Vietnam is home to highest diversity of primate species on the South-East Asian mainland. However, 90% of these spectacular designs of nature are facing extinction threats due to the high demand for wild meat and wildlife parts used in traditional medicine.
The Endangered Primate Rescue Center focuses on the rescue, rehabilitation, breeding, and release of Vietnam’s rare primates, many of which have been confiscated from wildlife traffickers.
Despite a hunting ban, to keep Pakistani elites and Arab dignitaries happy, the government of Pakistan gives them open access to hunt in the Cholistan desert, one of Pakistan’s major deserts.
Meanwhile, the Punjab Wildlife Department fights a great battle to protect Cholistan’s fast declining populations of chinkara gazelles and migratory birds from poaching.
Can trophy hunting benefit conservation? This is a heated debate. In Pakistan, we found many people that are convinced by their system and have plenty of benefits to show.
Suhelwa is a small-overlooked wildlife sanctuary on the Indo-Nepalese border that suffers from corruption, mismanagement and a lack of local support.
Can it still be saved?
Elephants are beautiful, majestic and emotional individuals that are worshipped by Hindus. But they are also simply so big that in a fragmented landscape like the Terai, conflict with humans is hard to avoid.
Before we arrived in India, we had a certain eurocentric picture of human-wildlife conflict and its challenging mitigation. Unfortunately, where humans and large carnivores share space, a diversity of conflicts can emerge. And across Europe, there is a low tolerance for the presence of these species.
So what can we expect as we reach the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which is regarded as the second most affected state by human-tiger conflicts in the whole country?
What needs to be done to make sure humans and big cats coexist peacefully now and in the future? Nowhere is this question more evident than in India, where around 32 million people are already living as next-door-neighbors to tigers in a country that hosts over 70% of the world’s remaining wild tigers.
Dilijan National is a refuge for old-growth in a country where forest cover is sparse and the climate crisis will increase this problem.
In our two months in Georgia, we have met many people who work in the field of nature conservation: protected area staff including rangers and visitor centre specialists, environmental NGOs, the government’s Agency of Protected Areas and activists to get an insight into nature conservation in Georgia has developed since the collapse of the Soviet Union and, most importantly, the way forward for the future.
In this article, we want to cover three important pillars in Georgian nature conservation which we have not specifically covered so far: funding with a special focus on the Caucasus Nature Fund, the political agenda to enlarge the protected area network made possible by the Agency of Protected Areas, and the crucial work of rangers.
Vashlovani Protected Areas, which are often referred to as the Georgian Savannah, is the only region in Georgia which was once inhabited by the goitered gazelle. However, due to the unsustainable level of hunting and poaching since the 1930s, the range and numbers of this medium-sized grazer declined rapidly, and in the 1960s, the species was declared extinct in the country.
Nowadays, Vashlovani hosts over 200 goitered gazelles thanks to trans-border cooperation and several rounds of trial and error, which shows the fragile process of species reintroduction.
We had the chance to meet some of the key players who contributed to what eventually became a conservation success, while also being able to observe these and other majestic animals with our own eyes.
Lagodekhi Protected Areas in East Georgia is home to beautiful pristine forests and mountains. And the administration is doing everything possible to protect this biodiversity from poachers.