Indigenous Community – Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

The future of UK-Canada research collaborations in the Arctic

Posted on April 12, 2019April 5, 2023 by janet.crompton

The Arctic is one of the most rapidly changing environments on Earth, with dramatic warming of the atmosphere and the oceans, accelerating glaciers, melting permafrost and shrinking sea ice.

All of these changes have major consequences for the indigenous groups of the Arctic countries: changing ocean ecosystems will impact fisheries and other natural resources, collapsing permafrost damages their homes and infrastructure, and disappearing sea ice effects their trade routes. All with implications for employment, education, and health.

Whilst these headlines reach the UK press, the immediate consequences can seem far away from our shores. However, a changing Arctic has a world-wide reach, contributing towards global sea-level and biodiversity changes, and putting pressure on shipping, natural resources, and international relations.

There have been recent large-scale efforts within the UK research community to increase our understanding of the high-latitudes. The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) launched the multi-million pound Changing Arctic Ocean program in 2017, initially comprising four projects investigating oceanic processes linked with the shifting sea ice dynamics, largely in the Barents Sea and Fram Straight regions near Iceland and Norway. Whilst these projects have already been successful in producing critical new data, and have developed to include a number of new projects, the focus is still firmly within the natural sciences. There is a clear need to include other disciplines, especially social sciences, and to expand to other geographical regions.

Earlier this week, I had an opportunity to attend a joint meeting between NERC and Polar Knowledge, Canada, as part of the 2018 ArcticNet meeting in Ottawa. The meeting brought together researchers and funding organisations from the UK and Canada, together with representatives of indigenous groups and northern communities. By getting these groups of people around a table together in one place, the aim was to go some way to creating a new strong international Arctic research partnership, to understand the interests and strengths in Arctic research in the two countries, make personal links and identify the next steps for all stakeholders.

For me, the meeting was worthwhile alone for the connections that I made, but also for the steep learning-curve in my understanding of Canadian research priorities: linking with people in Northern communities, building on infrastructure, engaging with communities, and blending with Indigenous Knowledge. I was particularly impressed with the true public engagement that is carried out, in their Northern approach to science, through public consultations, gap analysis, and identification of key principles in research and research ethics.

Now it’s a matter of developing the ideas that were discussed enthusiastically in the room, to build research plans with direct societal impact, true stakeholder engagement, and opportunities for early career researchers. It’s an exciting – and timely – moment to be in Arctic research.

This blog is written by Dr Kate Hendry from the University of Bristol School of Earth Sciences and the Cabot Institute for the Environment.

The Sarstoon-Temash National Park, Belize: forest communities and conservation

Posted on January 11, 2017April 5, 2023 by janet.crompton

This is the second blog post from former Environmental Policy MSc student Rachel Simon. During her time at the University Rachel was a member of the Fossil Free Bristol University group. Following the completion of her MSc in 2016 Rachel spent time with an indigenous conservation organisation in Belize, recording voices of land rights activists for the Latin American Bureau’s [http://lab.org.uk/] forthcoming book, Voices of Latin America.

The previous blog post in this series is available here.

Back in the SATIIM office in Punta Gorda, I’m invited on a patrol into the Sarstoon Temash National Park led by Maya and Garifuna community members. These monthly forest patrols are an important way of monitoring illegal logging and poaching. They also gather data on the forest’s rich ecosystems, which spread across over 40,000 acres of broadleaf, wetland and mangrove forest, and ten miles of coast in the Gulf of Honduras, a wetlands designated of international importance under the Ramsar Convention.

SATIIM and the Belize Government used to manage the area under a co-management agreement. But when SATIIM took a stance against oil drilling in the park the government terminated their funding and their partnership (see my previous blog post ‘Whose land, whose development?’ http://cabot-institute.blogspot.com.co/2017/01/the-sarstoon-temash-national-park.html)

However SATIIM continues to patrol and monitor the park, providing reports to the government and new funders such as Global Forest Watch [http://www.globalforestwatch.org/] an initiative of the World Resources Institute which works to collect and disseminate data about deforestation.

Map of the Sarstoon-Temash National Park and drill site by Amandala Newspaper

So early one morning seven men from the surrounding villages and I set off from the coastal town of Punta Gorda in a speed boat loaded up with three days’ camping equipment and supplies. We pull south round the coast on the glinting waters of the Bay of Honduras, speed past the Garifuna village of Barranco, before pulling into the darker stiller mouth of the Sarstoon River, the border with Guatemala. Tensions between the two countries over the boundary have been high over the years, and Guatemala has been uncooperative over conservation efforts – some SATIIM patrols have even been intercepted and detained by the Guatemalan military. A newish Belize Defence Force (BDF) outpost marks the Belizean side of the Sarstoon, and this has helped to discourage poachers and loggers crossing the river from Guatemala, as well as maintaining Belize’s claim over the area. We pull into the BDF check-point to report our trip. The commander informs us shortly that he can’t do anything to protect us if we stray from the Belizean to the Guatemalan side of the river. With that we start the patrol.

Marking sites of deforestation

Cruising the banks of the Sarstoon we count numerous lines and trails cut through the mangroves and forest cover, signs that poachers have come in to hunt, fish, and log hardwoods and comfre palms.

Illegal logging of Santa Teresa and Sapodilla hardwoods

On this patrol SATIIM are piloting a new tablet and app provided by Global Forest Watch to help them track deforestation more easily. The app is pre-loaded with maps highlighting “threats”: patches of fragmentation or breaks in forest cover identified from satellite imagery using algorithms. The patrol is then able to navigate to these areas using GPS in order to investigate. However on reaching our first “threat”, somewhere inland alongside the bank of the Sarstoon, it’s a pleasant surprise to find undisturbed mangroves and thick forest cover. It seems that the app’s algorithms need a little tweaking, and may be mis-coding some changes in vegetation or colouration as deforestation.

Unfortunately most “threats” are simply too far away to investigate, as trekking through the forest cover is slow and heavy work, and back in the office SATIIM’s Director muses that it might be better to pilot a drone which could zoom over the wetlands and photograph the areas we can’t reach.

On the second day we dock on the bank of the Temash River, in order to survey US Capital Energy’s main drill site, a couple of acres of dust and sand amid the vibrant forest cover. Martin Cus, the leader of the patrol tells me that the numbers of illegal incidents in the forest have increased dramatically after the government granted the company oil exploration contracts. Our 300m crawl from the river bank through mangrove, dense forest swamp and wetland takes 20 minutes – but the major road on the opposite side of the drill site, snaking north out through the forest, means there is now a much easier journey into its heart. Along with the company’s seismic testing lines, this has opened up the forest to more extractive activities, intensifying fragmentation of the forest cover and endangering its ecosystems. The company also ignored warnings about the drill site’s position in a low-lying and swampy area. Containing spills in this wetland would be near impossible, with run-off quickly contaminating the surrounding swamp, mangroves, and rivers out into the Bay of Honduras – as well as impacting the villages upstream which use the rivers as water sources.

US Capital Energy’s drill site, and road through the forest

Aside from monitoring threats to the forest, we spend a good deal of time using GPS coordinates to note down bird and animal sightings. The boat’s captain Roberto seems to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of bird species, but SATIIM is looking for scientists and data gatherers to carry out a more comprehensive review of the park, to help them evidence the value of its eco-systems.

Forest dependent communities

A week later, staying in the Mayan village of Crique Sarco, I’m able to learn more about the communities’ dependency on the forest. Many Maya subsist on milpa farming, a form of slash and burn agriculture. The forest is where they get most of their protein, hunting gibnut and other creatures for much of the year, while respecting the animals’ gestation periods. Communities have used the forest sustainably in this area for almost 150 years. Juan Choc, Village Council Leader, explains that the area around US Capital’s drill site used to be rich with animal life, but the company’s construction and working noise drove them away.

Juan Choc, Crique Sarco

Making the land more resistant to encroachment and the forest less vulnerable to resource extraction is now a vital project for the survival of these communities’ livelihoods. Juan Choc explains their communal land ownership model which prevents land from being gradually sold off and becoming fragmented, and that the village is now georeferencing their boundary in order to get more solid legal recognition. Land demarcation will offer better protection from outside corporate interests, empower the community, and safeguard the land for the younger generation.

The Sarstoon-Temash National Park, Belize: Whose land, whose development?

Posted on January 4, 2017April 5, 2023 by janet.crompton

View of the Temash River, Toledo, Belize

This October I spent time with the Sarstoon-Temash Institute for Indigenous Management (SATIIM), an NGO which integrates forest conservation with indigenous community development, the only one of its kind in Belize.

The organisation is located in Belize’s southernmost district of Toledo, reachable by a bumpy six hour bus ride from the country’s northern hub, Belize City. Government roadside adverts dot the route advising youngsters to ‘Stay Out of Crime’, and Belizeans to ‘Protect the Cayes and the Mangroves: your social security benefits’. Belize City is beset by gang violence, but high-end eco-tourism is booming in the north around the country’s cayes, beaches, and pristine conservation areas. Over 26% of Belize’s land and territorial waters have been designated as protected areas which play a crucial part in tourism, a major contributor to the economy as its second largest industry, and fuelling growth in many other sectors. The ads tail off by the time we reach Toledo, a safer but poorer district. From here to the River Sarstoon, the border with Guatemala, lie dense wetlands, forest and mangroves, and some of the country’s poorest communities, including many Q’eqchi Maya and Garifuna indigenous peoples.

Over four weeks I spent time here in SATIIM’s office, in the villages they work with, and in the forest, learning about their work and recording the voices of community members. On a visit to the sleepy Q’eqchi Mayan village of Crique Sarco Andres Bo, an active member of SATIIM, explained how the organisation began. Belize has been praised for its pioneering approach to conservation, using a series of legislative acts for protecting areas since gaining independence in 1981. But when it ringfenced a wetlands and forest area in order to create the Sarstoon-Temash National Park in 1994, the government ignored the collective land tenure of many Maya and Garifuna communities in the area, neglecting to consult or even inform them. Villages are largely forest dependent, employing milpa farming, a form of slash and burn subsistence agriculture – but using forest resources such as materials for house building, farming, hunting and fishing on part of their ancestral lands was now outlawed. “We can’t do hunting, we can’t do fishing, we can’t take out logs in there, we can’t have plantations there. But that is land we used, part of Crique Sarco….the vines and sticks which we used to build houses and posts are in those areas,” Andres explained.

Community conservation

In order to try to maintain influence in the area, and recognising that conserving the forest would have a beneficial impact on the surrounding areas’ ecosystems and resources, six villages came together to form SATIIM. The organisation then formed a successful partnership with the Belize Government to monitor the park under a co-management agreement using community led patrols. The community led element is key: SATIIM’s aims are to integrate environmental protection, human rights and development, and their work challenges any notion of conservation which promote reforestation at the expense of or exclusive from the forest communities whose livelihoods depend on it. “If you want to have effective development and effective conservation, the communities must be involved in the development of any plan that affects their livelihood,” explains SATIIM’s Director Froyla Tzalam.

Froyla and the SATIIM office team

Oil and development?

However in radical opposition to the NGO’s approach and in contradiction to the park’s protected status, the government decided to relax its ban on extractive activities and grant oil exploration permits to Texas-based corporation US Capital Energy, who began to cut paths and build exploratory oil drills, wreaking havoc on the forest’s ecosystems. They constructed a major drill site in a low-lying and extremely wet area, where any spills would quickly impact surrounding wildlife and waterways. I learnt more about the site on joining a community forest patrol in the following weeks, which is described in the second-part of this blog series.

The incident brought to the fore tensions between national development, local community interests, and land tenure rights. While environmental protection strategies have been used to bolster the success of the tourism industry and economic development in other areas of Belize, the government had clearly decided to pursue a different strategy in the impoverished and underinvested Toledo District, with Prime Minister Dean Barrow stating that US Capital be allowed to “Drill at Will” in the STNP.

“Are you telling us that we may spend decades protecting an area which over night can be turned into an extractive zone?” Froyla Tzalam

Concerned about the environmental impacts and effect on the villages’ livelihoods, SATIIM decided to fight back. In 2006 they filed a case against the government at the Supreme Court on the basis of its own environmental policy, as no environmental impact assessment has been conducted prior to the explorations. The court ruled against the government, triggering a string of cases in which the communities built the case for their land rights. Rulings from the Supreme Court and the Caribbean Court of Justice have subsequently stated that the government and US Capital Energy acted without the ‘Free, Prior, Informed Consent’ (FPI) of the Mayan and Garifuna communities, a principle defined by the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and recognised in international law. FPI recognises indigenous people and forest communities’ rights to consent to projects in lands that they customarily own, occupy or use. Court cases up to 2016 have reaffirmed tenure rights of the Maya and Garifuna communities in southern Belize, that their traditional land rights constitute property equal in legitimacy to any other form of property under Belizean law. In addition the Supreme Court has ordered the government to conduct work on the communities’ land boundaries and is ‘supervising’ its implementation.

Choosing development

The arrival of the oil company brought villages into conflict. Some labelled SATIIM as ‘anti-development’ for challenging US Capital. But Juan Choc, Village Leader of Crique Sarco tells me that since promises of job offers with US Capital haven’t materialised, more and more villagers are coming to realise that oil extraction may not be the type of development they need. The few short term jobs that appeared during oil exploration offered poor working conditions and were poorly paid. Better paid roles were reserved for staff with special skills brought in from Mexico. Orange and green paint, US Capital colours, coats the village schools around the exploration site. However the schools remain government funded, and the paint jobs seem little more than a branding exercise. Tangible benefits from the oil company have been few and far between.

Crique Sarco Village School

Community land tenure

SATIIM will now be working on georeferencing their ancestral land boundaries in order to get more solid legal recognition, and focusing on land rights awareness and environmental education. For the moment the low global oil price has meant that the impetus from US Capital has been lost and the drill site sits empty. But as the government has extended their permits to Feb 2017 in spite of court rulings, further drilling remains a possibility. Even once their land is demarcated communities will still have to decide whether they are for oil extraction or against it. SATIIM has been working on a program of environmental education so that communities are able to make more informed decisions about the benefits and risks involved. For Froyla the communities are now more informed, empowered and more ready to fight for what happens in their land: “It is clear when I attend the community meetings now that the villagers have a different vision of development for themselves. So that’s what gives me hope”.

Rachel Simon is a former part-time Environmental Policy MSc student, graduating in 2016. During her time at university Rachel was part of the Fossil Free Bristol University group. Following the completion of her MSc Rachel spent time with an indigenous conservation organisation in Belize, recording voices of land rights activists for the Latin American Bureau’s [http://lab.org.uk/] forthcoming book, Voices of Latin America.

The second blog in this series is available here.

Guest blog: Let’s reach the Size of England

Posted on October 22, 2014April 14, 2023 by janet.crompton

The Size of England is an amazing new charity working to raise £13 million to safeguard 13 million hectares of rainforest, which is the size of England, and coincidentally the area of rainforest that is cut down every year globally.

To us, safeguarding is not about owning land – it’s about encouraging those who need the land to use it sustainably and to empower local people and indigenous communities. It’s about establishing local rights to the land and providing alternatives for fuel and initiating tree planting programs to restore habitats.

We know that Size of England can be successful. Last year, the Size of Wales team reached their target of raising £2 million to safeguard 2 million hectares of rainforest. But as you know, we want to raise the game. However in order to do this we need help.

At the moment we are raising money for a start-up fund via a crowdfunding webpage. This is so we can register as a charity and start doing amazing things for the rainforest and the local community. We already have support from brilliant organisations such as Cool Earth, the Prince’s Rainforest Project, WWF and the Crees Foundation, but we can never have enough! We hope, through communication that we can raise the sum whilst also spreading the word of what we want to do, and getting people to ‘like’, ‘follow’ and ‘friend’ the project as it develops.

There are currently three of us, all volunteers with big ideas and ambitions. What we’re asking is can you help the Size of England campaign in other ways? Are you a great fundraiser? Could you improve our website? Have you got legal experience? We’d love to crowd-source skills as well as cash.

Check out our Facebook and Twitter pages. Also take a look at our crowdfunding site if you fancy and pass it on to anyone else who may find it interesting!

Feel free to message me if you have any questions or email me at olivia@sizeofengland.org.uk

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This guest blog is written by Olivia Reddy of Size of England.

Olivia Reddy

Jared Diamond: The World Until Yesterday – What can we learn from traditional societies?

Posted on September 30, 2013April 20, 2023 by janet.crompton

On 27 September, Pulitzer Prize-winning polymath, author Jared Diamond, gave the first talk in the Bristol Festival of Ideas series, in conjunction with the Cabot Institute, to promote the paperback release of his new book “The world until yesterday”. The book surveys 39 traditional societies and their attitudes to universal problems such as bringing up children, treatment of the elderly and attitude to risk. The aim of the book is neither to idealise nor disparage these traditional societies, but to investigate what lessons can be learned from unindustrialised peoples.

Constructive paranoia

One such tribe was the Dani whom Diamond lived with while studying local ornithology in Papua New Guinea. He opened his talk with a tale of the fear and trepidation that the New Guinean tribe showed when he suggested making camp under a dead tree in the jungle. Their “constructive paranoia” – while completely at odds with Diamond’s own Western attitude – was essential to their survival in an ecosystem rife with environmental dangers. Diamond mused that not only were accidents caused by the physical environment less frequent in Western society, but the consequences were less likely to be fatal or permanently disabling, due to our healthcare system. This alters our perception of the risks associated with hazardous behaviour.

Perception of risk

We worry too much about dangers that do not kill many people – like terrorism, nuclear accidents, plane crashes and DNA based technologies – but are comparatively blasé about the risks of alcohol, smoking and cars. Westerners tend to overestimate the risk of things beyond our control; things that are unfamiliar; that kill many people at once or in a spectacular way, while we underestimate risks that we encounter every day but assume “It will never happen to me”. This can be demonstrated by comparing personal ratings of danger with the number of actual deaths, but this does not take into account changes in personal behaviour to protect against significant risks. Diamond recounted another tale of a tribe living in close proximity to a pride of lions. Though the risk of being killed by a lion was very real, few tribes people were actually killed due to the various precautions taken such as travelling in groups and making a lot of noise so as not to startle the lions.

Conflict management

Jared also briefly covered further topics from the book, such as our treatment of the elderly, whose collective wisdom and knowledge is now usurped by the rise of the world wide web. He also examines differing strategies for dealing with conflict. While in the West we concentrate on perceived wrongs, and who is “in the right”, more traditional societies contend with disputes with those who they will continue to live with and trade with for the rest of their lives. Their model for conflict-management more closely resembles the idea of ‘restorative justice’, where victims and perpetrators meet to discuss the incident. The emphasis is on restoring a working relationship rather than assigning blame or retribution.

“The world until yesterday” goes on general sale by Penguin Books in paperback on 29 October 2013.

This blog has been written by Boo Lewis, Biological Sciences, University of Bristol.

Boo Lewis, Cabot Institute blogger

Watch the Jared Diamond event again online.