Newsletter Number 7
May/June 2002

The new Global Strategy for Plant Conservation
On 19 April 2002, delegates at the Sixth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) agreed to a Global Strategy for Plant Conservation. This is a landmark. For the first time the parties to the CBD - that is virtually all countries apart from the USA - have agreed on the urgency to save the world's plants, and the desirability of a common approach.

The strategy is unusual in that, uniquely for the CBD, targets have been set, in this case to be met by the year 2010. These targets are established at global level, and countries are expected to contribute according to their capacities, existing programmes and priorities. Community-based conservation and capacity-building are recognised as vital for the achievement of the strategy, especially as regards developing countries.

WWF, UNESCO and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, parties in the People and Plants initiative, have been closely involved in development of the strategy. As a programme, the People and Plants initiative is currently involved in negotiations to start a new programme, the People and Plants Learning Network, to build capacity in people-centred plant conservation, especially in developing countries. This programme will be directly supportive to the Global Strategy.

More details about the strategy may be found in the Regions and Themes section of this website.

People and Plants Handbook: Issue 8
This latest edition will soon be available. Whereas previous issues have been thematic, the Handbook now functions as the newsletter of People and Plants, and is a source of information on applying ethnobotany to conservation and community development. It also highlights the range of materials produced.

Some news about our field projects
People and Plants is moving forward with extensive field activities in a variety of conservation contexts.

The project at Ayubia National Park, Pakistan, has the particular goal of gathering information useful to the Forest Department and communities as they move towards collaborative management. Several small-scale activities try to take some of the pressure off the forests, namely promotion of tree nurseries and more efficient wood-stoves, and environmental education. The project supports staff in a number of universities to train ethnobotanists to build up a body of professional talent in applied ethnobotany. This will be vital for the success of future conservation.
Trees used for fuelwood are now mainly Salix, Populus and Aesculus, and 24 new nurseries have started since March 2002. Seeds of new maize varieties have been supplied.
WWF is involved in the development of joint management of a sample of Reserved Forest (74 ha), the parties including the Forest Department, NRCP, the local community, a community-based organisation (Mr Bashir) and WWF; tree nurseries have been established and the land planted particularly with Aesculus; 2 people guard the site, which is fenced. It is planned to start a similar initiative for a sample of Guzara Forest. Abdullah Ayaz (head of the project team) has started to establish permanent plots to determine forest composition/state, and for monitoring.
National capacity building in Applied Ethnobotany. Resource centres have been established at: Quaid-I-Azam University, Islamabad; Agricultural University, Peshawar; AJK University, Muzaffarabad and Karachi University. A curriculum development workshop was held (3-4 May 2002), and attended by some 50 participants, including 2 from Uganda (Patrick Mucunguzi and Joseph Obua); virtually all universities in were Pakistan represented, including 3 vice-chancellors. Ethnobotany has by now been established at various levels in several universities/colleges: NWFP Agricultural University; AJK University; Baluchistan University; Postgraduate Islamia College, Peshawar; Malakand University, Chakdara; Fatima Jinnah Womens University, Rawalpindi. The proceedings will be published soon by WWF-Pakistan. Professional training: so far 8 grants have been awarded for MSc or MPhil research, and 5 for PhD research. These were selected from over 25 proposals.

Nepal has long accepted the principle of community involvement in the management of its forests and Himalayan pastures. However, there has been relatively little emphasis on non-timber forest products. The focus here is on the conservation and sustainable use of medicinal plants, an important issue in Himalayan Nepal where people rely mainly on plants as sources of medicines and where many families gain substantial income from the sale of wild-collected medicinal plants.
The main case-study site is Shey Phoksundo National Park, where the work is with local communities to develop management systems for medicinal plants appropriate to local social, economic and cultural circumstances. Support is also offered for the development of local health care based on the Tibetan tradition, for example through assistance with the creation of new health care centres. The innovative approach of this project is engaging considerable attention. Lessons learned from this experience are helping promote the conservation and sustainable use of medicinal plants and related improvements in health care more widely in the country.

The project in Uganda also focuses on medicinal plant conservation in relation to health care. Attention is being directed particularly to the development of traditional health care as an integral part of the national health care system. These activities follow up early work by People and Plants on the use of medicinal plants at Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, including assessments of the sustainability of collection. The project is being implemented largely by the Department of Community Health at Mbarara University of Science and Technology, an institution founded on the principle of serving the needs of rural communities.

The training programme for applied ethnobotanists from eastern and Southern Africa is now in its concluding stage. Drawing on a case-study at Ragati Forest, Mt Kenya, Robert Höft has provided evidence which demonstrates why local communities have to be involved in forest management in tropical Africa. He shows convincingly that there is much need for more ethnobotanists, professionally trained to work effectively with communities and departments of governments.

Link to new WWF site
WWF itself has now developed a very useful research section on its own website, with reciprocal links to this site.

The newsletter, reflecting a selection of the many activities of People and Plants, is compiled by:
Martin Walters
People & Plants Editor and Web-manager