Thursday 3 March marks World Wildlife Day, the most important global annual event dedicated to wildlife. First instituted in 2013 by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), World Wildlife Day serves as an occasion to celebrate and raise awareness of the world’s wild animals and plants. It is also the anniversary of the 1973 signature of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).
The theme for World Wildlife Day 2022 is “recovering key species for ecosystem restoration,” with celebrations centering around drawing attention to the conservation status of some of the most critically-endangered species of wild fauna and flora and driving discussions towards imagining and implementing solutions to conserve them.
In honour of World Wildlife Day, we spoke to a few environmentalists about where Sri Lanka stands with wildlife and conservation.
The Sri Lankan context
According to data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, over 8,400 species of wild fauna and flora are critically endangered, while close to 30,000 more are understood to be endangered or vulnerable. Based on these estimates, it is suggested that over a million species are threatened with extinction. Continued loss of species, habitats, and ecosystems also threatens all life on Earth, including us. People everywhere rely on wildlife and biodiversity-based resources to meet all our needs, from food to fuel, medicines, housing, and clothing. Millions of people also rely on nature as the source of their livelihoods and economic opportunities.
Sri Lanka is an island paradise renowned the world over for its abundant biodiversity, and ostensibly, the picture we paint to the world is one of a lush island teeming with beautiful creatures, many of which are unique to Sri Lanka. The reality, however, is somewhat different.
Sri Lanka has one of the highest recorded rates of primary forest destruction in the world and has lost its closed-canopy forest cover from about 84% in 1881 to about 26.6% in 2010 due to the conversion of forests to other types of land use, such as human settlements, plantation crops, and agricultural activities. Human-wildlife conflict involving some of Sri Lanka’s most iconic and endangered wildlife species, such as elephants and leopards, is rapidly escalating, and extreme weather conditions, such as extended droughts and monsoons, have led to increased incidence of flooding and landslides.
Conservationists, activists, and environmentalists are on a never-ending protest against the rampant destruction of Sri Lanka’s precious natural heritage, which appears to go on unabated regardless of the Covid-19 pandemic. Sadly, the environment seems to be falling lower and lower in the country’s priority list.
Sharing his thoughts on conservation in Sri Lanka with us, Environmental Foundation Ltd. (EFL) Director Rukshan Jayawardene said: “There seem to be more problems than solutions.” Citing the most recent efforts of the Wildlife Protection, Adoption of Safety Measures including the Construction of Electrical Fences and Trenches, and Reforestation and Forest Resource Development State Ministry to mitigate the human-elephant conflict by digging deep, wide trenches – a deeply-controversial move that saw the Centre for Environmental Justice (CEJ) file a Fundamental Rights (FR) petition at the Supreme Court (SC) to halt such operations on the grounds of them being ecologically ineffective and functioning as a smokescreen for illegal sand-mining.
“Conservation efforts need to be intensified,” Jayawardene said, “especially when it comes to poaching and clearance of land in Protected Areas and the areas adjacent to them. The Government needs to work with a clear vision on how you should go forward with conservation. Current conservation efforts are constantly conflicting with agricultural issues and other needs.”
Conservation at a macro-level
Wildlife and Nature Preservation Society Sri Lanka (WNPS) President Spencer Manuelpillai also spoke about counterproductive policy and decision making and its impact on conservation. As the world’s third-oldest nature protection society, and the first in Sri Lanka, the WNPS was the driving force behind setting up Sri Lanka’s Department of Wildlife Conservation, the national parks we enjoy today, and drafting Sri Lanka’s cornerstone conservation legislature, the Flora and Fauna Protection Ordinance.
Manuelpillai noted: “There is an absolute disregard for natural habitats and a fair amount of disruption happening that is going to have very long-term impacts.” Also referring to the recent issue around digging trenches to mitigate the human-elephant conflict, Manuelpillai explained that this situation highlighted the downside of the State’s sometimes counter-productive conservation solutions in two ways: “Firstly, there is the provision that it doesn’t solve the problem because the elephants are on both sides of the trenches, but the bigger issue is that these trenches are going to cause a lot of other ecological complications, like cutting migratory routes taken by other animals, for example.
“Secondly, there is an absolute blind eye being turned to a lot of the issues experts are pointing out. We are not scientists; interest and passion drive us,” Manualpillai shared, “but even when more learned people point out issues, they [national authorities] don’t seem to care.”
A key theme for conservation for 2022 is land – from preventing habitat loss through the reclamation of land for agricultural and other industrial use, to the increase of natural forests in order to build more sustainable habitats and wildlife populations.
University of Colombo Department of Zoology and Environment Sciences Professor in Zoology Prof. Sampath S. Seneviratne gave The Sunday Morning Brunch some insight on this, explaining that while national parks were designated to protect large animals like elephants, leopards, deer, and so on, as well as smaller animals, the majority of Sri Lanka’s biodiversity lay in unprotected areas and especially in Sri Lanka’s wet zone.
“The problem is the wet zone has the highest human population size, the biggest industries, the biggest schools, the largest cities, and highways, so forests in the wet zone have been reduced to small plots of isolated forests.”
In the case of birds, for example, 90% of Sri Lanka’s endemic birds are found in the Hill Country and the Wet Zone; roughly the same is true of our amphibians. In fact, Prof. Seneviratne shared that Sri Lanka had over 250 species of endemic frogs living in its rainforest canopy and not only were these frogs endemic to Sri Lanka, but they had also, over the years (and we mean millions of years – Sri Lanka’s forests are over 150 million years old) developed very specialised adaptations that allowed them to survive in rainforest canopies where they had much less access to water than other frogs would. For example, their tadpoles live the whole larval stage of their lives within the egg to minimise the amount of water they need – a form of behaviour not observed among frogs anywhere else in the world.
Moving forward
With Sri Lanka being the bountiful hub of biodiversity that it is, it is now more vital than ever to protect its biodiversity, or as Prof. Seneviratne, put it, its “green gold”. And this is where looking at conservation at a macro-level comes in.
The diversity of species within our island means, automatically, that some species will dominate conversation, and by extension, conservation, because of their charisma. Some of Sri Lanka’s most charismatic species include elephants, leopards, and blue whales (though blue whales, despite their charisma, are critically endangered with the situation worsening, in part because of the stresses of overtourism). These charismatic species often pull focus and funding away from other less-compelling species.
However, this is not always a bad thing. “In global conservation, about 90% of money for research and conservation gets diverted to a few characteristic megafauna like tigers, lions, jaguars, and so on, and some people are quite unhappy. But one way of looking at this is that those species are flagship species – they’re conservation ambassadors – and as animals, they occupy large areas and are generalist in their use of habitat and environment. By protecting them, you conserve their habitat and conserve other species who don’t have that same charisma. Charismatic species play an important role, so there is no harm in focusing on conservation efforts for these species. A downside, however, is that certain animals which require specific conditions to survive might get overlooked.
Key for advancing towards effective conservation in 2022, however, is rebuilding habitats to conserve the animals within them, with both Manuelpillai and Prof. Seneviratne emphasising on the need to connect isolated forest patches and create larger connected habitats for the species limited to the isolated patches to be able to spread out and grow more sustainably.
