Community Conservation

Afghanistan – Community Conservation in the Wakhan
Conservation is as much a social and economic issue as a scientific one. Unless the culture, insights, livelihoods, participation, and aspirations of the local peoples are known and considered, any long-term conservation activities are likely to fail. Because of this it is vital to build broad-based constituencies for conservation and foster diverse actor participation in threats abatement to ensure effective conservation. 

Although protected areas are a crucial part of any country’s biodiversity conservation efforts, rarely are protected areas enough to conserve many important elements of biodiversity and ecosystem function. In Afghanistan, conflict has severely hampered development of a protected area system and left the government with little in the way of resources or training to properly manage any system they put in place. At the same time, in regions such as the Wakhan corridor, patchy resources and seasonal shifts in resource availability result in many species of wildlife having migratory patterns covering areas much larger than the size of any realistic protected area. Therefore, community based conservation will be critical to maintaining wildlife populations and ensuring sustainable use of environmental resources.

The Human Aspect
Two peoples occupy the Afghan Pamirs, both of whom also have populations in bordering countries. Wakhi inhabit the western Pamirs and extend down the Wakhan Corridor. They are mostly Ismaili Muslims, followers of the Aga Khan, and their origins lie westward toward Iran. Although basically agriculturalists, growing wheat, potatoes, and other crops, they also have livestock, most of which they graze during summer (and now often all winter) in the Pamirs. The Kirghiz, who are Sunni Muslims, are primarily livestock herders, keeping sheep, goats, yaks, horses, and a few Bactrian camels and donkeys. They shift these seasonally two or three times a year between summer and winter pastures. Such movements are short, often no more than 10-20 km. During summer they live in round, felt yurts and in winter mostly in stone and mud-brick huts.  Estimates put the total Kirghiz population at a somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 people. The Wakhi population in the Wakhan Corridor is said to be about 1,300 households with a little over 10,000 people.

Threats
Environmental degradation in the Pamirs will have more than just an effect on wildlife and soils. A vast majority of the people in this region depend directly on environmental benefits from local ecosystem processes for their very survival. Some communities are altitudinal migrants and agro-pastoralists, taking livestock up into high pastures in the spring and moving back down to lower elevation villages before the snows of winter. In some locations they grow crops on tiny farm plots hewn from the sides of mountains and terraced with rock walls. This local food production is critical, as the mountains make transport of products expensive or, when rains or frequent earthquakes block the few roads with landslides, impossible. Therefore, ensuring that local communities have the tools to successfully manage their resources is critical to the long-term survival of Wakhan communities and the sustainability of the entire Pamir environment.

WCS Activities
It is critical to identify local communities and understand their structure, political units, needs, wants, and insights, and to gain their complete cooperation in any conservation initiatives. Because of this, a socioeconomic survey will be performed to determine these and other aspects of civil society in the Wakhan region and to inform future conservation initiatives. Surveys will also include questions related to specific management issues such as attitudes and perceptions toward wildlife, hunting practices, and other relevant issues.

Community level conservation education, using local people properly trained to give simple presentations specifically designed to address local concerns and issues, is a simple and direct way to successfully encourage dialogue on environmental issues of local concern and to reach out to communities with ways they can implement sustainable management initiatives. Goals of this project component are to educate villagers about biological and conservation principles regarding available resources, unsustainable activities, and alternative activities or management techniques that may be sustainable; to educate villagers that loss of wildlife and rangelands threatens their ecosystem, culture, and future economy; and to present information on methods or techniques that will enable them to regulate or alleviate unsustainable grazing and hunting activities.

Education can and should be a two-way street – there is often as much to learn from local stakeholders as there is to learn from education ‘experts.’ Therefore, this conservation education program will be designed to have two results: to further develop and focus community interest in resources and sustainable resource use through targeted messages related to specific issues of importance to the Pamirs; and to collect information from local stakeholders that can be used to develop sensible resource management plans for each region based on traditional resource knowledge, uses, and rights.

A third community conservation component is to create community resource committees throughout the Wakhan Corridor region. The creation of resource committees will enable communities to achieve consensus on changes in resource use and sustainable management options. The project will also work with communities to develop bylaws for resource committees and wildlife rangers. Bylaws will create an enabling environment for training and government collaboration. Once committees are set up, the project will work with committees to arrange and facilitate agreements between government officials and resource committees to enable government agencies to provide assistance on many levels, including training. Finally, the project will assist in the creation of collaborative resource management plans. Management plans will enable communities to identify, develop and enact long-term goals for the sustainable use of rangelands, wildlife, and other resources of importance to their long-term survival.

Finally, as part of the process of developing community based resource management, individuals will be identified and trained to become ‘volunteer’ wildlife rangers. It is expected that eventually two people from each of 25 communities will participate in this program. Training would involve accurate identification of wildlife species and sign, proper survey methodology, note taking, and data recording. At selected times, these wildlife rangers will go into the field and survey wildlife species, focusing on species of concern such as Marco Polo sheep but also collecting ancillary data on any other wildlife seen during the surveys. These data will then be sent to a central project database to be entered and used to assess wildlife patterns and trends and develop recommendations for local and government-led management initiatives.

Next Steps

• Perform a socioeconomic survey of Wakhan communities.  
• Develop a community conservation education program that will lead to the creation of community conservation committees for resource management and the identification, training, and hiring of community wildlife rangers. 
• Combine assessments of rangelands, pastoralist land use and movement, Marco Polo sheep migratory patterns, and areas identified as critical to wildlife to develop a landscape management plan for the Wakhan region.