Innovation in Hawaii: Stories from the IUCN World Conservation Congress
In early September, the IUCN World Conservation Congress brought conservationists together with leaders from government, indigenous, faith and spiritual communities, the private sector and academia, to develop collaborative solutions to our planet’s most pressing environmental problems, writes Wendy Elliott, WWF Deputy Leader (interim) Wildlife Practice.
Around 10,000 participants from 192 countries participated in a vast array of events on topics ranging from crime to communities to corporate responsibility. A few nuggets stood out to me as innovations that can help us break through barriers, or connect beyond silos to achieve a sustainable planet.
The first was a rather unique story of a whale. Numbering just 115 animals in 2004, the Western North Pacific Gray whale faced the enormous threat of a major offshore oil and gas development in its critical feeding habitat off Sakhalin Island, Russia. But thanks to some innovative thinking by the project’s lenders, disaster was averted.
The banks made it a contractual requirement that the oil and gas company work with, and take advice from, an independently convened group of scientists so as to minimise the impact of its activities on the whales. Over a decade and 539 recommendations later, the whale population had increased to 174, showing how powerful such lending conditions can be.
© Vladimir Potansky / WWF-Russia
With major infrastructure and extractive projects threatening wildlife in locations all over the world, this is a model that, if followed by other lenders, could play a major role not only in wildlife conservation but in overall environmental sustainability.
Several other events spoke about innovative financial strategies that are delivering benefits — such as Ghana stopping fossil fuel subsidies, and compensating the public for the resulting fuel price increase with measures such as removing fees for state run primary and secondary schools.
We live in the age of technology, and it was no surprise that tech innovations are now helping to solve a growing number of conservation challenges.
In the area of wildlife crime for example, I learnt about plans by Paso Pacifico to construct artificial sea turtle eggs that contain covert GSM-GPS tracking devices and forensic markers. Once the eggs are poached, their movement can be monitored and mapped, revealing trafficking routes. And the New England Aquarium plans to develop a system that digitizes wildlife trade invoices in real time, analysing shipping values like size and weight to find discrepancies between reported and real cargoes.
With so many tech advances, it is more important than ever to stay connected, learn from each other and avoid reinventing the wheel. WILDLABS.NET was set up for just this purpose, as a web platform that brings together conservationists, technologists, engineers, data scientists, entrepreneurs and change makers in a central, open space to share information, ideas, tools and resources.
Other innovations became apparent in discussions with some of the many inspiring people I met at the Congress. For example Rohit Singh, WWF’s law enforcement specialist for Asia, told me how he is working with partners to trial a new version of SMART, the tool used by an increasing number of rangers during wildlife law enforcement patrols.
SMART Connect will for the first time provide ranger teams with real time access to, and integration of, information on locations of poachers, patrols, and key wildlife species. The ability to detect and respond to threats in real-time will shift the focus from looking at where poachinghas happened, to where poaching is happening.
And that’s not all… work is underway to integrate fire alert data collected by NASA via satellite into SMART Connect, enabling ranger teams to potentially take action to put out fires before they become too big to control. If this works, it could have enormous benefits not just for the forests and wildlife which are regularly devastated in raging fires, but also for the air quality so essential for us all. The 2015 South East Asian haze, caused by forest fires in Indonesia, affected tens of millions of people, and according to one study caused more than 100,000 additional deaths.
Elsewhere I met with a major US company who was sourcing a medicinal plant from panda habitat, with the harvesting communities not only gaining sustainability certification (FairWild) but also complying with specific requirements to minimise impacts on pandas, making the product ‘panda friendly’. No matter where you live, there are increasing opportunities for you to save the planet and its wildlife by purchasing the right products.
I learned about how engaging with what may seem at first glance completely unrelated sectors can bring breakthroughs. For example, a new framework has been developed by WWF’s tiger team to tackle conflicts between humans and wildlife, based on an enormously successful system that has dramatically reduced road traffic accidents. And the conservation community has teamed up with anti-corruption specialists to collectively tackle the corruption which is one of the biggest impediments to solving problems such as wildlife crime.
The planet has never before faced such challenges, but key innovations such as these greatly increase our ability make a difference at a scale that matters, to the benefit of both people and nature. And make it an exciting journey!
This story is reposted with permission from the author, Wendy Elliot. To read the original version, check out WWF News & Stories.
