In the early dark days of the coronavirus pandemic, when the death toll of 1 million was still unimaginable, there was a bright spot: nature seemed to heal. As humans were confined, stories circulated about observations of rare animals, such as wild goats hunting. of the city of Wales, and then become a joke about the thirst of the public over the symptoms of regeneration: New Yorkers claimed that Elmo returned to Times Square as evidence of a primary rebalancing of the land.
The concept of the resurgence of nature presented a relief from considerations about the human suffering of the pandemic and a hope for the planet: can nature still heal itself, if given time alone?
It’s probably not that simple. Scientists may take years to identify that the network has an effect on the wonderful “anthropausia,” as some have called it, on wildlife and the environment, but there are already symptoms of side effects. studies on the floor and follow up on some protected spaces on hold. More and more poachers have come to their place, environmentalists in Asia, Africa and America told CNN.
“We can’t expect nature to be just soldiers,” UN Environment Programme Executive Director Inger Anderson told the press on Tuesday in reaction to a question about stopping the continued loss of everyone since the 1970s. Nearly two-thirds of global ones have disappeared in the past 50 years, according to a recent WWF report, and a new report from the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew shows that about 40% of plants are endangered.
With land and seascapes already irrevocably altered, polluted, razed and planted, humans will have to figure out how to actively manage and maintain environmental health,” Anderson said, exactly the challenge facing world leaders at the United Nations Biodiversity Summit on Wednesday. COP15 World Biodiversity Conference next year.
In words, it will take more than a few months at home to heal the planet.
“There are more wild animals visiting inhabited areas. We saw penguins in Cape Town, kangaroos jumping through the streets of Adelaide, etc. In those contexts, it probably gave nature a break,” says Sebastian Troeng, executive vice president of Conservation International. Fewer foreigners have also disrupted the illegal wildlife industry across borders, he adds, but “that’s almost equally beneficial. “
Fewer people aren’t smart.
In Honduras, hidden cameras have captured a traffic replacement at 8 conservation parks this year. Monitored through the Panthera wild feline conservation organization, the cameras have already searched thousands of tourists, the organization’s regional director for South America, Esteban Payan, said.
“For years, you wouldn’t have a single cat there,” he says. “Now there is no more tourism, no tourists on those trails. And we started to see margays, we started to see ocelots, we started Payan says that in some parks the cameras have also started to capture more hunters.
People who hunt wild cats illegally get revenge on attacks on cows or livestock, he says. And some are simply armed vagrants. ” With the locks, many other people simply walk through the woods and walk with a gun, and go see a jaguar and kill it out of fear,” he says.
Panthera and other organizations have practical answers to these problems. One task is to sell electric shepherd fences to predatory cat livestock, but the coronavirus makes it more difficult to act on them.
“We have financing,” says Payan. The tattered global economy translates into fewer donations to NGOs than donors large and small, he says, which ultimately leads to “less patrols and less surveillance. “
A continent further away, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the same challenge is affecting efforts to save poachers who kill or capture exotic species of trafficking on the black market. Adams Cassinga, director of Conserv Congo, an anti-trafficking organization that works with lawmakers to bring poachers and traffickers to justice, told CNN that since the pandemic, he has noticed fewer park rangers and security guards in the areas.
His organization has helped 11 trafficking cases in Kinshasa over the past five months, he says, more than twice as much as at the same time last year.
It is a list of carnage of corpses and portions of rare animals: part a ton of pangolin scales, 4 wonderful apes, a baboon, 60 kilograms of ivory and several monkeys. Some of the live rescued animals, such as baby chimpanzees, bring $50,000 with them on the foreign black market.
“Covid-19 has been a great help to poachers,” Cassinga says.
Tourism is a central source of investment for wildlife reserves and herbal parks around the world. As CNN has already reported, the presence of ecotourists helps keep poachers and loggers at bay and, in well-managed reserves, their cash budget rangers, control of the park. and other fitness programs for wildlife. When it stopped this year, this major investment ran out.
“Covid-19 has had a devastating effect on wildlife tourism and the operation of protected parks and areas around the world,” says Andersen, Executive Director of UNEP. “In many countries, we have noticed a nearly one hundred percent decline in tourism.
“The lesson for us is that if we want to save areas, we want to expand our income resources” to go beyond tourism,” he says.
Not all the organizations interviewed via CNN had the same problems. African Parks, a nonprofit that runs 18 parks across the continent, said it had not noticed an overall increase in poaching. Marketing director Andrea Heydlauff attributed this to the fact that the organization was not heavily reliant on tourism and had not cut staff because of the pandemic.
What motivates a poacher? For some, it’s just survival. Several conservation organizations have warned that human poverty is one of the biggest risks for this year.
The pandemic would possibly have emboldened established criminals and traffickers, but it has also taken millions of unemployed people around the world into a desperate state of poverty, expanding the threat of “biblical-proportioned” famine, according to UN David Beasley. , Executive Director of the World Food Programme.
Tourism is an essential source of income in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve, a vast expanse of rainforest spanning ancient archaeological sites, national parks and wildlife reserves. feed his circle of relatives after the tourist activities ceased.
The dreading number of Brown Brocket of Yucatan, a small species of “vulnerable” deer through the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUNC), as well as “almost threatened” ocellated turkeys with iridescent blue feathers and copper, fell.
“I’m proud of it and I wish I hadn’t, but what else would I do?” he told CNN. “Before the pandemic, we could rely on tourism or paintings at archaeological sites to make money and buy food with But now we have hing.
Even before the pandemic, others in rural areas around the world supplemented food shortages through wild animal hunting or wild animal meat, but economic pressure has forced many others to hunt more to survive. Experts say this has also led to an increase in illegal logging, harvesting and grazing on land.
In Uganda’s impenetrable Bwindi National Park, an incredibly rare silver-backed mountain gorilla killed in June, the first such homicide the park has noticed in nine years. One of the remaining 1,000 in the world, the gorilla, known locally as Rafiki, had encountered furtive wild animal meat hunters who were likely to seek smaller prey.
Uganda-based veterinarian Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, founder of the Ugandan-based non-profit organization Conservation through Public Health (CTPH), says that without tourism, the percentage of park revenue faithful to supporting critical local infrastructure has been exhausted and others living in the domain “still do not have the option of resorting to illegal activities to meet fundamental food and timber needs” Kalema-Zikusoka said.
“For the most part, Uganda’s surrounding areas, greenhouses and wildlife reserves are among the poorest and most marginalized,” he says.
The number of other people accused of poaching more than doubled in Uganda during the first months of the pandemic. The Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) recorded 531 poaching suspects between February and May this year, up from 255 at the same time last year. UWA CEO Sam Mwandha said poaching has since been reduced to “normal” levels.
Environmentalists are concerned that the global drive to revive bankrupt economies could further damage the environment. Governments are already offering aid budgets in fossil fuel-polluting industries, and Conservation International has followed more than 20 setbacks in the international environmental coverage box this year.
Restarting the global economy will have to combine “putting food on the table” and directing “resources towards positive movements for nature that ensure a safe future,” says UNEP’s Anderson. the desire for more resilient and less tourism-dependent “wildlife economies,” he says.
Anderson also emphasizes wanting to look beyond spaces to rural villages and spaces, where environmental disorders abound. “We want to look at biodiversity beyond spaces, because that’s where loss is maximum. “
Currently, about 15% of the world’s land and 7% of the waters are protected, according to the United Nations Protected Areas Database. The target set ten years ago through world representatives in Aichi, Japan, 17% for land and 10% for water until 2020 (still below the 30% target of scientists for both).
Next year’s Biodiversity Convention in Kunming, China, 196 countries are expected to set new biodiversity targets, and this time.
To build momentum in this direction, several countries, coupled with Canada, the UK and the EU, committed this week to expanding grass areas, and more than 70 countries signed a 10-point commitment to prioritise the environment in post-Pandemic reconstruction. , China, India, the United States and Brazil were particularly absent from the list of signatories to the commitments.
The pandemic provides scientists with an impressive opportunity to make other people perceive the need for such compromises.
Although a tragedy, the pandemic is “this exclusive occasion in life” to assess the effects of our habit on nature, says Richard Primack, a boston University biologist who is working with scientists around the world to compile studies on the subject. covid-19’s effect on conservation, for the journal Biological Conservation. “Let’s look at those massive adjustments to human activity. “
A main question, Primack says, is whether the means through which humans seek to protect nature work. “Perhaps (the data) tells us that the control we have is not important, if biological systems literally remain the same. Or maybe it tells us that control is essential. “
A colleague of Primack’s sees initial evidence of an improved shield. David Philipp, a fishing enthusiast and conservation biologist at the Fisheries Conservation Foundation, has been reading bar towns on southern Ontario’s lakes and rivers for 30 years. caused a deastrous annual depletion of baby bars, disrupting fatherfish while protecting their nests from predators.
But between 2019 and 2020, the number of surviving baby bars in Philipp’s search domain more than tripled from 124,000 to 414,000, a replacement he attributes to a fishing disruption due to pandemic closures and the closure of the Canada-U. S. border. can live up to 15 years, theoretically rejuvenating the population for years.
His research, which is still under study, may be only a decisive detail in Philipp’s presentation to the Canadian government for a pilot assignment that would reflect well the benefits of blocking by preventing fishing for nesting spaces in lakes for a few months a year.
The locks “gave other people an idea of how things can temporarily get better if we act,” Anderson says. While observations of flourishing flora and fauna, humanity’s confinement may not tell the full story, he hopes they will motivate the public. to reconnect with nature and call for more environmental protections in the future.
Primack, the biologist, questioned whether, in some cases, the animals that saw the pandemic had visited urban spaces from the beginning. “People may be rushing too far to figure it out sooner,” he says. Only long-term studies will finally show whether wildlife in some spaces really used the sudden calm to explore, or if we just started seeing things differently.
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