Fauna & Flora International USA Inc

Northern Mozambique’s Niassa Reserve (4.2 million hectares) is one of the planet’s last remaining havens for biodiversity. Niassa harbours 40% of Mozambique’s entire elephant population, and is one of the most important refuges on the entire continent for two of Africa’s threatened carnivores, lion and wild dog.

FFI has been supporting Niassa – and the impoverished communities whose livelihoods depend on the reserve’s natural resources – for almost 15 years. This experience and institutional memory gives FFI a clear perspective on what is required to safeguard and conserve this amazing wilderness. The size of Niassa is its greatest attribute. However, it is also presents its greatest management challenge. Effective conservation management for an area this size presents enormous logistical difficulties. The recent resurgence in the demand for ivory and consequent explosion in poaching activity has exacerbated that problem.

As a result, in 2012, FFI took the strategic decision to secure a key area of the reserve situated at the coalface of the poaching threat and home to the most significant concentrations of wildlife. Chuilexi Conservancy was formed from three adjoining tourism concessions within Niassa Reserve, which FFI brought together after securing the management rights. This ‘reserve within a reserve’ is a vast area in its own right, covering 586,800 hectares. It was carefully chosen to ensure maximum conservation impact by protecting the highest densities of wildlife within the most severely threatened part of Niassa as a whole.

Over the last six years, FFI has implemented an ambitious programme of community engagement and anti-poaching measures that include livelihoods support and investment in critical infrastructure that has enabled access to the furthest reaches of the conservancy. Chuilexi Conservancy is now taking shape as a model of excellence that could serve as a blueprint for effective conservation management throughout the rest of Niassa.

Chuilexi provides strong evidence that FFI’s approach can reap significant benefits, curbing snaring and illegal logging, and – most critically – reducing the levels of elephant poaching within Chuilexi’s boundaries. We have been able to demonstrate that elephant poaching, which is rife across the African continent and the greater Niassa Reserve, can be significantly reduced with effective management whilst also benefiting local people.

Within the space of just six years, with intensive investment, Chuilexi has grown from three unprotected and besieged concessions into a well-established and functional conservancy – one of the largest private concessions in Africa. Given the sheer scale of the operation, this is a significant achievement. More importantly, it demonstrates that our model is working, and paves the way for even deeper and wider impact in future years to come.

The critically endangered Tonkin snub-nosed monkey has been at the centre of FFI’s primate conservation activities for well over a decade. In 2002 and 2007, FFI surveys led to the discovery of two key populations of the species in Khau Ca forest, Ha Giang Province and later in Tung Vai watershed protection forest in Quan Ba district, Ha Giang province on the border with China.

Since 2002, FFI has been focusing on community-led conservation by engaging local communities in species monitoring and habitat protection. Established in 2009, the Khau Ca Species and Habitat Conservation Area engages with the Management Advisory Committee and Community Conservation Teams to determine its management structure. It is the first successful model of special use forest management and has demonstrated the role of communities in species conservation and decision making of a special use forest. FFI has also developed a species conservation action plan for these sites, and continues to raise awareness about this endemic primate.

In 2015, FFI built the Tung Vai conservation field station and today continues to support community-based patrol groups in Quan Ba. In April 2017, another conservation field station was built in Rao Dan Chai forest, also in Quan Ba. An assessment of the agriculture in Quan Ba identified the impact of cash and subsistence crop growth on forest quality. Cardamom was identified as the primary cash crop and FFI is currently planning mitigation strategies to protect forest quality for the Tonkin snub-nosed monkey.

Whilst the species is still listed as one of the 25 Most Endangered Primates in the World by the IUCN Primate Specialist Group, through FFI’s work the population in Ha Giang has increased by at least 75% to around 150 individuals.

With essential support from Oceans 5, FFI and our key partners are working to eliminate destructive fishing practices and protect marine habitat in an 80-km-long marine corridor along the Nicaragua Pacific coast. The work is ultimately designed to reduce the negative impacts of fishing on marine turtles.

Pushing back against blast fishing is crucial—curbing the devastating practice builds the conviction among communities and authorities that destructive fisheries can be ended and responsible fisheries thrive. The project also aims to exclude bottom trawling from the Pacific coast, using a different strategy tailored to the situation of that failing industry; we are working closely with government and stakeholders, including coastal communities and the growing tourism industry, while mounting a major communications campaign.

The project is working to ensure compliance with fisheries regulations throughout the corridor, with particular focus on three priority areas: Chacocente, La Flor and Gigante. In between the protected areas of Chacocente and La Flor – both mass-nesting arribada beaches for olive ridley turtles – FFI’s focus is the community-based conservation area, proposed by the people of Gigante. This locally managed marine area is a completely novel initiative for Nicaragua and, with the help of the project, is gaining social and political support. Successful establishment of their Marine Zone for Life and Development could be a game changer for marine management along the Pacific coast. For enduring impact, we are strengthening the technical capacities of community members in Gigante to ensure their ability to manage the area successfully in the long term.

The global saiga antelope population has declined by over 95% over the last 20 years – one of the fastest recorded declines for a mammal.

FFI is a partner in the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative (ADCI), a joint initiative delivered together with the Association for the Conservation of the Biodiversity of Kazakhstan (ACBK), the Committee of Forestry and Wildlife of the Ministry of Agriculture of Kazakhstan, Frankfurt Zoological Society and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. The goal of ADCI is the conservation and restoration of steppe, semi-desert and desert ecosystems and their species in Kazakhstan.

All of FFI’s activities are delivered through our local operational partner ACBK. Together we are focusing efforts to address the decline of the saiga antelope on the Ustyurt Plateau. This is home to the most remote and threatened of the saiga populations. A temperate desert lying between the Caspian and Aral Seas, the Ustyurt covers an area of about 200,000 km2 shared by Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Conservation activities on the Ustyurt include the monitoring of saiga movement through satellite collaring and telemetry study, promotion of greater awareness of the plight of the saiga and support for its conservation through educational activities including the establishment of school eco-clubs on the plateau and the promotion of an annual ‘saiga day’.

In May 2015, a devastating mass die-off in Kazakhstan (the Betpak-dala population), caused by the bacterium Pasteurella multocida (the causative agent of haemorrhagic septicaemia) resulted in the loss of over 75% of the global adult saiga population in less than a month. FFI provided emergency funding support to enable ACBK and the UK Royal Veterinary College to respond to the emergency and to develop appropriate mitigation and management responses to any future such events.

In 2017, we supported the establishment of a new independent ranger team on the Ustyurt Plateau. The team monitors saiga movements and liaises with state ranger teams and local people to coordinate improved anti-poaching effort to reduce the illegal killing of saiga. As the horns from male saiga are used in Asian medicine, they are highly susceptible to illegal poaching, the main threat to the Ustyurt saiga today. Beyond the Ustyurt we are directly addressing illegal trade in saiga horns by working with customs, border and police authorities to improve their capacity to monitor and prevent illegal wildlife products being traded both within Kazakhstan and across the national border. This includes the provision and training of sniffer dogs.