As someone who spent years working at the intersection of sustainable-energy development and conservation in sub-Saharan Africa and around the globe, I have witnessed the many ways that local peoples and economies connect to the wider world. So when COVID-19 caused a global shutdown last year, I wondered — from my home in Delaware — how the loss of revenue from travel and tourism would impact the critical conservation work being done in sub-Saharan Africa.
Take, for example, Uganda, where tourism revenues account for nearly 10% of the country’s gross domestic product (over $1 billion per year) and support close to 100% of the management cost for the country’s protected wildlife areas.
Without tourism revenue to keep conservation programs going, the consequences might have been dire for both nature and people in the region. Thankfully, organizations like The Nature Conservancy were able to step in and provide a measure of relief over the past year. This work needs long-term commitments and investment from countries that can afford to support it, including the United States, not only for the sake of these amazing natural places and the people that call them home but truly for the safety and stability of the wider world.
Most U.S. foreign assistance for on-the-ground conservation is delivered through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and its programs focusing on protecting biodiversity, supporting local economies and tackling the impacts of climate change. As beneficial as this aid is, the U.S. government’s goals for distributing it are more than altruistic.
Without this aid and the conservation programs supported by it, these regions are more likely to experience a rise in economic destabilization and conflict over natural resources, creating threats to U.S. and global safety interests. It would make it easier for illegal trade in natural resources to take hold, which undermines global markets. This type of destabilization can directly impact companies and corporations that operate internationally, including major Delaware employers.
These regions and their inhabitants would also be at greater risk to natural disasters and climate change, leading to costly recoveries. In fact, investment in climate resilience overseas provides the dual benefit of improving planning, adaptation and implementation strategies that can be applied elsewhere. That includes coastal U.S. states like Delaware that will be increasingly impacted by sea level rise.
Failing to adequately invest in these programs would create a situation ripe for exploitation by poachers and wildlife traffickers, particularly in Africa, which has the most diverse and abundant large-mammal population in the world. Similar to other transnational crimes, such as weapons, drugs and human trafficking, the poaching and trafficking of wildlife species is an illicit industry generating tens of billions of dollars annually, funding dangerous organized-crime syndicates.
Thanks to the leadership of Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the U.S. Congress enacted the Eliminate, Neutralize and Disrupt (END) Wildlife Trafficking Act. Since passing in 2016, the END Wildlife Trafficking Act has aided in the arrest of members of wildlife-trafficking networks and supported interagency efforts to tackle the problem globally. But further investment is needed to make these efforts more effective.
Perhaps there’s no better example of how these threats can impact the wider world than the one we’ve all been living through for more than a year — a global pandemic. Almost half of emerging pandemic diseases originate in wildlife and spill over into human populations through the illegal trade or consumption of that wildlife or via our encroachment on or destruction of their habitats. There is strong scientific evidence to suggest that the degradation of natural lands significantly increases the global risk of zoonotic-disease outbreaks, such as COVID-19, Ebola, HIV, Zika, West Nile virus, bird flu and salmonellosis, among others.
Human health is inexorably tied to the health of nature, and there is catastrophic risk in not addressing these problems at their source. As we’ve witnessed firsthand, the financial costs alone of pandemics like COVID-19 on a global scale can be astronomical, but the amount of U.S. funding going toward the conservation efforts needed to help stave them off is incredibly modest.
In fact, just a fraction of 1% of the U.S. federal budget is directed toward these sorts of programs, but the return on investment to American citizens is much more. These programs help prevent global conflicts and instability, reduce international crime, guard against natural disasters and promote fair trade, all of which ultimately strengthen the U.S. and enhance our national security. We need to strengthen U.S. investment in these areas as the threats continue to grow.
Conversely, the cost of inaction may be more than any of us can ultimately afford.
For more information, please see naturalsecurity.us.
Dr. Robert Ddamulira serves on the Board of Trustees of the Pennsylvania and Delaware chapter of The Nature Conservancy. He is a researcher at the Joseph R. Biden Jr. School’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy at University of Delaware and is founder and CEO of ForestPesa, a startup focused on building a peer-to-peer lending platform to support small-holder forest-conservation investments in sub-Saharan Africa.
