Mountain Gorilla Conservation and Environmental Peacebuilding: Conservation as a common objective for peacebuilding

art by Rosanna Morris (UK)

Johannes Refisch (Great Apes Survival Partnership, UNEP)

Access to natural resources is the root cause of many conflicts and resolving those conflicts can be complex and challenging. However, in comparison to partitioning energy and other high-value resources, conservation is an easy-to-agree-upon common objective for peacebuilding.

Context

Environmental peacebuilding offers a number of potential benefits: for countries with a history of conflict, conservation often provides an easy-to-agree-upon common objective for cooperation and peacebuilding. It promotes cross-border dialogue and understanding and creates expanded economic opportunities through larger scale and regional ecotourism projects and by funding community institutions that address the root causes of conflict.

What’s been done

40 years ago, the population of mountain gorillas on the borders of Rwanda, DRC, and Uganda was critically endangered.[i] But since then, the population has doubled. There are many reasons why mountain gorilla conservation became a conservation success story, but environmental peacebuilding was a key part of that success:

Neither gorillas nor poachers respect international borders. Three national parks have a common border: Mgahinga in Uganda, Volcanoes Park in Rwanda, and Virunga Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Additionally, Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda and Sarambwe Reserve in the DRC share a border. Thus, collaboration between the mountain gorilla states was instrumental for the animals’ protection. Gorilla tourism generates income for the communities and governments that are in charge of managing parks and the wildlife. The pre-condition for their success is collaboration: Countries realized that they could generate more revenue by marketing tourism at regional scale.

A major milestone was an agreement between the three countries to share revenues from tourism. When a habituated gorilla group crosses the international border, 50 per cent of the income from tourism goes back to the gorillas’ country of origin (according to the revenue sharing agreement signed in 2005). This agreement paved the way for further transboundary agreements, such as a 10-year Transboundary Strategic Plan for the Greater Virunga landscape adopted in 2006, and the Greater Virunga Transboundary Secretariat that was created in 2008.

Key work areas of the secretariat include landscape management, community conservation, tourism development, and law enforcement.[ii] Transboundary collaboration culminated with the negotiation and signing of the Greater Virunga Transboundary Collaboration (GVTC) Treaty by the three countries in 2015.[iii]

After years of successful collaboration and trust building, the three countries now collaboratively tackle issues that go far beyond mountain gorillas. For example, a history of violent conflicts between fishermen in the DRC and Uganda led to a decision to include fisheries in the Transboundary Strategic Plan. There have also been informal discussions among partners to expand the mandate even further and include more sensitive issues such as illegal trade in timber. Under the facilitation of the transboundary secretariat, the DRC and Uganda are jointly redrawing the border between Sarambe Reserve in the DRC and Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park in Uganda because the river which forms the border has changed its bed.[iv] The GVTC has also helped to reduce tensions between the countries by providing them with a platform from which their military forces can collaborate in a transparent way.

It would not be unreasonable to conclude that the benefits reaped from investing in ecotourism helped the local people and the governments collaborate. There are far more contentious issues, such as the transboundary exploitation of natural resources, but also here the transboundary secretariat plays an important role as inter-governmental body and facilitator.

Looking ahead

There are a number of lessons that can be drawn from the mountain gorilla example. A technical and bottom-up approach allowed the transboundary initiative to continue even throughout high-level political dispute between the range states. Mixed technical committees, consisting of experts from all three countries, facilitated information exchange and collaboration, and helped prevent the prioritization of national interests. Natural resources are often the root causes of conflict and a conflict-sensitive approach to conservation is important. And finally, there is a need for a neutral facilitator in transboundary initiatives. This was, for many years, the International Gorilla Conservation Programme (IGCP);[v] much later, the transboundary secretariat was established.

However, there are also challenges of relying on tourism. With the COVID-19 related restrictions, the revenue from tourism has plummeted and this has had a massive impact on communities, and both local and national economies. The conservation community, including protected area authorities and communities, urgently has to diversify the income structure to make conservation enterprises less fragile. In 2020, for the first time in many years, Uganda lost a silverback gorilla to poaching. The gorilla was not targeted, but the poachers were charged by the gorilla while hunting for wild meat. This is partially the result of a lack of tourism income.

What does all this have to do with UNEP? Transboundary collaboration in the Virunga has been recognized by the UN as a functional and operational approach and platform to solve transboundary conflicts, and the Greater Virunga Transboundary Collaboration Secretariat has been participating in a number of events organized by the office of the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy to the Great Lakes region. The region faces many challenges, and the peace process is very complex, with many countries involved. A focus on the greater Virunga landscape via its collaboration secretariat offers the opportunity to tackle specific issues at a smaller geographic scale; successful interventions could then be replicated elsewhere in the region. The UN-led partnership for the conservation of great apes (GRASP) has been supporting the Greater Virunga Transboundary Collaboration Secretariat in a number of activities[vi] and has replicated some lessons learned in other transboundary areas in Africa.

Footnotes

[i] Hickey, J.R., Basabose, A., Gilardi, K.V., Greer, D., Nampindo, S., Robbins, M.M. and Stoinski, T.S. (2020) ‘Gorilla beringei ssp. Beringei’, (amended version of the 2018 assessment), The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2020. https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2020-3.RLTS.T39999A176396749.en. 

[ii] Greater Virunga Transboundary Collaboration Secretariat (GVTC) (https://greatervirunga.org)

[iii] Refisch, J. and Jenson, J. (2016) ‘Transboundary Collaboration in the Greater Virunga Landscape: From Gorilla Conservation to conflict sensitive transbondary landscape management’, in: Bruch, C., Muffett, C. and Nichols, S. (eds.). Governance, natural resources and post-conflict peacebuilding. Earthscan from Routledge

[iv] Digital Congo (2021) (https://www.digitalcongo.net/article-en/5c9f37090f460b0004bcea95/)

[v] International Gorilla Conservation Programme (IGCP) (https://igcp.org)

[vi] GRASP (www.un.grasp.org)