?
Response -- Gonzalo Castro, World Bank:
That's an excellent point and this is precisely the type of issue that I think the groups may wish to discuss in the afternoon. Without making any comments about funding by specific countries, it is interesting to note how when you add the contributions by Germany, GTZ, plus KFW, they jump to number two. It is an objective observation to note that most of the funding from bilaterals is coming from European countries.
The question about money is not so much of amounts, but of impacts. What is the relation between amount of funding and impact?
Is the 3 billion dollars money allocated or spent? If it's been spent, then we know something concrete. But if the money has not yet been spent, we know a lot more about absorptive capacity and potential for need.
Response -- Gonzalo Castro, World Bank:
The funds represented are funds allocated, not spent. But the funds that get allocated and not spent are a small percentage of the total. It's much more difficult to measure what is actually spent. Funders just provided information on what they approved, so that is another limitation to the database and analysis that we need to be aware of.
Two suggestions:
Conduct a study that would also document the amount of money directed towards so-called development, that often destroys biodiversity. When you compare the two, the development funds dwarf the amount of money invested in conservation. For example, in Mexico, money is being spent in the state-level management of a coastal protected area at the same time that there is an official program that is giving away small mesh nets just for keeping productivity going on in this coastal community. This means that for every dollar that we put in, we have a backlog of maybe five or ten dollars in equipment from official programs.
Consider environmental funds which could be ideal partners in fine-tuning these kinds of initiatives, as they often have a very clear idea of what is going on, how much money is coming from which sources. The funds of the region have recently organized themselves into an assembly and formal network called RedLAC.
How can we work into these methodologies a prevention approach that shows what the driving forces are behind the problems, what the sources of problems are that threaten biodiversity, instead of just a post-factum methodology? If prevention was worked into the methodology, we could have, not only an indication of the driving forces, those responsible, but also possible sources of funding for solving the problems which these forces are creating.
Responses:
Within The Nature Conservancy, we are identifying the threats which we then use to establish a conservation plan geared to abating those threats. Also, we must keep in mind that we should make every effort to conserve natural areas rather than restore them, as it's much more expensive to do the latter than the former. (G. Bustamante)
To clarify, trust funds were included in the analysis, but only through '97. A lot of capitalization has occurred in these trust funds after '97, so of course the percentage has probably increased dramatically. (G. Castro)
There is an increasing understanding on the part of bilaterals and multilaterals about the role that trust funds can play, and hopefully they will continue growing in their importance as a mechanism to transfer funds to conservation. (G. Castro)
The analyses [freshwater and terrestrial] presented really are the first layer of information that one needs to develop regional or ecoregional-scale conservation strategies. It is the immutable biological layer, with a sense of the trajectory of how ecosystems are changing or have been changed. The prevention approach is something that is thought about within the conservation community, and others are addressing it as well, at many different scales -- global threats or regional threats, overarching threats for ecoregions within a particular region, and even at the site level. There is a great deal of thinking going into how to develop predictive models on what are the right buttons to push at different levels and where are threats anticipated to be most severe or in coordination with biological priorities. A lot of progress is being made on that but there is a lot more work to be done at this point as well. (D. Olson)
Is the multilateral development bank (MDB) financing just loans? What are the nature of the loans a little bit more?
Response -- Gonzalo Castro, World Bank:
In the case of the two banks (WB and IDB), the grants are not there (since the GEF portion was counted separately) so what is left are loans. They are primarily biodiversity components within natural resources management projects. Many of these projects have to do with enhanced natural resources management in a rural area. And through those projects, there are planning components, there are research components, there are implementation components, and many times you have components that specifically address biodiversity conservation concerns such as identifying areas of high priority, creating protected areas, adding biodiversity considerations to sustainable natural resources use, projects, etc. So we dissect the projects and get out those funding that specifically goes to biodiversity.
Have the large number of projects funded by different agencies of the U.S. government been included in the study?
Response -- Gonzalo Castro:
Yes, we included most agencies from the U.S. Government that we are aware provide funding. USAID shows in the top ten, but there is also the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of State, the National Science Foundation. Actually, the National Science Foundation comes up pretty high on the list.
It is interesting that there was no talk about commercial or private sector, or private-public partnerships in the funding study. Therefore, agribusiness, forestry, tourism, manufacturing, mining, a lot of the private-sector drivers are not included. How did you decide to come down on a more traditional funding approach, of just including donors?
With regard to the geographic priority setting exercises, there was nothing that related to prioritization with regard to policy. All countries are not the same. Fiscal policy, tenure, land tenure, investment policy, staffing priorities, a lot of those kind of things are not the same everywhere. How would you take that overlay of information and put it into the prioritization model that you are all are considering?
Responses:
The private sector has not been included in the study. We tried, based on the definition of biodiversity, to see who is funding biodiversity projects that have those objectives, and then we came up with a list of funders. There is, of course, a lot of money from the private sector that has both positive and negative effects on biodiversity everywhere, and that would be a totally different type of a study that we haven't conducted. It would be quite interesting to see how much private-sector funds are directed toward biodiversity and what is their impact, particularly in the last five or ten years when privatization has been so important in most of these countries. (G. Castro)
In terms of the prioritization of investments, I think some of these biological analyses can help at some level inform strategic planning about where investments need to made and about what kind of activities need to be worked on. In one sense, there's an extraordinary amount of urgency for biodiversity conservation in the region. We are, on average, losing 100 to 200 species a day globally over the next forty years. Importantly, we're losing whole kinds of ecosystems, tempered grasslands, tropical dry forests, varzea flooded forest, temperate rain forests, desert, freshwater areas. These systems will be gone in twenty years, fifteen to twenty years, for the most part, if there's no urgent action taken on them at this point. There will still be some rain forest left, but these other areas, which are not as charismatic, will be gone. (D. Olson)
It's not only ecosystems; it's entire processes. We're losing migrations, we're losing dispersal patterns, and so on. So the biological analyses can help inform strategic investments as to what kinds of biodiversity elements to focus on. There is certainly a whole number of other socioeconomic, political, cultural factors that go into the timing and sequence and level of effort on these issues. These kinds of analyses, the analysis of distinctive biotas, combined with other kinds of biodiversity target analyses, such as WRI's Forest Frontiers Critical Conservation Target, RAMSAR's analyses looking at critical wetlands for large-scale migrations and functionality analyses of coral reefs, mangroves, and wetlands, all of these things are really important conservation targets, and, taken as a whole, one can start to build a regional conservation strategy that is comprehensive and robust. (D. Olson)
It's a great pleasure to be among so many old and new colleagues this afternoon. I'm going to switch topics, in a sense, and talk about a different aspect of biodiversity and conservation challenges and that is collaboration among donors. By donors, I'm going to talk about foundations on the one hand and bilateral and multilateral donors on the other hand.
This morning you heard donors defined somewhat more broadly by Mr. Castro to include NGOs that are both recipients of funding as well as donors in their own right, but, in terms what I'm going to say, collaboration between those kind of NGOs is a whole different topic that most of you who represent NGOs are much more expert in talking about than I would be. So I'm just going to focus on foundations and bilateral and multilateral donors. I hope, as a result of my remarks and many of your thoughts, that at the end of this meeting we'll figure out some ways to have increased collaborations between donors, so we can help impact conservation issues, certainly in Latin America.
Mike Deal, speaking for AID this morning, already said that AID's experience, in terms of collaboration between donors, has not been all that successful, and perhaps some of my remarks will shed some light on that. I'd like to talk about two experiences that I have had in terms of donor collaboration. The first experience I've had was when I worked with the U.S. Department of Energy, and in the 1970s and 1980s I was tasked with coordinating all of the international research and development collaboration of that U.S. department with all the other countries in the world, including the Russians, the Japanese, the Chinese, and so on.
As some of you may remember, in the 1970s the oil production cartel, OPEC, imposed an oil embargo on the large oil-consuming countries. The consumers responded by establishing the International Energy Agency, known as the IEA, in Paris, in 1976. Interestingly, from the very outset, the country members of the IEA agreed to collaborate in reducing their dependance on oil and engage in coordinated actions to meet interruptions in oil supply and to assure their energy security. Collaboration and energy technology research and development was at that time, and still is, one of the components of IEA program. I'll comment briefly on the characteristic of what that intergovernmental activity was all about and why it turned out to be so successful.
Secondly, I want draw on the experience of the Consultative Group on Biodiversity, known to us members of that group as the CGBD, or, more shortly, as the CG. It is a group of forty-seven U.S. and Canadian foundations, plus USAID. Formation of the group was suggested in 1987 by Nyle Brady and myself when I was at AID as the Agency Director for Energy and Natural Resources. At that time, Congress mandated AID to become involved in biodiversity conservation. Our purpose in suggesting the establishment of the Consultive Group was to enlist the help of the U.S. foundation community in carrying out AID's mandate, since we felt that an intellectually richer effort and one that would have more funds in it was something that should be done, rather than AID trying to carry out this mandate by itself.
I think the CG has been eminently successful in fostering collaboration on biodiversity conservation among its member foundations, and I think its activities are a model for other groups to emulate. For example, there is now in the foundation community an affinity group on population, reproductive health and rights, which was established a year ago, somewhat modeled on the CG, and it already has thirty-eight foundations as members.
Let me talk briefly about the International Energy Agency and some of the characteristics of collaboration there that may be useful to you. The IEA has twenty-five member countries. Membership is essentially from the industrialized states. The important aspect to us is that the member states join together with very clearly shared goals and commitments made at the highest levels of government. These include, "Sharing dialogue with all participants," and a policy framework which contains the goal statement that, "International cooperation in the development and dissemination of energy technologies, including industry participation and cooperation with non-member countries should be encouraged." That kind of enabling language immediately suggests a number of characteristics that bode well for cooperative undertakings.
There was a clear commitment at the highest levels of government, or for the purposes that we are here today, at the highest level of donor organization to collaboration; there was a clearly defined set of common interests at the very outset; and, by implication, there was a willingness to commit resources to achieve a set of larger objectives. That's what the IEA was all about.
In the energy technology area, the collaboration is carried out through a Committee on Energy Research and Technology, which is one of five standing committees of the IEA. That committee is responsible for developing policy, the framework for the overall cooperative program, and oversight of the activities. Early on, that committee established working parties in those energy technology areas that member countries decided were ripe for exploring cooperation.
That cooperation, twenty years later today, is still going on, and today it covers such areas as energy efficiency, natural gas, clean coal technology, nuclear fusion, renewable energy technologies, and the area of carbon sinks. Program managers representing these technology areas are members of the working parties. After a period of exchanging information on their respective programs, a country that believes cooperation in a particular area would be of benefit to them as was well to other countries proposes a collaborative work program. This is then embodied in an agreement signed by those energy ministries from the countries deciding to participate in a particular area.
Right now there are forty-eight such implementing agreements operational. They were first entered into in the late 1970s. Many of them are still going today. So that really reflects that this kind of collaboration has been very successful.
Let's look again at what are the characteristics of that cooperation that we can learn something from.
Clearly, to cooperate, the cooperation has to be beneficial to each of the participants; otherwise, it just won't work.
A very well-defined program has to be set forth that clearly spells out the responsibility of each of the parties and that specifies the resource contributions that each of the parties should make.
And representatives of the parties have to have sufficient authority to commit their agencies. You can't have people sitting around the table agreeing to a cooperative program and then saying, "Well, I'm going to have to go back home and see if my bosses will approve this, and maybe you'll hear from me six months from now." That really doesn't work very well.
In the IEA, the understandings are actually reflected in legal agreements. The case of the IEA, those agreements are signed by the various energy ministries of the countries in question. Clearly, once a cooperative program is agreed to, you need periodic reviews to see what's going well, to see what's not going so well, and then to adjust the work program and the responsibilities of the parties as you gain experience from the collaboration.
The interesting thing about this collaboration is, it really requires the commitment of time and resources on the part of each cooperating agency to develop these collaborate programs, to travel to the meetings, etc. Most of these agencies, of course, carry out the cooperative programs through contractors or grantees in their own countries.
Again, the various program managers are really committed to the collaboration. I know the people in the Department of Energy today find this cooperation so important, that they build into their own program budgets (which are approved by the U.S Congress) the means and the resources and the travel time, etc., to make sure that these kind of cooperative agreements continue to stay lively and meaningful.
Now let me talk about the Consultative Group on Biodiversity. As I said, the Consultive Group was established about eleven years ago, and I would say in recent years the collaboration under the Consultative Group, after some initial period of experimentation of information exchange, of foundation program officers getting to know each other and becoming familiar with their colleagues and the way their colleagues operate, has really been very successful. But it's an operation very different in style from the IEA, and the programmatic content is very different. It's not a meeting ground for governmental representatives, but the outcome is very similar: it's effective collaboration between donors.
Just as in the IEA, the CGBD has established working groups in areas that foundation program officers identify of priority interest to their foundations and which they believe are ripe for exploring cooperation. Usually a working group will start by educating itself about the various facets of the problem area that they have selected, bring in experts in the field, including those from academia, NGOS, and government to discuss ongoing efforts, issues, and identify areas that require support. Then the working group members will discuss the grantmaking programs of their own foundations, suggest areas in which the group might require further information, and identify where foundation grants could be most useful to achieve progress. Thus, they develop and agree on grantmaking strategies that the group should pursue.
But unlike the IEA, the relationships between the foundations, their program officers, and their grantmaking programs are almost always informal. The agreed cooperation is not documented in signed agreements between the parties. Once a working group agrees on its approaches and suggests grantmaking strategies, its grantmaking actions are left to each foundation and its own internal decision-making process. There are no formal commitments written in stone. Each foundation program officer recommends to his or her board those grants that best fit in both the foundation's own grantmaking priorities, as well as the working group's overall strategy.
Nevertheless, there often are fairly clear informal understandings about the funding levels necessary to implement the strategy, the types of implementing organizations that should receive support, like the NGOs, community groups, universities, grassroots groups, and the nature of the support that's required.
Currently, the CG has four working groups in the areas of forestry, marine biodiversity, biodiversity and environmental health, and conservation-based development that is focused on sustainable communities in the U.S. A number of other areas are being explored, including invasive species and the role of conservation science.
In addition, the CG has spun off several other activities into separate projects, including urban sprawl and growth management, and one on educating the public and policymakers about biodiversity, the so-called Biodiversity Project that's managed by Jane Elder out of Madison, Wisconsin, and some of you maybe have been in touch with her.
The number of collaborative undertakings that are taken up under CG sponsorship are limited by only two things: the appetite of the foundation community to collaborate, and the ability of the CG Secretariat to help coordinate and prioritize those efforts.
As contrasted to what governmental donors provide funding for, the foundation community tends to support a somewhat different mix of efforts. Mr. Castro's data this morning indicated some of that. For example, we tend to do more in education and public outreach than the bilateral and multilateral donors. We tend to do relatively more on organizational capacity-building. And the one area that governmental donors don't get involved in at all, and that's very important to, at least the kind of foundation community that I work in, is the support of activism.
Now, what about international activities of the CG? Well, when it was founded in the late 1980s at the suggestion of USAID, clearly the thought was that the Consultative Group would deal with the worldwide problems of biodiversity conservation. What has actually happened is, because of the interest of the foundation members, has really concentrated on biodiversity conservation activities in the U.S.
Nevertheless, the CG did a partial survey of its members last year and found that, I would say, roughly 60 million dollars out of perhaps a total of 350 million dollars spent by CG member foundations on environment was devoted to conservation outside of the U.S., and of that amount, I would say about 30 to 40 percent goes to Latin America. The largest amounts in Latin America, according to our very brief survey, went to Mexico, followed by Brazil. But interestingly enough, our survey showed that the largest amount of money that foundations spent outside the U.S. went to Canada.
Why? Well, I'm not completely sure, but I think it was because people around the world have been very concerned about the cutting of old-growth forest in Canada, and the U.S. foundation community has really jumped on this problem and has supported a lot of groups, including many activist groups, to see if they could influence provincial and governmental policy in Canada to stop cutting of old growth. The foundation community has gone even so far as to fund some of the groups that have been conducting civil disobedience to really call attention not only in Canada, but worldwide, to this issue. Again, this is an activity that foundations support, that multilateral, bilateral donors really can't support.
The CG has attempted to do some coordination of international conservation funding by donors, and I must say that up to now that has not been terrible successful. About a year and a half ago, we sponsored a meeting in Tucson, Arizona, where we brought together some Mexican organizations and people who funded in Mexico. Regretfully, not a lot of follow-on action came out of that meeting. We are now planning a meeting this spring to coordinate donor action in Canada, an obvious choice from what I just said.
I might mention one of the areas where I think CG collaboration has been most successful -- sustainable forestry. About fifteen foundations participate in that. The focus has largely been on forest certification. I would say that the member foundations of this subworking group have had a major influence on the course of forest certification around the world.
Other CG working groups have made significant contributions. This is especially true in the marine fisheries area and with respect to the impact of endocrine disrupters on human health, two very active areas for the foundation community.
One thing that just recently happened to show the activism of the U.S. community is about forty foundation representatives were present in Seattle when the World Trade Organization met, and, as most of you know, was not successful in setting forth a negotiating agenda for new trade agreements. I think foundations played a very important behind-the-scene-role in influencing the outcome of those negotiations. Foundations funded a lot of the groups that were demonstrating. We had several meetings with White House staff, including the Chief of Staff to the President, to try and influence administration policy. Our position, generally, was, there's got to be a better balance between trade and environmental and social considerations than has been the case to date.
Now, let me quickly run though some lessons we've learned from the CG collaboration. This is sort of a mixture of different kinds of things, but I thought I would just throw them out.
First of all, our collaboration has been a learning experience for us. We teach each other, we bring in outside people to bring us up to speed on various issues, and collectively we can do this better than each one of us alone.
Secondly, we've learned that, on any one particular issue, whether it's trade or conservation activity in Latin America, there's a variety of NGOs, grassroots organizations, community organizations, that get involved in an issue. We really have to look at all of the interdependent parts of the chain and all of the actors that take part in it in order to fund a successful set of activities.
I think the most important point is why collaboration under the CG works so well, is because foundation program officers, who designed the collaboration, know each other well, have a lot of respect for each other, understand what the constraints are in each other's organizations, they enjoy each other as colleagues and friends, and, believe it or not, we have a lot of fun together.
Unlike in some of the bilateral and multilateral donor organizations, foundation staff doesn't turn over very often, so I've been working with some of my colleges for nine or ten years, and have gotten to know them very well, and that really makes a difference.
Foundation program officers generally have the authority to commit their foundations. Yes, they have boards, but they know their boards well enough that, I would say, 95 percent of the time they know what their boards are going to approve. It's not like when I was in USAID; I would never know whether I could get anything approved or not.
Free information-sharing, really being open with each other about what you're all about, what your foundation directions are, etc., is very important.
This was suggested to me by Emery Bundy of the Bullet Foundation, who's been doing a lot of work in Canada. Understanding that progress often results in part from a multiplicity of actions and interactions that are not often predictable from the outset. Again, when I first came to USAID and I read these 200- or 300-page project documents, my immediate reaction was, this doesn't make any sense. You can't sit here and plan a program for five years down to every last detail. You've got to be flexible in terms of program design and the kind of support you that you give.
Certainly, recognizing that all of the actors in a program that you're going to fund should be consulted, should give you lots of input. We can't sit in our offices in Washington or San Francisco and make all the smart decisions. We've got to get a lot of input and from all of the participants and stakeholders.
You need many different kinds of components for a program to be a success: research, organizational capacity building, etc.
You've really got to work hard at eliminating any friction between the parties. You can't just take it for granted that some problem that comes up will go away. You ought to face it head on in the working group, put your complaints on the table, and work them out.
You've got to understand the community of actors that you're dealing with in the field.
Very important, you need to make long-term commitments. Here I will say that both the foundation community, as well as a number of other donors, are fickle. They change their mind, their boards, their governments, their politicians, think you've solved the problem. The kind of issues that we are dealing with are not solved in two or three years; it takes five, ten or twenty years.
And, very important, you've got to build a capacity of the organizations that you're working with, especially if you're working in developing countries.
The last thing is to talk about how foundations can work with the bilateral and multilateral community. I've talked to a number of my foundation colleagues about this, and I would say there are six constraints that have made it difficult, in the past, for foundations, who, as Mr. Castro has indicated us, are much smaller funders, but, I would say, are much more flexible funders, to work with the bigger donors:
The scale of our contributions is much smaller, and so that tends to separate the groups from each other immediately.
There's a lack of continuity of staff at the bigger donors, so just about the time we get to know somebody at USAID and work out a collaboration, the cast of characters changes.
Third, and it's obvious, I think, that the internal processes of the bilateral, multilateral donors are very complex, bureaucratic, influenced by politics and a lot of other things. Foundations tend to move much more quickly.
The larger donors tend to support projects whose design is fairly detailed, and therefore it's difficult to accommodate collaborative efforts unless they're built in from the beginning.
I would say that the bilateral, multilateral donors tend to work with in-country NGOs that are blessed by governments. Well, foundations don't need such approvals. We often like to support groups that are more activist, and perhaps even critical of those in power in their countries.
Finally, the criteria that foundations use to choose projects and locations may be quite different from the criteria that the bilateral and multilateral donors use.
I know I've made very broad generalizations, and I'm sure many of you could argue with some of these, but I hope that we can all find ways to encourage closer working relationships between U.S. foundations and the bilateral donors. I hope I've given you some input for thought, and that as we leave this meeting tomorrow, I hope that we can work together better and more intensively. Thanks.
December 14, 1999
| Moderator | Walter Arensberg, Inter-American Development Bank |
| Presenters |
Jorge Bilbao, Americas' Fund -- Argentina Pedro Leitao, FUNBIO (Brazil) Brad Northrup, The Nature Conservancy David Smith, Jamaica Conservation and Development Trust Fund |
Workshop participants were divided into four break-out groups to address specific questions provided by the workshop organizers. The following points were made in response to the questions:
1. How useful do you think the analysis/data presented are? How might your organization use this analysis?
There was a general recognition that the exercise and the data are a very useful and valuable first cut, although definitive conclusions on donor spending were not apparent.
More analysis and evaluation of the data is required, to consider, for example, the impacts. Need to further clarify the terms and limitations of the raw data.
There is a need for more information in order to assess exactly how and who, would use this type of information.
Many different organizations would find the data useful, for example, for:
2. Should this type of data collection be continued?
Generally yes, but it would depend on how users find it. There was a general recognition that the ecoregion scale might not always be the most useful, as it takes away emphasis from finer scale issues, and may have political drawbacks.
There was a suggestion that the map legends used might be misleading. For instance, the use of the color red for areas that are more heavily funded might lead one to the conclusion that these areas are "overfunded." However, just because those are the priority areas or they're the most funded, does not, in absolute terms, necessarily mean that they are overfunded -- they are relatively more funded, but not expressly in absolute terms.
2a. Would donors provide information to such a database to aid in decision making
Generally, yes, but it would depend very much on how useful donors find the data. In addition, every donor has its own system of collecting this information and aggregating it can be painful.
2b. Should the current database be maintained and updated or should a new database be created?
The general feeling was to keep the current database but parties would need to collaborate with other organizations, particularly on the maintenance of the data (maybe even combining databases from various sources in a systematic way, if necessary).
One group thought they could not answer this without being familiar with the structure of the database.
Four characteristics were developed that were thought to be critical to the success of the database in the future:
- it needs to be flexible
- it needs to be informal in the sense that there needs to be a flexibility in the way it's put together and allow different uses
- it needs to be demand-driven and have more user input
- it needs to be easily accessible.
A three-tiered structure that employs the emerging organizational frameworks that deal with environmental trust funds was recommended as one possibility to manage this type of data:
- At the international level, the Inter-Agency Planning Group (IPG), comprised of most of the high-level donors mentioned in the study could maintain and manage the database.
- RedLAC, the regional organization of environmental trust funds, could be used to coordinate the national input in the setting of priorities for the data collection.
- The individual national environmental trust funds could be used to organize data development at the national level (supply and test the data). Although not all the countries in LAC have national environmental trust funds (thus far there are 27 funds in existence), it is an emerging movement. The trust funds have certain characteristics that meet the criteria stated above of informality and ease of accessibility, flexibility, and being demand-driven.
Another recommendation was made to start with some experimentation at a smaller scale, perhaps gathering data for a couple of countries and to take one program element of the database (e.g., protected areas) and use that to develop the essential core data needs more fully, and then to test that with a users group (as was done in Haiti) and build it up from that exercise.
2c. What mechanisms should be used to carry this out (web site, listserv, conference, coordination committee, etc.)?
The web and the Internet would be useful for dissemination but the data would need to be combined from many sources (similar to what the UN Foundation recently did in setting its priorities), so thought should be given to issues related to the ownership of the data.
A coordination committee to manage an interactive website, where users can download information and do their own analyses, adapting the information to their own needs. The committee should have members from the donor and recipient communities.
Whatever mechanism used, must make sure to include the perspective of national NGOs. It's very important to ground-truth the data because often those working in-country are surprised by the data, not because they don't know what's going on, but because data are sometimes collected incorrectly.
Developing a CD-ROM should also be explored.
2d. Which institutions are likely candidates to maintain this type of information?
Conservation Data Centers (CDC), World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC), Inter-American Biodiversity Information Network (IABIN), BCIS, OECD Project, the World Bank
Important to develop some collaborative mechanisms. Having the data in different places doesn't necessarily help the user and may fragment the funding available to collect and hold the data.
The World Bank might be a very useful home for the database because people respond when the World Bank asks questions, more so than when other agencies send out queries (for example, they were able to get a good response on their questionnaires).
Should keep in mind that maintaining the data collected and providing the information to the users are two separate and distinct functions that could be carried out by two different entities.
Should clarify relationship to CBD Clearinghouse Mechanism.
2e. What are possible sources of funding for this?
Large donors can cover costs of systems compatibility and aggregation. Users cover their own costs for using and updating the information.
Costs would not necessarily be associated with developing the information required (as lots of the information is available), but with compiling it.
2f. What additional types of information not included in this study would be useful for future analysis?
More information is required on funding trends, not where we've been, but where we may be going in the future with funding; what are the plans and projects that donors have in mind for future funding? What are the major areas of interest to donors? What are they concerned about?
Include more socioeconomic data, including political, economic, cultural, and social data. But must make sure the information is collected with a very well-defined focus in mind, so as not to be confusing..
Track development spending to see what pressures these projects are exerting on biodiversity.
Include information on potential threats to biodiversity -- highways, factories, agricultural expansion -- and location of threatened fauna and flora.
Add private-sector funding/inputs.
Should clarify what is grant money, what is loan money.
National level funding should be included to get a full picture of all of the funding going towards biodiversity conservation.
Include information on "brown" grants and loans.
Should survey existing databases to see what information gaps can be identified and then filled in.
Include information on the relationship between the gap that exists between the national needs and agendas and those of the donors' needs and agenda. In other words, to ask what are the interests in funding at the national level and what are the interests in funding at the international level from the donor community to see where gaps exist as a way to inform where we should be going in the future.
Need to also conduct subregional and local analyses of funding patterns.
Whatever data are collected and added, must make sure that data are collected from all levels but that it is also accessible at all levels (international, national and local) and, finally, that it is in a form that is useful at the local level. There are a lot of communities, local agencies, governments, local government agencies that need to use data and it must be translatable into a form they can use.
Compare the high-priority sites biologically with the sites receiving the most funding.
Include marine-coastal regions in data and data analysis.
Other Points
Provide ability to break down data by country and allow users to see which donors are providing how much funding in which countries.
1. What are the strategic roles different types of donors can play in relationship to one another and host governments to create the most effective overall biodiversity conservation effort?
The general answer is that everybody has a role to play -- donors, governments, stakeholders -- all should be involved and have an interest in this exercise. However, stakeholder involvement in the definition of priorities is essential. Locally driven and endorsed priorities will lead to increased sustainability of efforts.
Donors can possibly increase, stimulate, or influence transparency and priority-setting, both within their own organizations and at the national level in countries where they work, keeping in mind, of course, national sensitivities.
Donors can try to influence national priority-setting to bring in more of civil society participation, more private-sector participation, so that you get better priorities being set, and it's not simply the priorities of one set of individuals.
Bilaterals can influence policy at the national level and should circulate information, such as that presented at the workshop, to other donors, so that policy and development staff can get a look at the environmental data and get a better idea of what's going on in the other sectors.
Donors can be instrumental in capacity-building of NGOs and public functionaries.
Donors can play an instrumental role in determining where time, money and effort should be focused and in inducing NGOs to focus on a particular area, project, etc. But, in order to do this, there should be a country plan of some sort. The government has to be part of and involved in this process.
Donors may be able to influence/encourage governments to better coordinate their own ministries with jurisdiction over biodiversity-related matters (e.g., the Ministry of Water needs to talk to the Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Tourism needs to talk to the Ministry of Transport).
Governments do need to be proactive in optimizing the use of resources for conservation.
Donors can aid in defining and measuring the impact of projects.
Donors can assist countries to implement their national biodiversity strategies.
2. What are their funding, policy, political, operational or other constraints that would reduce their ability at information sharing, coordination and collaboration?
Political agendas within a country which often change from one election to the next.
Fear of transparency.
Short-term development agendas which often clash with the long-term biological diversity conservation agenda. The conservation community has still not found good ways of helping people to understand that the two may coincide, that you can have development and also conserve your biological diversity.
A reluctance to share information on the part of the donors, who are not necessarily inclined towards cooperation and working under the direction of other organizations. Instead, donors often try to jockey for the best, most meaningful area in which to work, rather than work in collaboration with others.
Different missions, different areas of interest, the niche concept, priority perception.
Governments that might not have the same interest in environmental and biodiversity conservation that donors have. Since many governments have to approve loans or grants before any project gets started, donors face a problem. In addition, the environmental constituencies might not be very strong in-country.
Weak institutional capacity, on the part of NGOs and donors, to handle collaborative projects.
Host countries do not always encourage donor communication.
There is a proliferation of strategies (Climate Change, Biodiversity, etc.) that may hamper coordination.
3. What are the most valuable/useful aspects and impacts of coordination at each of the following levels -- national, regional and international? Which of these should be strengthened and how could that best be achieved?
Different levels of coordination are needed -- national, regional and international, although must adjust expectations at each level. Regional coordination mechanisms may have to be reactivated.
Identify where you already have existing structures and capitalize on those. Examples were given of RedLAC, a network of environmental funds within Latin America and the Caribbean, and the environmental committees at each level of government in El Salvador, which is divided into different departments, which are comprised of counties, and the counties of cantons. Information flows from the environmental committee at the canton level to the county level to department and then to the national government.
The donor community must understand what the capabilities, strengths and interests are of its members in funding various types of projects. For example, who's doing project development funding, who's doing capacity-building vs. other elements of biodiversity work. What does each donor do best?
Donors should exchange lessons learned, especially with regards to methods of monitoring and evaluation of the impact of their funds as well as general information about what projects are going forward where.
The most valuable coordination level would be at the national level, and influencing decision-makers is also a national-level concern. Host countries should also develop the priorities. These should not be determined by the donors.
Country-level collaboration is the most useful scale to develop most of the time. But there are some exceptions to this, such as regional initiatives that exist in Central America and the Caribbean, but in terms of the database, it was felt that bringing the data down to the country level, closer to the decision-makers, was important.
4. What are the most appropriate means and mechanisms to achieve increased dialogue and collaboration concerning conservation efforts in the LAC region? What should the priority steps be in this regard and how could they best be implemented?
Although the web is useful, face-to-face meetings between NGOs, donors, international NGOs, government and business, was felt to be important. Personal relationships developed at these types of meetings can be instrumental in getting things accomplished.
Increase the decentralization of donor agencies and increase the funding limits handled by the in-country offices. Countries often have branch offices of World Bank, IDB, etc., but the level of operation of those in terms of the sort of projects they can develop, the level of cash they're able to control usually puts them in a very small role.
Encourage the establishment of country donor groups (Madagascar was given as an example). Through these groups, donors would meet together, but with local NGOs, with governments, etc., to discuss what the problems in the country are, what are the priorities at the national and other levels, and these discussions in-country could then inform what goes on in Washington and other places as well.
Donors should incorporate, influence and support ecoregional conservation in their agendas. It is believed that this movement is driving a lot of the decision-making that's going in Latin America, and donors were urged to get behind this trend and support it even more than they have in the past.
Follow-up process should involve an inventory of existing mechanisms for coordination and an identification of those operable at the ecoregional scale. Follow-up should not include creation of any new agency or service, but should identify those already existing and make use of them. Again, RedLAC could be a useful instrument for disseminating and helping to deepen the analyses that were provided during the workshop.
Other Points
In general, donors should definitely communicate with one another, share goals, define and measure impact.
There's a need to increase funding (the three-point-X billion dollars was felt generally by the practitioners not to be sufficient), but donors also need to define the impact they want the projects to achieve. Without transparent expectations, neither donor nor recipient will be satisfied in the long-term.
Must work harder to better coordinate poverty alleviation efforts with environmental conservation.
Donors need to work more with civil society, especially with respect to the environmental/biodiversity impacts of policy decisions.
Don't forget that the test here is if isn't healthy biodiversity conservation, don't do it.
Let's stop defining ecoregions and move forward with what we have.
The following questions/comments were raised during this session (summarized versions are provided):
What are the future funding trends for biodiversity? Can the NGOs of the region be optimistic and count on additional funds from major donors? Or, are we resigned to a defensive strategy of just saving certain priority ecoregions, and losing the rest? (Miguel Reynal, Fundacion ECOS, Uruguay))
Unlike development groups, environmental and conservation NGOs still have more to learn about working with and influencing the loans and short-term priority-setting of the multilateral development banks. Our challenge is to influence and work with the World Bank and IDB staff country by country and learn how to help the multilaterals leverage policy reforms with their client governments. The process whereby the MDBs sit down with a client government every two to three years (typically when the new government comes in) is finally opening up to NGO involvement after a long period of relative lack of transparency. (Randy Curtis, TNC)
The World Bank, IDB and the NGOs need to figure out how to work together to encourage client governments to pass laws that require environmental impact statements for all public and private infrastructure and development projects, not just the multilateral financed ones, which do require it. This could probably do more to mainstream biodiversity planning in the private-sector flows, where the role of conservation/environmental organizations is still very much undefined. However, this won't be easy because of trade issues. A lot of governments don't want to be comparatively viewed as overly restrictive and discouraging private investment. (Randy Curtis, TNC)
The whole course of economic development must be addressed and we must really pursue sustainable development seriously if we're going to win the conservation battle over the long-term. We may be able to slow down the pace of deforestation, the pace of biodiversity loss, but the losses are going to continue unless our economic development really changes its course. To do that, because it is not likely that bilateral and multilateral investment is going to increase significantly, donors will have to work much more closely with industry to achieve sustainable development. The conservation point of view must be integrated into all economic activity worldwide. (Jack Vanderryn, Moriah Fund)
An excellent way of inducing change at different levels would be to put together a mega database of what is working worldwide or regionally; in other words, which projects have been extremely successful. That means international donors would have a very clear idea of what kinds of projects are working in certain ecoregions. And governments would have a chance to see models that are working which they may then try to replicate. It seems to be true that governments are likely to pay more attention to examples of other successful government projects, rather than NGO projects. (Lorenzo Rosenzweig, MFCN)
Industry needs to become involved, to play their part. Also, never forget that the most important element of this endeavor is the human element. So poverty alleviation must be central to all efforts. (Mr. Lizarraga, Belize)
Donors should engage in a policy dialogue and have countries in LAC increase the importance of the sectors that deal with biodiversity (environment, natural resources, etc.). For if biodiversity conservation is not deemed a priority by individual countries, and placed at the same level as the Ministry of Agriculture or Finance, there's only so much that donor funds can do. (Phil Jones, USAID/Guatemala)
It is hard, but not impossible, for donors to influence national priorities. Although the multilateral development banks have to respond to member country requests, bilateral donors can, and do, influence national priorities. Private foundations can do so through working with NGOs and so on. Because if there is not a commitment from the national government to conserve biological diversity, then very little progress will be made, no matter how much money is invested. Influence through appropriate means would be very welcome from conservationists in Third World countries.
Environmental trust funds represent an important opportunity emerging in Latin America which will allow a dialogue which will influence not only conservation, but economic development.
In Brazil, the conservation community has been starting to work with industry and the private sector and, within very limited conditions, the private sector has started to talk to us about how important environment for them, particularly those industries which have their activities based on natural resources. They are quite prone to listen and to make contributions and we should make the effort to bring them to the table, talk to them and see what they think, and at the end, try to involve them in committing themselves to the cause.
I think that all the presentations pretty clearly said that this kind of data is useful. There were questions about exactly the nature of the data and that there would be interest in having national data, as well as data on the private-sector investments. There was a question raised in one of the presentations about having more emphasis on trends, certainly on gaps between development-assistance funding and funding specifically for biodiversity, gaps between national investments from national governments, and what was coming from development assistance. If you like, a little bit more analytical approach to it, but there was no question, if I read my colleagues correctly, that gathering this kind of data was very useful.
It was clear that it should be a very user-friendly operation, that it should be flexible, informal, demand-driven and accessible and that we should use existing institutions. However, there is probably a need for some upper level of coordination, so that everyone doesn't trip over one another or duplicate what others were doing. There's no particular need to invent some supra-structure for this. The IPG group, the RedLAC group, existing national trust funds, probably some existing NGOs who are involved in data-gathering and publishing information about the state of the environment and their countries and so forth, could all be actors in gathering and disseminating the data.
The question of the donors' roles and how to coordinate and communicate, and this is with regard to this kind of effort of developing data, once again I think everyone felt that it is clearly a role that donors can do and should continue to play in their own internal efforts to make sure that they understand what's going on and what they are doing, as well as what others are doing, and that they should be more proactive about it, that it's not just a passive thing that is known only to those who happen to work within the institution. It should be a proactive effort to get the data gathered, get it out, publish it, circulate it, and so forth.
This was useful for the donors themselves in terms of their own coordination to have this exchange of information, to learn from the information. To increase the value of the database to donors, it was suggested that more information be included on lessons learned from projects that have been successful and so forth. It's absolutely true that donors are extraordinarily inbred, and if they hear that it was done by another donor, however, they really get moving, because that gets their competitive juices up and also reassures them that a donor can do it.
There was a great deal of emphasis that, although it's nice to have global sources of global information, that where this stuff is really useful is on a national and even on a local level. So as local as you can get, as specific to immediate trends and problems as you can get, the better.
It was felt that donors and others should get more involved in circulating information about the data. We should try and create a framework in which this kind of information can be gathered and circulated in a dynamic way.
A lot of what this boils down to is whether there is real demand for this. At the IDB, for example, we are owned by our borrowing members and, therefore, we tend to be particularly responsive to their demands and needs. This is the classic problem of, if they're not asking for it, we don't fund it. Obviously, that's a gross way of putting it. We do energetically promote certain agendas and promote things, but when it comes right down to it, it's demand from the countries that really shapes our levels of funding, the direction of our funding and so forth.
So I think what we're all trying to do is to ask how to stimulate that demand. One way, obviously, is to have more concessional money available, but I think the negative trend that we're all aware of, is that that kind of concessional money is drying up. I don't think it'll disappear; I just think it will be much less than it has been in the past, and so we have to find other ways of financing activities.
However, I do see more positive than I do negative. Part of it has to do with the fact that people are beginning to see that not only biodiversity conservation, but environmental issues in general, do need to be mainstreamed, that having them on the margins, having them in separate ministries that were unrelated to other ministries, having them be the province of what many people regarded as missionaries concerned about pure conservation and not about the development agenda, that that really wasn't the way of achieving an environmentally sustainable development process, and that the mainstreaming approach is the correct approach. Now, it's also the most difficult. It's also the one in which you have to run head-on into people who may have an old, traditional and outmoded view of what environmentalists are trying to achieve, but it seems to me to be a positive trend.
At the IDB, we are attempting to get these issues into the bilateral programming process and the Country Development Strategies. Environment and conservation issues should be dealt with, not just when we talk about concessional funding, but when we talk about transport, water and sanitation projects, and agricultural development projects. To the extent that part of a strategy for rural development involves conservation because there are forests that need to be conserved, then conservation should be in that rural development strategy.
Another positive trend is that there are more and more environmental funds around and more and more NGOs around, of all sorts. The emphasis on civil society is growing and is much stronger, and that's important because it begins to get a variety of actors involved in these questions.
I don't disagree with the point that we have to raise the priority of these issues within national governments, but, in fact, there are more and more environmental agencies and ministries. The Forum of Environment Ministers of Latin America and the Caribbean has thirty-some-odd members. I think there is only one country that is not represented in that forum at either the ministerial level or at the head of authority or head of independent agency level.
That begs the question a little bit of whether these are strong and powerful ministries. The question of priorities, and where these Ministries sit at the table with regard to Ministries of Finance and Agriculture and central bankers and so forth, is still a very important question. But the institutionalization of this, and from the public point of view, is very evident and positive. We still need to face the question of decentralization, of how municipal governments discharge their responsibilities with regard to more effective land-use planning, conservation planning, environmental management, and so forth. But to me that's the trend that needs to be focused on.
Another positive trend is the one that has to do with the private sector. The Inter-American Development Bank is about to finish a new strategy for the Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF), which is a fund devoted to promoting the development of the private sector in the region. We've just finished a strategy with them specifically aimed at how to do that in a way that promotes a private sector that has adopted environmental objectives on its own.
The MIF has been putting money into an environmental fund. And judging from a number of meetings that I've been to on such mundane and occasionally boring subjects as ISO 14,001 and ISO 9,000 and so forth, there is a growing interest and a growing demand for that type of environmental quality in management within firms, and not just within the leading large multinational firms, but within small and medium-sized firms as well. That's an extremely positive trend and one that we should not neglect.
I'd like to wrap it up with a bit on the IDB, which I think just proves this. What are our priorities at the moment, at least from the point of view of the Central Environment Division? I say it that way because the priorities in any of the regional divisions do depend a lot on bilateral programming with the countries, so they'll vary, and most of our funding on environment has fallen into urban large-scale sanitation and water projects. But from the point of view of our central division, and God willing we can eventually influence the rest of the bank, strengthening the capacity to manage the environment is probably our top priority.
So strengthening those ministries, those agencies, and focusing on the municipal level as much as possible is a major priority. Getting this environmental strategy out for the private sector and getting it moving are additional priorities. Other priorities are strengthening our own internal due diligence process so that it mainstreams environment within the bank through training and through lessons learned and so forth, focusing on getting the hide-bound economist to incorporate environmental concerns into cost-benefit analyses, etc.
I would add one last thing, which is that in thematic terms, the IDB is also finally following the lead of our brethren at the World Bank of developing an explicit climate-change strategy, which we hope to have at least in proposed form by the end of March. This is another positive trend, that bit by bit ever so slowly, but nevertheless with forward movement, the question of climate change seems to be gaining in importance, particularly in the region, and that certainly, if we work it out right, the financing available here may also make a contribution to addressing some of the problems we've been discussing today.
Also there is the whole question of natural disasters, which I know is not immediately a subject for discussion, but which has attracted a lot of attention. People seem to be paying a lot of mind to it, and it is a very good entry point for drawing out some of the conservation, reforestation, land-use planning kind of issues that, in the long run, are going to make for more environmentally sustainable development in our countries.
Thank you very much.
| Moderator | Barbara Belding, Deputy Director of Office of Environment and Natural Resources, USAID/Global Bureau |
| Panel Participants |
Nels Johnson, World Resources Institute Twig Johnson, World Wildlife Fund Rachel Kyte, IUCN/The World Conservation Union Jim Nations, Conservation International Lorenzo Rosenzweig, RedLAC (Network of Environmental Trust Funds in the LAC region) Andrew Taber, Wildlife Conservation Society Alec Watson, The Nature Conservancy |
JIM NATIONS, Conservation International: Contrary to common thinking and the buzz on the streets, I believe that conservationists do, in fact, have a team approach, that we realize that we're in this together. To me, the analogy is that if we're all firemen and our own house is on fire, the last thing we're going to do is argue about who gets the second floor. In fact, what we're going to do is decide what needs to be done, figure out how to go about it, and who does which job first.
So we are, and becoming increasingly more, effective as a team of professionals aimed at a common goal. We're beginning to communicate better amongst ourselves as national NGOs, international NGOs, the donor community, and one of the primary tools that we are developing and very happy to see being developed as we create this team approach is shared information on funding. Where's the money coming from? Where's it going? What's it going into?
I think we also have a common agreement on what our conservation priorities are. If you take the priority ecoregions that are used by many of the national and international NGOs, and do a poor man's GIS with some acetates and lay over that the priority Parks in Peril, and lay on top of that the priority areas within the national countries as developed in the Biodiversity Strategies for each different country, and lay on top of that the hot spots that are used by other groups, you will find that there's about a 95 percent overlap on agreement in what the priority conservation areas are.
The obvious result of that is that what we're trying to get is full conservation coverage of those biological priorities, and a very effective, very efficient use of our donors's monies. So the catchphrase in this era of catchphrases would be "No gaps, no duplication. We are, in fact, a team." So the concept of better data and better communication amongst ourselves are the very tools that we need to allow us to achieve these goals of no gaps, no duplication.
LORENZO ROSENZWEIG, RedLAC: From a practical point of view, we should look at three important areas that can shed light on how can this funding analysis improve decision-making for NGOs. The first one would be that this kind of information is extremely important for the design of fund-raising campaigns. Fund-raising campaigns get to be the production or the productive part of most NGOs, and in this case, most environmental funds. Designing a fund-raising campaign will require in-depth knowledge of the donor market, of the donor's status, and the levels available and the money available in each of the areas. So that would be one important consideration.
The second one, in my opinion, would be also for marketing and public awareness. Most NGOs rely on strong marketing and public awareness campaigns to carve a niche wherever they work. So campaigns can be derived from a knowledge of all this money mapping in Latin American countries, and finally, it will also help decide which are the thematic areas, or the thematic subjects that are under-represented or that need additional attention from the different NGOs.
ALEC WATSON, TNC: I would add to the nouns at the end of the question, governments. I think you want to have funding analyses, improved decision-making for NGOs, donors and governments. I feel strongly in agreement with the point made about the importance of governments giving very high priority to conservation if we're really going to make the kind of headway that we want. I think the analysis, not only the funding analyses, but also the biological data that we were talking about the last couple of days is very, very important for governments to make their decisions.
I think that we, as NGOs and as donors, have an obligation to try to get the government agencies as well informed as they possibly can be, so they can help make the right decisions and approach the IDB and the World Bank with environmental and, particularly, conservation, concerns at the center of their national agendas for which they're seeking funds from these organizations.
I agree entirely with what Jim Nations just said, that we need better analysis and aggregation of data by country and by project and by overall theme, if you will, to give greater clarity as to what everybody is doing, to reduce the redundancy, and also to identify the gaps that are in funding in any particular country or even area of a country. So we have to get more specific data than we've had presented to us so far, certainly on the funding side.
Finally, I just want to reiterate a point that's been made a couple of times. I think that in the final analysis, when you're talking about funding of projects, no matter how important the ecoregional planning is in terms of helping us decide where we should focus our priorities, once you get down to the implementation and the funding, it has to be done within the country framework. So it should be looking at countries, the basic unit of analysis for the decisions for conservation funding.
RACHEL KYTE, IUCN: Within IUCN last year for the first time, we did a series of pie charts to track where IUCN received its funding this year, where it will receive its funding in five years' time, and where it expects to receive its funding in ten, fifteen, twenty years' time, given that the kind of project that we're all engaged in is a twenty-year, fifty-year, one-hundred-year project. What that clearly showed is the need for much greater and sophisticated funding analysis within IUCN. Given the nature of IUCN, that's something that we do in partnership with our donors, whether they be governmental, foundation, or multilateral.
The extent, however, of its usefulness, I think, is limited to plotting trends, donor self-education and mutual education, so that donors themselves understand where they're coming into a debate. But I think that what we've understood in IUCN so far is that it's one tool in a series of understandings about how money flows, both good money and bad money, or money that drives us away from our conservation goals.
The other tools then that have to be in the tool kit: an understanding of what are the best mechanisms for delivery of the money, what is the best mechanism for priority-setting at the local, national, subregional level? And only in that context does funding analysis then kick in with the kind of results that we want to see.
TWIG JOHNSON, WWF: I want to agree with what has been said before and just make a couple of additional points. One, that we agree that this information has to be improved, and ideally what we're all looking for is knowledge. The world is inundated with information, we're absolutely flooded with it, and yet very few people have the knowledge they need, to make the decisions that they need. This is true whether we're an international organization or a government or an NGO or a local community. So that the real analytic task is to get rid of most of the information. Knowledge involves eliminating some 90 percent of information so that you have what you need. I think that analytic task is a really important next step.
To do that, we need to specify the kind of decisions and the kind of actions that we want this information to be used for. That's a step that almost everybody forgets and that's why almost no information is used by anybody for much. So really let's try to identify what questions we want to address. It seems to me that in the discussion we've identified some. We want to know whether the biodiversity we're talking about is strategic, important, is it real, does it have biological significance? I think that's what Jim was talking about, this emerging consensus among the scientists about what big areas have priority.
The next challenge is within those big areas, to get really quite specific about the most important biodiversity, evolutionary and ecological processes. So that within countries, within regions, within subregions, very scarce resources of biodiversity conservation can be applied strategically. I agree that development should become sustainable. We need to work on all that, but until that happens, and in any case we're going to have to make strategic choices about what we do next, what we do first, where we put our priorities this next year, the next two years, the next three years.
The other thing I think about questions, we need to think about decades, fifteen, twenty, thirty years, and that really is a different set of questions than most governments ask or most people ask. Biodiversity is only meaningful if we talk about its conservation in a strategic sense over a thirty- to fifty-year time frame, just as a practical matter.
NELS JOHNSON, WRI: I just want to make a couple of points about whether this kind of information is useful. I think it is. The first thing I ever did in Washington was trying to track this stuff, and I've been committed to this kind of information data and I'm glad that we're doing it. I think as we've talked about, though, there's a new generation of information we need to really make this useful, and I want to make a number of points there.
First of all, how much we're spending for good work to conserve and maintain biological diversity really pales in comparison to how much money we're spending in terms of subsidies, infrastructure, and a lot of other things that are really chipping away at biodiversity every single day. So we need now to start mapping out where the most destructive subsidies are going. Where are the infrastructure projects going and could they be put some place better and still achieve the same objectives that they're designed for? We still haven't done that very well. We need to map that the same way we're mapping the good stuff that we're doing to conserve biodiversity. So I think that's the new generation kind of work that we need to do now.
In terms of priority-setting, I think it's important to point out that we don't want to just fund one particular set of priorities. We can have a tyranny of priorities set, and in spite of all the good work that's been done, with the efforts we've heard over the last couple of days, I just want to caution everybody that it's important to make sure that we specify the goals and objectives we're really concerned about. There is no one universal right set of priorities, and we need to have a lot of them. If we were interested in mapping where the agriculturally important species in Latin America, we'd have a much different set of priorities than we saw on the map yesterday. So let's just keep that in mind.
We really do need to look at priority-setting and think about a new generation approach to setting priorities. I think we've made a lot of progress. The first priorities that were really set, at least at a global level, were by Norman Myers back about 1987 or 1988, the tropical hot spots. The sophistication of priority-setting has come a long way since then, but we have a long ways to go, and, of course, we'll never reach the perfect place.
ANDREW TABER, WCS: It's kind of hard being at the end of this chain of all these great ideas, so I'm going to try to be ornery to attract some attention to some of my particular concerns. I wanted to bring up tyranny as one of the issues which I'm concerned about. About ten years ago I worked with Kent Redford on a paper where we were attempting to overthrow the tyranny of the rain forest, and I'm looking forward to trying to overthrow the tyranny of the Global 200 -- I think we need to keep a broad prospective.
I'm a field biologist, or certainly was until a year ago. I spent most of the last twenty years searching for wild corners where nobody else was working, and, in fact, what I found, and I think is very enlightening and exciting, is that those corners where projects are not under way already are fewer and farther between. That's very exciting, and I think that is reflected in this kind of ecoregional analysis of where funding is going. I think that is really contributing very well to ensuring that we are conserving biodiversity across Latin America, rather than in just those few spots where they're the highest total number of species and so on.
The other major point I'd like to make is that, again underlining what some other people have said, what works and what doesn't. We really need to focus much more on that, and I found this exercise tantalizing, but only tantalizing. It raised far more questions than it answered. There's a huge set of issues, there's a huge set of political correctness in the different approaches and so on that different people are using across Latin America. I think the donors need to look much more critically at what works so that donor dollars can go farther in terms of getting conservation forward.
I think there's some huge problems with indicators of success. I've actually found that USAID, in their best moments, have asked us a lot of very good critical questions, which have made us think very clearly in terms of aiming our projects at results. I think that's been very effective. I'm unaware of how other donors work in that sense, so I don't know how effective that is, but certainly it would be neat if donors could work together on that.
Just a couple of points of some major things which are falling through the cracks, just in terms of what works and what doesn't. There are huge questions, for instance, about how well community-based approaches will work in the future. I'm absolutely convinced that community-based conservation is the way to move forward, but, nevertheless, when one looks at a lot of these projects, one is finding that as the quality of life for people living around protected areas improves, their use of natural resources improves and their impacts on biodiversity also increases. What can we do abo ut those particular kinds of issues?
TWIG JOHNSON: The key question about money is, is the money we're using really about biodiversity conservation? Because much of it isn't. If it is, is it really kind of strategic, sensible, thoughtful, is it a good investment in terms of biodiversity? We don't know that, so I think that this, in terms of the next set of questions of unpacking what's going on, would be absolutely essential. Actually, when you think about it, isn't it amazing that after thirty to forty years of doing development and development cooperation and generations of leaders swearing openness and transparency and cooperation, that nobody knows what anybody else is doing? And that goes even within governments or within the NGO community or within business. So I think we're really on to something and I think we really need to push ahead.
NELS JOHNSON: Another thing that is important in a context of keeping track of where we spend money is how long are we sticking with places. In my experience, looking at what works and what doesn't, I inevitably find that the places where institutions and people and money have been committed for a long time are the only places where I really see things happening right. I think donors have too little patience with projects and places and people and organizations. We need to think ten years. Projects need to be ten years or more. Three and four years is money down the drain, in my opinion.
What is important to follow onto that is we need to spend a lot more time and attention on monitoring and adaptive management. We need to take monitoring seriously and build it into all the projects we're doing so we can learn how well that limited money we're using for biodiversity is being effectively used, because I think the answer to the question is, demonstrably we're never going to be spending enough money for biodiversity, so we have to spend what we have very well.
ANDREW TABER: Yes, obviously more money would be better. That's an easy answer, but, in fact, I think it only works if there's a much more critical evaluation and thought about where it should go.
On-the-ground capacity in Latin America is extremely limited. I've certainly seen capital city infrastructure, conservation infrastructure, growing enormously, but it has not been matched by in-the-field conservation expenditures and conservation action out of the capital cities. We need to be very careful about that, and so just throwing more money will just create more infrastructure unless we are much more strategic and the donors are much more aggressive in terms of pushing for those funds to go where they need to go.
I get increasingly frustrated with this kind of planning exercise. There's so many of these kinds of things at this grand macro scale, when are we really going to get down to the on-the-site business of actually making conservation happen? We cannot lose sight of that. What really counts is what happens out in the field. So as we push for more money, and clearly we need to, the donors need to make sure that conservation is happening on a site-by-site basis out there where biodiversity is being lost.
RACHEL KYTE: To answer a different part of the suite of questions within question number two. There was a moment between Prep Con Four and Rio itself, of the Earth Summit process, where we lost the plot. In our desire to hype the Earth Summit, we allowed ourselves to come out with this figure which was almost meaningless, the figure of Agenda 21 going to cost $125 billion over ten years.
What we did when we hyped that figure and took it around the international marketplace and took it back home to our northern legislators and governments was we gave the impression that this was something that you could do if you just found $125 billion over ten years and that it was all win, win, win. It's taken us probably seven to eight years to get back to the point where we understand that there are choices, which is why biodiversity conservation, especially in Latin America, has to be couched in the region's efforts towards democracy, towards the rule of law, towards citizenship rights for local people, whether it be women or indigenous people. It's why you can't conserve biodiversity when the region is in that kind of struggle still. The same is true for the Caribbean as well.
In a region which is privatizing and which is experiencing growth in really strange and eerie ways with rapid growth in some places and almost some kinds of stagflation existing in other places, that's one of the problems in getting the message over.
The other point I wanted to make was about the money being different. What we need, as I think Nels said, is money that's there for the long term. We want loyal money. We want money that allows you to get down to the local women's group that's working with the iguana in that forest, and that's loyal money, because it takes a long time to get there and it needs to stay there.
What we also need is money which is not oriented around a project cycle. We sit in these rooms and we talk about the programmatic effort, we talk about the twenty-year time line, and yet we're looking at projects with no overheads. Well, somewhere there's a disconnect. Money is gold, it's silver, and it's bronze. Project money, to me, is bronze. Sometimes it's even tin. Sometimes it's not even that. What we're looking for is the silver and gold, and I think there are ways for bilaterals, multilaterals, and foundations to move the quality of their money upstream.
The final point is that each of these different sets of money comes with different accountability clauses. We're not very good at working that accountability element. So multilaterals are accountable to their boards, and yet we are very good at going down and preaching in a forest in Nicaragua about what's good and what's not good in terms of corruption in democracy. We're still very bad at doing it in London and Washington. The bilaterals are accountable to their own legislatures and they still don't feel enough heat from us, and foundations are accountable to themselves. But are they?
For a foundation to go into a country and set up and start funding civil society and ecological groups at the grassroots and to stay there for five to six years, and then to just say, "Oh, we're going to go somewhere else now," I believe that there is an ethical accountability of a foundation to the people that it said it wants to work with as a partner for six years. It's very interesting for me, what is accountability within the foundation world. And as we build philanthropy in Latin America, not just in North America, we need to deal with that question head-on.
JIM NATIONS: My answer to the question of how do we know whether or not the level of funding is appropriate revolves around two lessons that I've learned in life that I later found out were wrong. The first one I learned here in Washington, D.C., and that is the adage that there is no project that can't be justified. The second is something I learned many years ago in the army, which is that the secret of success is to move fast and look busy.
The truth is that we don't have time for either one of those things. We don't have time to justify our projects just because we're doing it, and we don't have time to just move fast and look busy. The focus instead, to me, should be not on money, but on goals. If your goals are clear, the amount of money that's required to achieve that goal will become obvious.
At CI, we got very directly involved in this because one of our major donors came to us and said, "How do I know that these pretty pictures that you paint for us during the board meetings are true? How do we know that you, in fact, are achieving what you say that you're achieving?"
It put us into a very concerted effort to do monitoring and evaluation, and we looked at all the different processes, all the different schemes that exist out there to monitor and evaluate progress. What we actually ended up with is something that many of you are familiar with, which is the logical framework. If you've done a USAID project or you've done a GEF project, you realize the elegant simplicity of a logical framework in which what you're looking at is the question, what are you really trying to do? What are the steps that are required in order to achieve that goal?
If you can define those things, how much it's going to cost to achieve that goal falls out of it as a natural part of the process. If we can agree on the goals, and increasingly we do, and on the steps that are required to achieve that goal, then the money that's required to do that is a no-brainer.
LORENZO ROSENZWEIG: I think we have a fundamental flaw in all this. Just the single fact that we are sitting here is totally wrong. That means that we are doing something valuable, but we have a fundamental design flaw, and that means that, first of all, biodiversity funding should not be necessary. It is necessary because the economic model that we are living in is not appropriate. Why it is not appropriate, probably because we don't, or in this model we don't take into account natural capital, something that recently has been designed as industrial metabolism and things like cyclic versus linear processes and human activities.
The relation between size of the project or money invested and impact would always depend on many, many elements. The most relevant would be time and other factors. As was said before, it makes no sense how much money you spend if you have a counter-money being spent in just the opposite direction. So this is a very difficult question to answer, given the current economic model and development model that everybody is working with.
Also when we talk about the monitoring and seeing how those efforts succeed or not, we urgently need a baseline and the baseline that addresses both social and biodiversity indicators, because without that, we won't know if we are moving in the right direction.
Lastly, I would like to say that our activity should be like a research and development activity. So that the money that we are providing should be seen as seed money that eventually will make all these initiatives get the big commerce, the big international markets machinery, moving in the right way. If we don't do that, then we don't magnify our investments and we won't be able to win the battle.
ALEC WATSON: We have to get down to very specific sites, with very specific objectives, very specific targets, and very specific ability to evaluate and monitor what we're doing, so we can see that the funds that are being provided are being used for what they're supposed to be.
In that context , we need very, very explicit strategies. Once you have clear strategies, then the factors that are relevant to what you're trying to do become evident. Then you can see that there are other sources of funding than the ones you immediately thought of. There are negative sources of funding, or funding for negative things, and to the extent that you can stop those or redirect them, you have almost the same, even better results than having gotten your funding for the projects themselves.
If we talk in broader terms, like natural resource management, for example, rather than simply conservation, you can bring a lot of other factors to bear, you can find other kinds of resources that would not be available for conservation, but might be available for natural resource management in a sensible fashion, for instance.
Finally, to pick up the second half of the question, I think that size does matter, and I think in general terms the larger the areas we're trying to protect, the larger the landscapes, the more measurable the stability of conservation targets is, and also the maintenance of ecological services becomes more evident, and we can make a stronger, more powerful argument for protecting entire watersheds than you can for protecting relatively small units.
In that regard, large areas also are relevant to carbon sequestration and other kinds of forest protection devices, which are not as relevant to small areas. So think more broadly, think in big areas, have clear strategies and clear objectives, I think we'll do better.
The following questions/comments were raised during the Question and Answer Session (summarized versions are provided):
Question 1 -- Howard Batson, USAID/Jamaica:
Responses:
That is our main challenge, how to mainstream concern about biodiversity into all the different things we have to do to survive and improve our livelihoods. It's easier to think about biodiversity as separate, but we need to mix it up with the economists and the finance ministry people and the transportation ministry people. That's how we're going to make progress. But this doesn't necessarily have to cost a lot. For example, in Costa Rica, it is phenomenal how much dry forest is coming back in the Guanacaste region, two or three years after cattle subsidies were removed. They haven't been spending tens and hundreds of millions of dollars to get all that forest to come back. They just removed one of the most destructive driving forces behind the ecological destruction there, and the citizens of Costa Rica are going to be better off economically, because they're not wasting money on what is not only an environmentally destructive activity, but one that, economically, was not very viable to begin with. So we've got to look for more of those kinds of opportunities if we're going to make progress. (Nels Johnson)
Thinking strategically, both in terms of sustainable development strategies and biodiversity, is really important. In many cases that's going to mean not pretending to be able to achieve biodiversity objectives in areas which are high priority in terms of development objectives, or even more appropriately in areas where there is nobody in control, which is many of the areas of the greatest biodiversity. I mean, whether you're talking about Chaco of Colombia, or the parts of the southwest Amazon, there just is not much control. (Twig Johnson)
A recent study pointed out that only about 2 percent of protected areas were protected in the strict sense of protection, but about 60 percent of them were remote. In other words, they were far enough away from the ag frontier, the infrastructure frontiers to be de facto protected. So I think we need to think strategically on both sides, both about the development and when to get out of the way, and the intermediate step is, conservation at what cost? How much biodiversity can you really conserve, here, at what cost? (Twig Johnson)
The argument, or polarized thinking, that it's either development or conservation is bogus. We know that we need to combine these two things. But what is necessary is to change the concept that human beings are exempt from the laws of biology and nature and the way to do it is a long process. We have to begin with environmental education of our children. We have to carry it through the universities, and we have to respond to this often-repeated lie with the often-repeated truth that we, in fact, are subject to these laws. We have to get away from allowing economists, politicians, and lawyers to make all the decisions, and either instill into them the concept of biological reality or ourselves take over the role of making those decisions. (Jim Nations)
Although we are making progress on eliminating perverse incentives, we are failing to put biodiversity at the heart of the poverty-alleviation agenda. Almost all of the bilaterals and multilaterals have a clear poverty-alleviation strategy and goal. At the same time as that goal has become articulated, environmental budgets have been cut back. It is not effective to polarize environmental issues as environment vs. population or trade -- we need to find a way to express the absolutely intrinsic value of biodiversity within the poverty-alleviation struggle. (Rachel Kyte)
Question 2 -- Margarita Astralaga, RAMSAR Convention:
Responses:
The issue of priority-setting is really important. Certainly all good things have been promised, promoted, and attested to in one or more of the various conventions we've had in this region and globally. But we've got to try vertical as opposed to horizontal priorities. Everything is a priority, but then if you could only have one tomorrow, which would it be? If you could only have two. (Twig Johnson)
We are at risk of creating a priority-setting industry at the expense of doing anything in any particular place. That is a real concern, and I think whenever someone is about to start setting priorities, it's really incumbent upon them to look at what already exists. There are lots of places where we have a pretty good idea of the priorities that support certain goals and objectives. So if those are the goals and objectives we're concerned about, then let's start with what's already been done. (Nels Johnson)
NGOs really should hold donors and governments to those priorities that they've developed and they've signed on to. I think there's not enough accountability going on with respect to priorities that have already been set. (Nels Johnson)
Question 3 -- David Smith, Jamaica Fund for Development and Conservation:
Responses:
We do need to establish why biodiversity is important. It's like burning the books of Alexandria before we've read them. Biodiversity represents the information available in creation. It's being destroyed before we even have names for it, much less studied it. That impoverishes us all. But we need to recognize that this reason might not resonate with governments or communities, let alone people who are trying to figure out how they're going to feed their family. That doesn't mean that it isn't important and it won't be important for their children or for their grandchildren. But that's why having a strategic approach to biodiversity conservation is very important. The important thing is that we have biological criteria at a global level for assessing it, so that we know where to begin. But we should not pretend that there's going to be biodiversity conservation at every level while still pursuing agricultural or development goals. To the extent that we want to include biodiversity conservation in our agenda, it should be true, thoughtful, strategic, sensible and we should do what's necessary to do that for the future. (Twig Johnson)
How are these priorities going to be more relevant to development? In this next generation of priority-setting that we do engage in, we need to get a lot better at integrating social and economic information. We haven't done a very good job with that thus far. It's not an easy thing to do, but we've got to press ourselves to incorporate those issues better. (Nels Johnson)
There's a biological aspect to this we haven't done very well either, which is, we shouldn't just be thinking of priorities in the context of species (whether they're endemic or endangered, etc.), we ought to be looking at ecological functions and processes. So the ecosystem services -- those functions and processes that people directly benefit from -- are one way to make these priorities very relevant to people in developing countries, as well as developed countries. What kinds of places are most important for filtering water that people drink, or maintaining water flows and keeping the range of variability in a watershed within check and not flooding all over the flood zones where most of the poor happen to live? Hurricane Mitch was a prime example of that sort of problem. These priorities can be extremely relevant to the concerns that most people have, but we're not going to get there if we keep calling it biodiversity. We've got to look at the ecological functions and processes that people really depend on. (Nels Johnson)
Question 4 -- Bai-Mass Taal, UNEP:
Response:
I have the honor of closing this conference. Of the business that I have to attend to, I'll take care of the most important first, and that is acknowledging the people that made this conference possible. So for their hours of data entry, mapmaking and analysis, we need to thank Karin Harjes, Megan McKnight and Danielle Berman.
For helping to pull the whole conference together and for assistance over the last two days, thanks are due to the BSP staff, Vance Russell, Rita Ogilvie, Janice Davis, Jonnell Allen and Connie Carrol.
The World Wildlife Fund's Conservation Science Department, and in particular Tom Allnutt, helped with maps and software. The World Conservation Monitoring Center, David Gray of the World Bank, and Michael Parr of the American Bird Conservancy provided critical data.
For the presentations I'd like to thank David Olson, Georgina Bustamante, Thomas Lovejoy, and Jack Vanderryn. To Jack Vanderryn we owe a special thanks, because on a volunteer basis he joined the steering committee that helped shape this conference and really gave us some very valuable insights. To Tom Lovejoy on a personal note, I'd like to thank him for wearing a bow tie.
The people who initially conceived of the need for this funding analysis and worked over the past several years to bring it to fruition are Eric Fajer and Gonzalo Castro. We need to thank Gonzalo also for the Bank providing these wonderful facilities for having this meeting.
Now, there's one individual in particular that really stands out amongst all of these, and for those of you who have ever had to prepare for a conference and manage it, you know that there is progress and setbacks. There's again progress and frustration, and there's details, details, details. This one particular individual managed all of that and also had substantial intellectual input into the conference itself, and that's Ilana Locker, and I think we really need a hand of applause for her.
Of course, thanks to all of you, too, for coming here, and for your time and for providing your insights and helping to advance our understanding of where funding in Latin America is going, and also how we, as a donor community, can work more effectively together. As has been referred to several times, there's the real world out there, too. There's people that are otherwise intelligent and well informed, who doubt the importance of biodiversity and who are just basically ill informed about the topic. I'm sure all of you have examples of this every day.
For example, one individual who was quite influential and from one of the major donor agencies, and that agency will remain anonymous, came up to me one day and said, "Jeff, why is it that we need to conserve biodiversity, given that we now have genetic engineering?" It kind of reminded me a bit of that sort of fanciful projection about there being a million monkeys with a million typewriters placed in a room for a million years and, by God, you'll probably come up with a Shakespearian sonnet. The thing is, though, when I compare the capabilities of monkeys to Shakespeare and our capabilities to that of the creativity of evolution, I think the monkeys compare rather well.
But in any case, there is that group out there (as well as the general public) that we need to be educating and the decision-makers that we need to be trying to influence. But this conference here was really a gathering of the committed, of those who already know about the importance of biodiversity.
I want to assure you that your recommendations and suggestions are going to be summarized and put into proceedings, and they will be distributed to you. They're going to be used. The World Bank and AID, along the lines of the data, are going to be getting together to look and see how it is that we can move ahead in a sort of cost-effective and efficient manner in making the data that is needed available. We will be consulting with interested parties and then trying to move ahead.
You got a summary of the data that we currently have. There's much more detailed data than that that has to do with sites, with country-level information, and so on, and that is going to be put onto the Web.
Aside from the data, there was also another purpose to the conference, and that had to do with getting together the various donors that are involved, the foundations, the NGOs, the multilaterals, and the bilaterals. In preparing for the conference and in the last couple of days, I've learned a fair amount about the strengths and the constraints of the various donors.
I think donor coordination is a very serious issue because there is a lot of untapped synergy there. We really do need to learn more about each other. I'm going to give you one example that I'm familiar with, with regard to AID and the Banks, in which our strengths can actually complement one another, and this has to do in the energy sector. There's a substantial amount of loan money out in the Banks for energy for environmentally sound energy which doesn't move because of the lack of grant funds for designing the projects.
Now, AID, on the other hand, while we don't have anywhere near the amount of money that the Banks have, we do have grant funds. On several occasions we've been able to provide those funds to get projects designed in order to release a substantial amount of loan funds, again, for environmentally sound energy production. I think that there are parallel types of arrangements potentially in the biodiversity conservation arena that we ought to be exploring.
In any case, I think that one of the things that we need to take away from here is a commitment from the different donors to get to know each other better, their strengths, their weaknesses, and how our strengths can reinforce one another. It's questionable as to whether or not we're going to be getting an increase in funding for biodiversity, and certainly whatever we do get is not going to be adequate. So it's incumbent us to use those funds and to work as effectively as we can to making the most of what we do have.
Again, thank you very much for participating and making a very successful conference.
Preserving
the 'Big, Big Wild': Ecoregion-Based Conservation in the Chihuahuan Desert
Chris Williams, World Wildlife Fund
Application
of the Marine Priority Setting Exercise in the Central Caribbean
Gina Green, The Nature Conservancy
Ecoregional-based
Conservation in the Andes: Perspectives and Challenges
Roberto Roca, Conservation International
Mexico
Brazil
Caribbean
Central America
RedLAC