Lockdown’s Impact on Ecotourism

August 6, 2020 / activist360 / Leave a comment

We’re flying less. And wild places that count on tourism dollars are starting to take notice.

Between flight shaming and a global pandemic, destinations that depend on travelers to protect ecosystems are finding themselves with fewer resources to do so.

July 1, 2020 — Rincon del Mar, a beachside hamlet on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, is part of a burgeoning industry that is helping to turn the tide for the country’s peacetime economy and its environmental conservation.

In 2010, Amauri Julio, a fisherman turned tour guide, joined other community members to form an environmental group to protect Rincon del Mar’s beaches and mangroves. During the day, he offers tours for snorkeling among tropical fish and corals and visiting idyllic Caribbean islands. Participants in afternoon tours view giant flocks of seabirds going to roost, aquatic reptiles and, as night falls, luminescent plankton in the lagoon surrounded by mangroves. With the country’s more-than-50-year armed conflict in the past, Julio says that more and more international tourists are visiting, providing a sustainable source of income for the village and their environmental projects.

*Rincon del Mar by Yássef Briloz (CC BY 2.0).*

Growing concerns about climate change, however, could change that. One response has been “flight shaming,” using remorse to discourage travelers from flying. The movement started in Sweden in 2017 and gained international attention when climate activist Greta Thunberg crossed the Atlantic in a sailboat to attend the U.N. Climate Action Summit in New York in September 2019. Some conservationists and ecotourism providers are concerned that flight shaming may have negative unintended consequences, especially in developing countries where tourism is a key source of jobs, economic growth and conservation funding.

Places like Rincon del Mar depend heavily on tourism. And the Colombian government views tourism as a whole, which has grown some 300% since 2006, as the country’s “new petroleum” and is investing heavily in the blossoming industry.

The COVID-19 pandemic is offering a preview of what could happen if flight-shaming caused air travel and international tourism to dry up. “If you want to see what happens when people stop flying to Africa or Asia, we can see it right now. With tourists gone, poachers are moving in and killing endangered species,” Costas Christ, a former senior director at Conservation International and founder of Beyond Green Travel, a sustainable tourism consultancy says in an email. Christ says he is concerned that with tourism companies and governments’ conservation budgets pummeled, previously protected natural habitat may be turned into cattle ranches. “That is what happens when tourists stop flying.”

Tourism With Benefits

There’s an important distinction to be made between nature tourism — the act of vacationing outdoors — and ecotourism, Christ says.

Nature tourism involves spending a holiday in natural places, “but that does not mean [travelers] are having a positive impact on nature,” Christ says. He points to Tayrona National Natural Park, also on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, as an example of where people visiting in large numbers damaged the natural environment by discarding trash, lighting fires and trafficking plants and animals.

Ecotourism, on the other hand, encapsulates principles and practices that ensure that tourists benefit both the environment and local communities. “Ecotourism was developed to make sure nature tourism did not destroy the very environment that tourists want to visit,” Christ says.

Liven Fernando Martinez Bernal, a professor at the National University of Colombia and an expert in tourism, economics and the environment, says that if the ecotourism industry can grow in an organized way with quality standards, it could generate impressive benefits. Bernal wrote his doctoral dissertation on the environmental impact of tourism in Colombia’s National Parks, looking at the post-conflict scenario and focusing his analysis on the economic impacts for local communities. He found that ecotourism doesn’t require a large capital investment, so rather than concentrating benefits in the hands of a few as often happens in the tourism industry, it can contribute to wealth distribution and economic development at the local level.

Costa Rica is a prime example. From the early 1940s to the 1980s, forest cover decreased from 77% of the country’s territory to 21%, mostly driven by the expansion of cattle ranching and production of crops like coffee and bananas. Facing an economic crisis in the early 1980s, the country looked to ecotourism as a way to diversify the economy while protecting the environment. Today more than 3% of its GDP comes from ecotourism. This, combined with a carbon tax on fossil fuels and payments for environmental services has meant that within 30 years, the country had more than doubled its forest cover.

Conscious Decisions

Experts suggest there is a balancing act at play between the desire to support local economies and conservation efforts and the need to address global climate change. Ecotourism clearly plays a role in protecting habitats and the biodiversity they support. Yet reducing the threat of climate change is key to their well-being, too.

Christ suggests that the answer may lie in finding a happy medium that accommodates both, particularly where they intersect. “The answer is not to stop travel,” he says, “but to get travel right.”

Editor’s note: Dimitri Selibas wrote this story as a participant in the Ensia Mentor Program. The mentor for the project was Rachel Cernansky.

2019 Deadliest Year Ever for Environmental Activists

August 5, 2020 / activist360 / Leave a comment

2019 was the deadliest year ever for environmental activists, watchdog group says

Global Witness says that activists on the frontline of the climate crisis are facing more violence than ever before.

By Ashoka Mukpo on July 29, 2020

Mongabay Series: Global Forests

In a new report, the watchdog group says that at least 212 environment and land defenders were killed across the world in 2019.
The deadliest countries were Colombia and the Philippines, with 64 and 43 killings respectively.
Despite making up only 5% of the world’s population, representatives of Indigenous communities accounted for 40% of those killed.
Killings related to agribusiness jumped by 60%, to 34 in 2019 – researchers say as consumption of commodities like beef and palm oil increases, so too will deadly conflict over land.

2019 was the deadliest year on record for environmental activists, according to a new report by the advocacy watchdog Global Witness. In total, the group says that at least 212 people were killed across the world in retaliation for their defense of land and the environment, with those representing Indigenous communities bearing a disproportionate brunt of the violence.

Many of the killings were linked to battles over control of forests that are critical to the global fight against climate change, said Chris Madden, a senior campaigner at Global Witness.

“Looking at the cases that we’re seeing and the issues these people are working against, they’re often the very same causes of climate breakdown,” he told Mongabay in an interview. “So that’s why we’re saying they’re at the front line of the climate crisis.”

Topping the list of the deadliest countries for environmental defenders in 2019 were Colombia and the Philippines, with 64 and 43 killings respectively. In Colombia, the figure was more than double the number who were murdered in 2018. Overall, the most dangerous region for defenders was Latin America, which saw two-thirds of the global death toll, with the Amazon alone accounting for 33 deaths.

*Total Number of Killings Per Country in 2019*

Despite only making up 5% of the world’s population, activists representing Indigenous communities, who are often on the front lines of conflict over forests and land, comprised 40% of those killed.

In Colombia, the 2016 peace agreement signed between the government and the leftist guerrilla group FARC is causing a scramble for control over lucrative resources left behind in the group’s wake.

As FARC insurgents demobilize under the terms of the agreement, paramilitary and other criminal groups are rushing in to fill the void, with Indigenous communities suffering as a result of the power struggle. Those communities accounted for half of the documented killings in the country despite representing less than 5% of Colombia’s population.

In late May, Mongabay published video of paramilitaries firing assault rifles into an Indigenous Emberá town and forcing members of the community to flee by canoe.

A darker side to Covid-19: Colombian community flee crossfire as armed fighters vie for control, published by If Not Us Then Who?

When environmental defenders are killed in Colombia, the courts rarely deliver justice. According to Global Witness, nearly nine in 10 murders of human rights activists in the country do not lead to a conviction.

Elsewhere, the deaths of activists have been linked to intimidation and violence carried out on behalf of repressive governments. Killings in Honduras jumped from four in 2018 to 14 in 2019, giving it the highest per capita rate of any country analyzed by Global Witness. In the Philippines, 2019’s toll brings the total since Rodrigo Duterte took office in mid-2016 to 119 — almost double the figure for the comparable period before his election.

A number of killings in the Philippines have come directly at the hands of government forces or groups loyal to it, including that of a leader of the Manobo Indigenous group, who reportedly died during an aerial bombardment by the Filipino military last year. The Manobo have long been engaged in a campaign to prevent encroachment into the Pantaron mountain range by loggers and mining companies.

The Armed Forces of the Philippines later posted a photograph of his body online, saying he was killed during a clash with local communist militants. According to Global Witness, this follows a pattern of activists and environmental defenders being “red-tagged,” or accused of holding communist sympathies and providing support for rebel groups.

“In the Philippines, state forces are implicated in quite a number of cases,” Madden said.

*Environmentalists killed by year, 2004-2019, according to Global Witness*

Overall, data shared with Mongabay by Global Witness show that the majority of killings globally are carried out by unknown assailants, accounting for 65 of the deaths. Forty were traced to hit men, 22 to paramilitary forces, and 17 to armed forces or police. Others were connected to landowners, criminal gangs, and private security guards.

In recent years, agribusiness has been linked to a rising number of retaliatory murders of land rights activists. In 2019, 34 such killings were recorded, an increase of more than 60% from the previous year. As global consumption rises, Madden says that violent conflict over land that can be used to produce palm oil, soy, cattle, and other commodities is likely to spike as well.

“At the global level, with increased consumption, we are seeing that these industries do have to keep expanding into ever more remote or different areas,” he said. “That’s what we’re seeing at the Amazon at the moment with agribusiness and logging ramping up again, and it’s playing out in various places across the world.”

*Illegal sand and gold mining in Indonesia. The mining sector is a major source of violence against environmental defenders. Image by Rhett A. Butler.*

Madden adds that as troubling as the numbers are, they are also likely to be significantly underestimated. The methodology Global Witness uses to verify killings of environmental and land defenders is strict, drawing on media reports as well as those from the group’s local partners. In some parts of Africa, for example, retaliation against local and Indigenous activists can be hard to track.

Tabitha Netuwa of DefendDefenders, a Uganda-based human rights organization that provides support to activists in East Africa, agrees that the true figure is almost certainly higher.

“It is an underestimate – the shrinking civic space for [human rights defenders] to operate is making reporting about human rights violations a challenge. In addition, many of these violations happen in areas far removed from the capitals where accessibility is a challenge and many [human rights defenders] working in those remote areas face reprisals for speaking out,” she told Mongabay in an email.

Four activists from sub-Saharan Africa were represented in the total, with one each from Kenya and Ghana along with two from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, including Joël Imbangola Lunea, who was allegedly murdered by a security guard working for the Canadian palm oil company Feronia Inc.

According to Madden, while some governments, corporations and financial institutions have taken steps to protect local activists, more needs to be done.

“I think that governments in particular in the EU, U.S., and global north have a particular role to play in strengthening requirements around what companies need to do in these situations,” he said. “So making sure they have to do full due diligence of the human rights impacts throughout their whole supply chain.”

Note: This story has been amended to include a quote from Tabitha Netuwa of DefendDefenders.

CITATION: Global Witness. Defending Tomorrow: The climate crisis and threats against land and environmental defenders. July 2020.

How Language Digital Activism Can Play a Role in the International Decade of Indigenous Languages

August 3, 2020 / activist360 / Leave a comment

Global Voices, through its Rising Voices initiative, with the support of the Canadian Embassy in Mexico, presents a series of online conversations focusing on how indigenous communities in Mexico and Canada have been adopting technology and the internet as tools to promote and revitalize their native languages benefitting and impacting a new generation of potential speakers. These conversations will be an opportunity to engage with key language activists and advocates from Mexican indigenous and Canadian First Nations communities who have been utilizing the internet, digital media, and technology to promote and revitalize their languages. The conversations will also highlight the possibilities for cross-regional learning and exchange.

At the recent UNESCO meeting in Mexico City to kick off planning for the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, one of the working groups focused on the role of digital technologies and indigenous media in the campaign. This theme was also echoed throughout the proceedings in discussions about the importance of reaching and involving young people, a key ingredient in language vitality.

Language digital activism has been playing an increasingly important role in the overall strategy of language revitalization. Young people have been employing digital tools and taking do-it-yourself approaches to creating content in their languages and outreach to others. Resources such as digital language activism toolkit in development is one such approach to building capacity for young leaders to play a central role during this next decade.

With approximately 18 months to go before the start of the International Decade and the continued focus on the potential of digital technologies and the internet, what are the strategies needed to take things to the next level? How can language advocates partner successfully with policymakers to make a meaningful impact?