Monitoring & Assessment of Biodiversity at the Smithsonianby Howard Youth
A river runs through it. And once, so did much enmity and a fair bit of blood. For more than 150 years, South American neighbors Ecuador and Peru quarreled and battled over 48 miles of rain forest and river cloaking an ambiguous border between the two countries, in a remote region called the Cordillera del Condor. Military conflicts over the land erupted in 1941, 1981, and again in 1995. Finally, in 1998, the two nations signed a peace treaty and established a definitive political border. Boundary markers now dot Cordillera del Condor's soggy rainforest soil, and many land mines have been removed. Today the hope is that instead of dividing the countries, this lush border area will become a collaborative peace park, a shared protected area.
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| The Cordillera del Condor region on the border of Peru and Ecuador. (Robin Foster/The Field Museum) |
As illustrated by Ecuador and Peru, lines that divide can also bring neighbors together. For this reason, peace-nurturing border parks are now a hot topic worldwide. "Border parks offer opportunities for cooperation between countries that often have few lines of communication due to past or present conflicts," says Charles Besançon, a conservation planning consultant working with the World Conservation Union and World Commission on Protected Areas' Transboundary Protected Areas Taskforce.
Conservationists like Besançon see more than fence-mending opportunities at country boundaries—they also see some of the best remaining chances to save wildlife and wild places. "Conservation seems to be a relatively easy subject for discussion among nations and can be a catalyst to further cooperation in other realms," he says.
But while it's easy to paint a blocky green border park on a map, it's something quite different to secure one on the ground, especially in remote border areas that often shelter poachers, drug runners, bandits, refugees of war and those who prey upon them, and slash-and-burn settlers trying to make a living.
Besançon has catalogued 188 border parks dotting the world map. "They run the whole gamut of examples, from parks set up to increase tourism to those promoting peace and cooperation to those targeting biodiversity conservation," he says. "Many of these internationally adjoining protected areas are in developing nations with barely enough money to support their own parks, let alone deal with the negotiations, security issues, and activity at many different levels of government [that are necessary for peace parks]. Few exist that can truly be called 'peace parks' where peace and cooperation are explicit objectives," says Besançon.
First and Future Peace Parks
The peace park concept blossomed in 1932 along the 5,000-mile
border between the United States and Canada. There,
between Montana and Alberta, two national parks joined:
Montana's Glacier National Park and Alberta's Waterton
Lakes National Park melded into Waterton-Glacier International
Peace Park. Peace park organizers, including Rotary
International, wanted the park to celebrate close friendship
between the two countries and provide an example of
cooperation that could serve as a model elsewhere in
the world. While Glacier's one million acres are managed
by the U.S. National Park Service and Waterton's 130,000
acres by Parks Canada, the two agencies cooperate in
various ways to maintain an expansive, mountainous ecosystem.
Park staff often hike visitors to the border, where
American visitors sit on the Canadian side and Canadian
visitors on the U.S. side. The park superintendents
make a tradition of hiking together each year.
Ecuador and Peru hope to share a similar friendship some day, while protecting borderland wildlife and spurring sustainable development in the Cordillera del Condor. Allies and international organizations including the World Bank, Conservation International, Ecuador's Fundación Natura, and the International Tropical Timber Organization are helping with the peace park plans. Several parks already join at the border, but more are in the works. "In the case of the part developed in Peru, a proposal has been made for the creation of a national park embracing a large part of the frontier region. This area is approximately 370,500 acres in extent," says Martín Alcalde, Conservation International's director for the Condor region. "The proposal is well advanced and it's hoped that in the coming months the Peruvian [government] will officially declare this park."
Recent surveys found the Cordillera del Condor chock full of biodiversity. Some animals occur nowhere else, among them a localized subspecies of the long-haired spider monkey (Ateles belzebuth belzebuth). Despite the surveys, the area remains poorly studied, so it's hard to know how many endemic species truly live there. Scientists have only scratched the surface, a fact hinted at by this summary, which appeared in the 1998 book Endemic Bird Areas of the World: Priorities for Biodiversity Conservation: "This area of southernmost Ecuador and northern Peru has only recently been explored; thus, five of the six endemics [endemic bird species] have been discovered since 1975, and [the other] was first found in 1963."
Large mammals such as mountain tapirs (Tapirus pinchaque), jaguars (Panthera onca), and manatees (Trichechus inunguis), and large birds such as harpy eagles (Harpia harpyja) and macaws (family Psittacidae) thrive in parts of the Cordillera del Condor. But these creatures and their habitats are not likely to survive this century unless governments and local people work together to secure protected areas and begin sustainable activities, such as compatible small agricultural projects and selective, certified logging. Why such urgency if the region is so out of the way? Because, as with so many once-remote spots, humanity is surging forward. Areas at the edge of the frontier are already being cleared for cattle ranching and slash-and-burn farming. Roads, which are pathways to large-scale clearing, are beginning to snake into the forest.
Dangers on the Borderline
Protecting and managing large parks with small budgets
is a major challenge elsewhere in South America. This
is certainly the case in Venezuela, where a number of
parks hug the country's volatile border with Colombia.
A 2003 report by Venezuela's national parks authority
reported that "problems in El Tamá and Sierra
de Perijá national parks are associated, generally,
with the presence of Colombian guerillas, smugglers,
illegal immigration, kidnappings, drug growth and traffic,"
among other things. Heavily forested and mountainous,
El Tamá National Park has few roads and a handful
of staff members who must each keep an eye on thousands
of acres. Although Colombian parkland sits on the other
side of the border, no binational management plan exists.
This is hardly surprising, considering the ongoing conflicts
between the military and guerillas in remote parts of
Colombia, but it leaves the park's imperiled wildlife,
including spectacled bears (Tremarctos ornatus),
at risk and protected only on paper.
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| Spectacled bears are at risk on the border between Colombia and Venezuela. (J'nie Woosley/NZP) |
Even the best-staffed wild areas in the world face challenges protecting their border parks and boundaries. In the United States, security efforts have been stepped up along the entire frontier between Mexico and the U.S.—nearly 2,000 miles—since September 11, 2001. Consequently, there is increased vigilance for terrorist activity, drug trafficking, and illegal immigration in U.S. national parks on the border, including in Texas' Big Bend National Park and Arizona's Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.
"Protecting national parks along the Mexico border is no longer about simply protecting landscapes, plants, and animals," said Big Bend National Park Superintendant Frank Deckert before a House Government Reform Subcommittee in 2003. "In 2001," he said, "the U.S. Border Patrol estimated that 250,000 undocumented aliens entered the country through parklands with over 200,000 through Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument alone. The…impacts from these human and vehicular intrusions is already causing serious damage to park resources. Here in Texas, similar border security problems are just beginning and multiplying exponentially."
Border crossings in many parks have been shut down in an effort to channel international traffic to the most secure areas. Despite tensions along the Mexico-U.S. border, there is still talk of someday establishing a peace park between Big Bend and a Mexican natural area just across the Rio Grande.
Border Conservation: Super
Size It
Following years of civil war and ethnic strife, leaders
in southern Africa are celebrating peace at their borders
in a monumental way. They secured a huge, multi-nation
peace park along the borders joining South Africa, Mozambique,
and Zimbabwe. The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park is
Africa's largest wildlife reserve; it spans 13,500 square
miles, an area larger than the size of Belgium. Security
fences are coming down 13 years after a cease-fire was
called in Mozambique's bloody civil war, enabling smoother
communication between neighbors and safer passage for
wildlife that freely roamed across political boundaries
before war made doing so dangerous or impossible. The
10,000 African elephants (Loxodonta africana)
packed into South Africa's Kruger National Park, which
is believed to have carrying capacity for only 7,000,
have a chance to disperse into a larger area now that
the borders are open to them, which could reduce stress
on the overtaxed ecosystem. Ten white rhinos (Ceratotherium
simum) and several large antelopes already have
been relocated from Kruger to the Mozambique side, where
many easily targeted mammals were wiped out by poachers
and those seeking to feed hungry armies during the years
of bloodshed there.
Such gigantic protected areas often encompass not only wildlife habitat, but also villages and towns. Border areas often house the most disenfranchised—those living farthest from capitals and commercial centers—many of whom are poverty-stricken or are refugees of war or ethnic conflicts. Creating a park in these people's backyards could further disrupt fragile communities. "If you have people living on the edge, relying upon natural resources for their livelihoods, the establishment of a strictly controlled national park can put further stress on them by removing opportunities for hunting and for gathering plants," says Besançon. In addition, decisions on land-use practices for the parks are sometimes moved from the local arena to distant government centers, where local concerns may not be heard.
In the case of the Great Limpopo, local communities went about their daily lives without realizing they'd been enclosed in park boundaries, while heads of state forged ahead with plans for the park. Government leaders are now trying to remedy this oversight by incorporating local populations into park planning, and giving them opportunities to use resources and set up sustainable businesses. With support for locals—and support from them—the future of the park and its communities will be far brighter. In Ecuador and Peru, large indigenous communities living in the Cordillera del Condor region have been included from the start in park planning as well as the setup of sustainable development projects.
The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park started out with presidents shaking hands and discussing plans. Such relaxed, high-level activity is not possible for all border parks. Sometimes cross-border conservation efforts come via a different route. Low-level cooperation has prevailed in the home of the world's 700 remaining mountain gorillas (Gorilla gorilla beringei)—the border region between violence-torn Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Uganda. While high-level government officials in these countries were barely talking, lower level conservationists overcame all odds to protect transborder habitats for endangered apes and other wildlife. "This is an example of how transboundary cooperation can transcend ethnic and political bounds," says Besançon. "These countries have had some form of violent conflict going on for years. During the 1994 genocide, Rwandan refugees moved through the parks in the DRC and Uganda. Through all of this, the managers of the parks have been in communication. The park staff are just conservationists doing their jobs. This is remarkable given the animosity between governments and peoples," he says.
Bounty at the Barrier
Some potential peace parks were nurtured by barbed wire
and land mines. You could call the Korean Demilitarized
Zone, or DMZ, a "war park." Since South Korea
signed a truce with North Korea in 1953, this 155-mile-long,
2.5-mile-wide no-man's-land has become a defacto wildlife
sanctuary unmatched elsewhere on the Korean Peninsula.
Among its denizens are wildlife species now gone from
most or all other parts of densely developed South Korea
and severely drained and deforested North Korea, including
nesting red-crowned (Grus japonensis) and white-naped
(Grus vipio) cranes, black-faced spoonbills
(Platalea minor), Asiatic black bears (Ursus
thibetanus), and perhaps Amur leopards (Panthera
pardus orientalis).
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| White-naped cranes thrive in Korea's DMZ; if North and South Korea open the DMZ to development in the future, wildlife could be negatively affected. (Jessie Cohen/NZP) |
In an ironic twist, peace between the Koreas could spell doom for the DMZ's prime wildlife habitat. Over the past few years, South and North Korea have initiated a dialogue, and a road and rail line have opened through the DMZ. Conservation has not been a top priority for either country in years past, so conservationists are clambering to secure the DMZ's future as a peace park before it opens to development. "I feel positive that creating a peace park in the Korean DMZ will happen in the foreseeable future," says Seung-ho Lee, president of the DMZ Forum, a U.S.-based group lobbying for the designation of the area as a peace park. "Although the current political climate is not bright," says Lee, "we have continuously engaged political leaders of North and South Korea and other stakeholders to commit to the peace park." So far, though, the area's future is anyone's guess.
In a perfect world, border parks would exist around the globe, fostering harmony among nations and between humanity and other species. "The best thing since sliced bread is what some people would call it," says Besançon of the idea of transboundary protected areas. "Clearly these things are rising in number and extent. But we need to make sure we're doing it right. For one thing, it's an awfully expensive exercise. We shouldn't jump in without understanding the implications." These include the realization that peace parks are costly, requiring cooperative park and border security patrols, conferences and formal agreements, and other pricey formalities.
Whether peace parks or other border parks succeed as tools of understanding and biodiversity protection will depend upon whether political leaders, countries, and local people can join forces to listen to one another and collaborate. Anything less may bring about the opposite outcome. Says Besançon, "The goal should be to allow the benefits of protected areas to be shared equally with local people and across borders. Otherwise, we risk creating conflict where none existed before."
—Contributing editor Howard Youth frequently writes on international conservation efforts.
Chain
of Dreams: The Mesoamerican Biological Corridor
ZooGoer
34(5) 2005. Copyright 2005 Friends of the National Zoo.
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