For some reason or another, we use the word “conservation” when describing the management of natural resources. One definition describes conservation as “the action of conserving something, in particular: preservation, protection, or restoration of the natural environment and of wildlife”.
This definition is symptomatic of many of the problems that beset the field of “conservation”. Words such as preservation and protection are the words that guide many conservation practitioners.
Consequently, for many people conservation is something they perceive to be the responsibility of others and only happens inside national parks. For this reason most humans have become entirely divorced from the natural world, and we are currently living through the most extreme period of extinction our planet has ever witnessed.
Increasingly science suggests that maintaining biodiversity, life in all its forms, will be critical to sustaining human life. The famous biologist EO Wilson, the so-called “father of biodiversity”, argued that “only by committing half of the planet’s surface to nature can we hope to save the immensity of life forms that compose it. Unless humanity learns a great deal more about global biodiversity and moves quickly to protect it, we will soon lose most of the species composing life on Earth”.
Currently only around 15 per cent of the earth’s surface is formally protected. Increasing this percentage more than threefold through the creation of more national parks to protect biodiversity is not a realistic possibility, and we are going to have to find other ways to safeguard the natural world as we continue to attend to the needs of humans.
There are many who now believe that “conservation”, if that is what we must continue to call it, must now urgently transform itself into an economically and financially viable business, where we can start to talk openly about commercial opportunity, profit and return on investment.
It is faintly ridiculous that much of Africa, and Kenya in particular, has to continue to rely on inefficiently applied philanthropic largesse from the global north when it sits upon natural assets that if managed correctly could become an economic pillar for the development of the continent.
So how might this transformation begin to happen? Let’s start with carbon, the next massive global business. According to Larry Fink, chairman of the investment management corporation Blackrock, “the next 1,000 unicorns won’t be search engines or social media companies, they’ll be sustainable, scalable innovators - start-ups that help the world decarbonize…”.
Wilderness and biodiversity rich areas will be well placed to capitalise on evolving carbon markets by registering themselves as places to retain and sequester excess atmospheric carbon, earning themselves “carbon credits” in the process.
Thus, concerted action to protect and expand highly threatened forest areas in Kenya, such as the Mau Forest in the west of the country, could earn the national exchequer and local communities huge amounts of money from the sales of the credits they have earned, at the same time as preserving biodiversity and ecosystem services, including the provision of water to millions of people.
Similarly, the recovery of the highly degraded rangelands of northern Kenya would provide immense benefit to people, livestock and wildlife alike, as well as resulting in dramatically increased levels of soil carbon to earn carbon credits.
The opportunity for Kenya in this space is massive and appears to come with very little downside aside from a degree of complexity that can sometimes be challenging to overcome but will likely become simpler over time.
Already there have been some notable new “carbon start-ups” in the country and, whilst we must watch these carefully to ensure they remain credible and properly monitored, they show what might be possible.
So, at a global level it is almost inevitable that carbon will become the new “big thing”, and the capital markets all over the world are already starting to jump all over it. But from a biodiversity and ecological perspective, we must not stop there.
The conservation “industry” remains deeply inefficient in so many ways, and there exist many more opportunities to remodel the sector to give it a better chance of being successful at the scale that is going to be required.
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