Workshop on forest monitoring, Uganda (photo: Susanne Schmitt)

People and Plants is a programme of capacity-building in ethnobotany applied to conservation and the sustainable use of plant resources. It entered its final four-year phase in January 2001 as a partnership between WWF and UNESCO. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew has associate status, helping with provision of information, as through hosting this website.

The purpose of the programme is to conserve biodiversity and achieve sustainable use of plant resources. The immediate objective is to increase capacity, in selected countries and internationally, for work with local communities on botanical matters, to help them manage their plant resources more sustainably and generally enhance their involvement in conservation.

Rationale

People and Plants aims at the heart of conservation. Conservation of biodiversity is a major global concern. It is a rather abstract concept, which, in terms of practical action, addresses ultimately the ways that particular areas of land and the plants and animals that they carry, are used and managed. This means working with local stakeholders at individual sites. Balances must be struck between the current interests of different stakeholders, and between the present and the future. Of course, site-level work alone may not be enough to deal with all the issues – changes may be needed elsewhere, for instance to government policies. But, experience at field sites is often of great help for ascertaining the types of changes to policy that are both necessary and realistic.

Local communities form key stakeholder groups which, virtually everywhere, must be included in conservation schemes if they are to be successful. The involvement of local communities is particularly vital when people are dependent on wild natural resources, whether for their own subsistence or for sale. While the public in some richer countries may be interested mainly in wildlife, wild plants (rather than wild animals) are of much greater everyday importance to communities in most developing countries. They supply materials for house construction, furniture and crafts, fuel, food, twine, dyes and medicines. Resources of plants provide a form of green social security for many poor people in developing countries, helping to sustain their livelihoods. It is often the poorest members of rural communities who are most dependent on local wild plants for their sustenance, and therefore have most to gain from placing the harvesting of these resources on a sustainable basis. The People and Plants programme is directly relevant to the promotion of livelihood security and reduction in poverty.

Conservationists need to find balances between conservation and development. Conservation is necessary to maintain natural resources for the future or to ensure that that their benefits are maintained for wider society (e.g. forest retention for protection of climate and water supplies). On the other hand, people virtually everywhere are interested in development or economic expansion. A focus on the knowledge, uses and methods of management of plant resources by communities can often be invaluable for identifying key links between people and nature, identifying related conservation and development issues, and bringing that key stakeholder group – the local community – early into discussions to resolve any problems.

Ethnobotany is the subject concerned with the relationships between people and plants. The aspect of ethnobotany of interest here is applied ethnobotany – that is, ethnobotany applied to conservation and sustainable development. It is an essential discipline in conservation, but a challenge to master, since it requires competence in both the botanical and social sciences. Applied ethnobotany also requires that its practitioners are able to identify central conservation issues at particular sites and can approach the resolution of any problems in an efficient way according to the resources at hand. It is often best carried out by multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural teams, which should include members of communities (especially those most knowledgeable about plants) as well as modern specialists (centrally botanists and sociologists, but also often those with other skills – not uncommonly medicine, marketing, horticulture and conflict-resolution).

There is great need to build capacity in applied ethnobotany. Biodiversity, nationally and internationally, is imperilled. Many areas of more natural vegetation are being degraded, and their values to people reduced. Many wild plants gathered for trade are over-harvested. Forest reserves and other protected areas are frequently managed by agencies without adequate arrangements being agreed with communities as to their involvement, not infrequently resulting in unnecessary conflict and loss of resources.

The need for involvement of communities in conservation is widely acknowledged, but much more needs to be done. When People and Plants started in 1992, there was not a single ethnobotanist in several of the countries of its operations able to work effectively with communities on practical conservation issues. Very often, ethnobotanists have been content merely to record and publish the uses of plants (often medicinal plants), without any benefits accruing at site.

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