Transcript of Web Audio Chat Featuring Andrés Ferrer
Director, The Nature Conservancy in the Dominican Republic
Nature Conservancy web chat with Andrés Ferrer, Director of the Conservancy’s Dominican Republic program, discusses whether poverty is relevant to conservation.
Moderated by Jim Peterson, the Conservancy’s Communications Officer, moderates.
(Edited for clarity and brevity.)
Listen as Andrés Ferrer, Country Director for The Nature Conservancy in the Dominican Republic, discusses how he's been leading efforts in his country to bridge the divide between poverty alleviation and environmental protection.
Jim Peterson: Hello, and welcome to the latest in a series of Nature Conservancy web chats where important and timely conservation topics are discussed based on questions submitted by chat participants. At the heart of our conversation today is whether poverty is relevant to conservation?
Our guest today is Andrés Ferrer. Andrés is the Director of the Conservancy’s Dominican Republic program. To begin, Andrés, why don’t you tell us a bit about the Dominican Republic, where it is, and why the Conservancy is working there.
Andrés Ferrer: The DR shares the island of Hispaniola, which is located in the center of the Caribbean, with the Republic of Haiti. It’s an island on some 72 square thousand kilometers, two-thirds occupied by the DR, and one-third occupied by Haiti. The reason why we operate here is the rich biodiversity that occurs in Hispaniola.
We base our work in four major strategies: accounting for environmental assets; strengthening of local partners; promotion of conservation policy; and biodiversity conservation through poverty alleviation.
We have the White Water to Blue Water project in the Samaná Bay area where we are measuring the impact of the inflows of the river into that estuary, which is an important source of shrimp fishing. We have been working in developing conservation plans for Madre de las Aguas, the central mountain range of the Dominican Republic that provides water for like 80 percent of the population in the DR, and like 70 percent of the population in Haiti supporting rice production in that neighboring country, which is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.
Most recently, we completed an “eco-regional assessment” for Hispaniola, which, in my opinion, is one of the most advanced planning methodologies implemented on Hispaniola.
We work out of three major platform sites: Samaná Bay and its network of nine protected areas, Mother of the Waters and its network of seven protected areas, and Parque del Este. From these three sites, we radiate lessons learned, best practices, and conservation in each of these throughout the national system of protected areas.
Jim Peterson: I want to get to a couple of the questions now that have come in from some of our listeners at nature.org/chat.
Rafael in Indonesia: In Komodo National Park in Indonesia there is a significant problem with poverty which is encouraging fishermen to rely on unsustainable practices, such as over-fishing and bomb and cyanide fishing. And he wonders what sort of steps can we take to resolve the conflict to make certain that poverty will not function as a reason to forego conservation?
Andrés Ferrer: The most important thing we have found when deal with poverty issues and your end goal is protect biodiversity is to develop relations of trust with local communities. You have to understand how they perceive the surrounding environment. You must realize that local communities have related to the environment for centuries, sometimes for millennia, and have developed certain practices for their subsistence.
In those practices, in my opinion, lays the solution to many of the pressures that the people themselves place on the environment. Some of those practices, after being characterized and studied, can be a streamlined and converted into conservation tools that, at the same time, result in an increased income for local communities.
For example, we supported a project in Samaná Bay, which is a national sanctuary for a population of 2,000 humpback whales, where we had an over-fishing problem. We helped support fishermen to become whale watching guides for the ever-increasing number of tourists that came to watch the whales, because the fishermen lacked techniques, they lacked training, and they lacked knowledge of the whale populations.
Today, many of those former fisherman are not pressing the marine resources in the bay. They have become guides for whale watching, and we have provided support for a partner that works to convert these fishermen into that eco-tourist practice. So I think the solution is to support poor communities.
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