HIV/AIDS and Biodiversity Conservation Linkages

by Judy Oglethorpe, WWF-US and Nancy Gelman, Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group

The HIV/AIDS pandemic is having large impacts on conservation in Africa through loss of institutional capacity for conservation, and increased use of natural resources including bushmeat.

AIDS (Acquired ImmunoDeficiency Syndrome), which is the late stage of infection caused by HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), is affecting every person, organization, and sector in Africa, and the disease is quickly spreading in Asia and the Pacific, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. It causes long periods of illness, and is significantly reducing life expectancy. An estimated 34-46 million people are living with HIV/AIDS (see map diagram). Approximately 3 million people died globally from AIDS in 2003, approximately 2.3 million in Sub-Saharan Africa. The disease is impacting local and national economies, governance structures, agricultural production, food security, and education. The erosion of social structures and increase in AIDS-orphans, who grow up without family stability, could lead to future global insecurity. These societal changes directly and indirectly impact biodiversity conservation and natural resource management, including the illegal hunting of bushmeat.

Increased Natural Resource Use by AIDS-Impacted Households
As rural households lose salary remittances from cities or the capacity for heavy agricultural labor due to HIV/AIDS, they turn increasingly to natural resources as the ultimate livelihood safety net. In many areas medicinal plants and wild foods are being overcollected, bushmeat hunting has increased, and in certain places timber consumption for coffins and charcoal production is causing deforestation. This unsustainable use erodes the resource base for the future. Some protected areas face increasing threat as people seek access to natural resources that are no longer available outside. This occurs at a time when park guards may be patrolling less as they are ill from the disease, taking care of family members with AIDS, or attending funerals.

Changes in Land Use Due to AIDS
Land management is changing as people rely on practices such as fire or extensive farming that can be more damaging to vegetation and wildlife. Traditional knowledge of sustainable land management and resource use is being lost as parents die before passing it on to their children. It is likely that resource control systems by traditional leaders such as hunting of bushmeat are breaking down. Land inheritance can be affected in places where widows and orphans cannot inherit land because of national land policies or traditional practices. Even if national policies are in place for them to inherit, they may be evicted because of land-grabbing. All these factors can result in less sustainable use of land and resources.

Loss of Conservation Capacity
Wildlife management is also affected directly through loss of human capacity. The conservation community has already lost key champions, leaders and staff in government agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), communities, training and research organizations, and private sector. National park and wildlife conservation personnel are especially vulnerable to HIV/AIDS as many work in remote areas away from their families for a large proportion of time. This makes them more likely to have sexual relations with other partners. They may not have access to HIV/AIDS awareness information or condoms. When staff are lost, the institutional experience and memory of the conservation organization suffers. Precious conservation funds are being diverted to pay for AIDS costs such as funerals and sick leave. The full scale of the HIV/AIDS problem to conservation capacity and institutional development has not yet been realized. This situation is expected to get much worse as the HIV/AIDS pandemic peaks in many countries in Africa and grows more severe in other regions of the world.

Sharing Coping Strategies to Deal with AIDS’ Impact to Conservation
The Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group (ABCG) (comprising African Wildlife Foundation, Conservation International, The World Conservation Union, Wildlife Conservation Society, World Resources Institute and WWF US) has been working with partners to identify the impacts of AIDS on conservation and natural resource management, and ways to mitigate them (www.abcg.org). Partnerships have since been developed with African organizations that have developed best practices, such as KwaZulu Natal Wildlife, and the Wildlife and Environmental Society of Malawi. Several workshops and conference presentations have been organized or catalyzed including at the World Parks Congress where HIV/AIDS was highlighted as “an emerging issue for conservation” in the Durban Accord, the final communiqué of the Congress (http://www.iucn.org/themes/wcpa/ wpc2003). Other outreach has included dissemination of a poster, and fundraising is currently underway by WWF for a manual for conservation organizations, and for further studies and sharing of best practices. An HIV/AIDS-conservation community of practice has recently been established through FRAME (www.frameweb.org).

What can be done?
The conservation sector can play an important role in helping to deal with the impacts of the HIV/AIDS pandemic on the capacity of staff working on protected area management and bushmeat trade, and local communities involved in community-based natural resource management. We can also help AIDS-impacted households to use their natural resources more sustainably. Activities include:

Develop organizational policies on HIV/AIDS
Many conservation organizations, such as African Wildlife Foundation, Kwa Zulu Natal Wildlife, and WWF-Eastern Africa have developed workplace policies on HIV/AIDS. Activities include: developing prevention, treatment, and care programs in the workplace including HIV/AIDS awareness and condom provision, wellness programs, provision of anti-retroviral drugs if there is an adequate health infrastructure, encouraging HIV testing, dealing with stigma and low morale issues, and managing benefits and life insurance.

Build conservation capacity
The conservation community must build capacity to deal with the loss of staff due to the disease. We can adapt training programs (e.g. train more people in a broader range of skills on short courses rather
than investing heavily in a few people for higher degrees; promote training at home base rather then sending people away from families for training, such as through distance learning). We can also incorporate HIV/AIDS into natural resource curricula. Southern African Wildlife College, for example, has a module on HIV/AIDS in their wildlife management diploma course.

Work with AIDS-Impacted Communities on Conservation-based Enterprises
Efforts by organizations such as the Wildlife and Environmental Society of Malawi include targeting AIDS-impacted communities in order to work with them on conservation enterprise development activities such as guinea fowl rearing, beekeeping for honey collection, and the production and marketing of indigenous fruit juices such as baobab and tamarind, based on sustainable practices. These activities are not labor-intensive, can be undertaken by grandparents, AIDS orphans and people in the early stages of AIDS. Such activities take the pressure off other natural resources such as bushmeat. We can also provide strategies for the sustainable use of medicinal plants that are used to treat some of the illnesses associated with HIV/AIDS.

Collaborate with other sectors
The conservation sector needs to collaborate with other sectors to obtain technical assistance (e.g. health sector for employee HIV/AIDS awareness and health programs) and to reduce environmental impacts (e.g. working with agriculture and food security sectors to promote less labor-intensive agricultural production with low environmental impacts, to keep pressure off natural resources and reduce harmful impacts such as too frequent or extensive fires).

The HIV/AIDS pandemic is a multi-sectoral issue that must be addressed by each sector of society. The conservation sector can make an important contribution as natural resources provide alternative livelihood strategies to AIDS-impacted households. We need to ensure that these resources are used as sustainably as possible, and at the same time try to maintain conservation capacity. The AIDS pandemic threatens to undermine achievement of our common conservation mission in Africa, and we need to do all we can to prevent this.

MORE INFORMATION:

Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group (ABCG)
Information on the linkages between HIV/AIDS and natural resource management in East and Southern Africa and examples of coping strategies on how conservation organizations and local communities practicing community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) are dealing with the impacts of HIV/AIDS: http://www.abcg.org 
or http://www.frameweb.org/ev.php?ID=6786_201&ID2=DO_TOPIC

AIDS Brief on Community-Based Natural Resource Management- http://www.afr-sd.org/Environment/AIDS%20Brief-all-150%20res.pdf

HIV/AIDS and Community-Based Natural Resource Management Toolkit -
http://www.afr-sd.org/Environment/AIDS%20Toolkit-150%20res.pdf

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) - http://www.fao.org/forestry/hiv-aids