ABSTRACT
The convergence of the biodiversity and climate crises, widening of wealth inequality, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic underscore the urgent need to mobilize change to secure sustainable futures. Centres of tropical biodiversity are a major focus of conservation efforts, delivered in predominantly site-level interventions often incorporating alternative-livelihood provision or poverty-alleviation components. Yet, a focus on site-level intervention is ill-equipped to address the disproportionate role of (often distant) wealth in biodiversity collapse. Further these approaches often attempt to ‘resolve' local economic poverty in order to safeguard biodiversity in a seemingly virtuous act, potentially overlooking local communities as the living locus of solutions to the biodiversity crisis. We offer Connected Conservation: a dual-branched conservation model that commands novel actions to tackle distant wealth-related drivers of biodiversity decline, while enhancing site-level conservation to empower biodiversity stewards. We synthesize diverse literatures to outline the need for this shift in conservation practice. We identify three dominant negative flows arising in centres of wealth that disproportionately undermine biodiversity, and highlight the three key positive, though marginalized, flows that enhance biodiversity and exist within biocultural centres. Connected Conservation works to amplify the positive flows, and diminish the negative flows, and thereby orientates towards desired states with justice at the centre. We identify connected conservation actions that can be applied and replicated to address the telecoupled, wealth-related reality of biodiversity collapse while empowering contemporary biodiversity stewards. The approach calls for conservation to extend its collaborations across sectors in order to deliver to transformative change.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a range of effects on the environment and particularly on wildlife, through diverse and sometimes contradictory impact pathways. In this study, based on data collected among indigenous people and local communities from South America (Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, and Peru), we investigated changes in the use of wildlife resources for food during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our study generated unique data collected from 756 households in 60 communities and nine sites. We confirm the hypothesis that wildlife use increased as a short-term response to food insecurity during the pandemic, and fish played a more significant role than wild meat in that endeavor. The increase in wild-meat consumption as a response to food insecurity was conditioned by prices and availability (unsuccessful hunts). Wildlife use did not increase as an alternative means to generate income, because communities were cut off from the market economy for several months. Also, whereas the reliance on wildlife emerged as an immediate solution during the first months of the crisis, longer-term strategies prioritized at household level involved diversifying food sources through domestic meat and crop production. Among all available animal-based proteins, local chicken came just after fish as the animal-based source of protein whose consumption increased the most during the first months of the crisis, as a response to food insecurity. We caution that relying on wildlife as a safety net may constitute a poverty trap in cases where the resource is depleted. Although not specifically studied here, access to land and the transmission of traditional knowledge/skills are possible additional determinants of the role that wildlife may play in times of crisis, and this is proposed as an area for future research. Results also attest to local communities expecting more support from their respective national governments, and confirm results from Walters et al. (2021) that governments were generally absent or unable to react quickly during the pandemic, leaving households (or their local leaders) with the responsibility to innovate with local solutions and pro-actively adapt to the rapid impacts of the crisis.