Presumably, we can all agree that conserving our natural wonders and resources is a noble and necessary task. The question, then, is how best to go about doing so. To find out about one innovative approach, we spoke with Sibylle Riedmiller, the founder and Project Director of Chumbe Island Coral Park (CHICOP).
Located off the coast of Tanzania, CHICOP is a nature reserve that combines conservation with environmental research and education. It is a private initiative that aims to be sustainable not only in an ecological sense, but in a financial one as well. Rather than relying on donor aid or government subsidies, the park supports itself through ecotourism, as it brings travelers and students from around the world to experience the island’s coral reefs, pristine beaches, and rare wildlife.
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What are some of the main threats to coral reefs throughout the world and around Chumbe Island in particular?
The threats around the world are well known: overexploitation and destruction of coral reefs by unsustainable and destructive fishing methods (in Tanzania dynamite fishing and beach seining in particular), coral mining, pollution by coastal development and intensive agriculture, and last but not least, the effects of climate change: coral bleaching and acidification of seawater.
We have since 1992 been able to stop fishing and anchorage in the Reef Sanctuary on the western side of Chumbe Island, which is now a small totally protected and fully managed marine park. However, the corals there also suffered temporarily, but quickly recovered from the 1998 worldwide bleaching event, and we needed active intervention to control Crown-of-thorn starfish and Diadema sea urchin outbreaks from 2003.
At present, the reef is in excellent condition concerning biodiversity and biomass, compared to many other reefs in the region, as shown by our regular monitoring and comparative research by independent researchers. There are over 200 species of reef-building corals, which is about 90% of all found in the region, and at least 423 species of fish, and we are still counting! When the world-renowned coral specialist Charlie Veron visited Chumbe a decade ago, he even found a new coral species which he wanted to name ‘Oulophyllia chumbensis’, but then the specimen got lost and we’re waiting for an opportunity to send another one…
Nevertheless, even the most professional and effective MPA management can do little against the effects of global climatical trends that are indeed worrying. With our Environmental Education and Awareness programs for government officials, fishers, schoolchildren, and last but not least, ecotourists, we work towards changing human behavior, which will determine what we leave behind to future generations: a healthy, productive and stunningly beautiful coral reef, or more underwater graveyards like there are so many in the region and worldwide.
Getting the Chumbe Island project up and running turned out to be a long and trying process. Would it have been easier to do somewhere outside of Africa?
Around the world, nature conservation has historically been a state monopoly, and private sector involvement and investment was not often encouraged. In this respect, we were fortunate to find and take advantage of a political and legal window of opportunity in Zanzibar in the early nineties that made Chumbe possible. The absence of limiting conservation policies, laws and institutions allowed for unique and very innovative contractual arrangements between the Government of Zanzibar and Chumbe Island Coral Park Ltd. that created the park, based on political reforms ending decades of isolation of Zanzibar, including new investment policies that encouraged direct foreign investment.
On the other hand, major governance issues, such as institutional weaknesses and rent-seeking by some officials delayed implementation and thus increased investment and operational costs unnecessarily, which obviously has an impact on investment success and commercial viability. It took us 8 years of park development until we could open for commercial operations, and until a few years ago, the Project Manager had to spend up to 80% of her time dealing with cumbersome government bureaucracy on routine issues, not island operations as you may expect. This has improved now fortunately.
In addition, there are no tax incentives for investing into non-commercial park establishment, management, research and education programs, which now make up for about a third of our staff and operational costs and thus reduce profits accordingly. Indeed, we employ 42 staff with only seven rooms, which is three times the international average for eco-lodges according to a recent study of the International Finance Corporation. All this is not really acknowledged. These particular governance framework conditions may indeed be more favorable elsewhere.
Another reason why private investment into conservation may be less attractive in Africa is that there is so much competition from generously funded donor aid. For example, for a donor-dependent country like Tanzania, where over 40% of the government budget is paid by donors, there is much temptation to see state-run conservation as a more ‘profitable’ approach for both, government and aid agencies. Local people in and around the parks rarely benefit from this bonanza and are quite often alienated, not to mention sustainability, which is systematically undermined, in spite of all good intentions and declarations to the contrary. It is like drug addiction, the more you get the more you need.
It may sound cynical, but aid agencies also have institutional and vested interests (William Easterley once described them as a ‘Cartel of Good Intentions’) and are not particularly known for transparency and accountability neither back home nor to local people in recipient countries. There is an incredible amount of wasteful spending and leakage when aid money funds conservation, and there are real concerns about ‘aid effectiveness,’ which are not really addressed, as the spending pressure is so high. I have worked in the aid industry for most of my professional life and believe that I know what I’m talking about.
What are some of the challenges you have run into that are unique to running a marine park rather than a nature reserve on land?
Indeed, Tanzania’s most important tourism attractions are the world-famous terrestrial wildlife parks, and the government has decades of experiences in establishing and managing them, though with very limited community and private sector involvement. Just think of the world-famous Serengeti, Ngorongoro crater, Kilimanjaro parks among several more!
In contrast, marine conservation is a fairly recent addition to the development agenda here, and policies and the legal and institutional framework were only created from the mid nineties. The privately established Chumbe Reef Sanctuary was actually the first managed Marine park in Tanzania, and also officially recognised by the Zanzibar government in 1994 and the international conservation community (UNEP-WCMC, IUCN) from 1995.
Being a front-runner at local, national (and even international) levels has its costs. People don’t understand what you are talking about, don’t believe you, suspect a hidden agenda. In the early nineties, few people in Tanzania knew anything about coral reefs, they are not taught about in schools and the national language has no word for them (even fishers refer to them as rocks and stones). So officials wondered why this foreign investor cared so much about those underwater rocks? It took many years of awareness creation and actually proving on the ground that all the conservation and education work is real, until some of this was understood and acknowledged. International recognition is of utmost importance here as well, and we worked hard for that. The many prestigious international awards won by Chumbe, both for conservation and ecotourism, helped convince officials and the public that the Chumbe Project is indeed something Zanzibar can be proud about.
Also, where private land tenure is well accepted, as in many countries even in Africa, private reserves can be developed with relative ease by the owners. In contrast, water bodies, in particular the oceans, are commonly seen as public property or no-man’s land, and badly suffer from the tragedy of the commons around the world because of that. It is the Wild West (or East) out there, where massive overexploitation and destruction of marine resources threaten the productivity of fishing grounds. In Tanzania, rampant dynamite fishing all along the coast is the biggest challenge.
Nevertheless, turning the whole of the uninhabited Chumbe Island and the adjacent reef into a park, was an accepted investment proposition in the early nineties, and we are grateful for that. As you can only lease land in Tanzania anyway, the idea of leases and contracts for both, the western reef of Chumbe and the virgin coral-rag forest on the island seemed fairly logical. The creation and official recognition of the Reef Sanctuary and Management Agreement with the Government of Zanzibar have worked well so far, together with the development of the Chumbe Forest Reserve. In fact, we run an island reserve, thus doing what is demanded in the conservation world today, that is integrated ecosystem based management rather than protection of particular species only.
The downside is of course that leases and contracts have a limited duration and extension is not guaranteed, and may be subject to political pressures and thus insecurity. Ideally, nature conservation should be for perpetuity. Thus policies and instruments need to be developed that increase security of tenure for the conservation-minded investor. Investment into conservation is by definition long-term, foregoing short-term profits from resource exploitation, and there need to be incentives for that!
Altogether, the challenges have more to do with the fact that Chumbe is a privately established and managed park based on leases and contracts, and we share these challenges with other private nature reserves around the world.
What role does environmental education play in your enterprise and in conservation in general?
Environmental Education and Awareness creation on coral reef ecology and marine conservation have always been on the top of our agenda, indeed one of the main reasons for creation of the park. Even the company registration documents are explicit on that.
As mentioned above, to win the support of government officials for the project in the early years, a lot of time has been spent for awareness creation on coral reef conservation among them. The Park rangers have also been ‘educating’ local fishers for many years, as explained further down, and this continues up to today.
Indeed, you may have expected me to mention ‘fishers’ among the main challenges to the park above. Interestingly, people in the conservation world always assume that fishers are the greatest challenge to marine parks. They were not around Chumbe, as few people depended on this reef before creation of the park, and because we put so much emphasis from the very beginning on communicating with them.
For a number of years already, schools are the main target of our Environmental Education Program. There is a classroom in the Visitors’ Centre on Chumbe with a library and many interesting exhibits, and CHICOP has, since 1999, organised school excursions for secondary students and their teachers to Chumbe Island. Until 2008, over 2500 students and 500 teachers from more than 35 secondary schools, as well as some primary schools and local and overseas universities have visited Chumbe Island. They come for a one-day school trip and are taken along nature trails by the rangers and also learn how to snorkel, which is a unique opportunity for girls in particular!
Teachers are also given guidance for practical field based environmental education. Relevant teaching materials have been developed and teachers’ seminars organised to help prepare and evaluate these island excursions. As coral reefs hardly figure in school syllabi and examinations of both primary and secondary schools, teachers had to be convinced that the Chumbe Environmental Education program is not a waste of time, and together we have managed to explore topics in the syllabi that can be used to create a link between the island excursions and classroom teaching in schools.
CHICOP has also encouraged the formation of Environmental clubs in schools, and now created the “Chumbe Challenge Environment Award” for students. Fortunately we always had very competent and committed volunteers helping us with the Education program (and other programs) and taking it to the professional level where it is now, hopefully also gradually influencing the formal education system, though this is a very long process.
Last but not least, all guests to Chumbe are also taken along nature trails in the forest and the reef by the rangers, and are also experience the eco-architecture and sustainable technologies of the bungalows, where water and energy needs are provided by rainwater catchment and solar panels, and where composting toilets avoid any sewage. Indeed, everything on Chumbe is part of an educational experience for everybody!
Fishing has long been a staple livelihood around Chumbe Island. What interactions do you have with the local fisherman?
This is actually not true! The coral reef west of Chumbe Island has traditionally been a no-go area for local fishing boats, as it borders the shipping channel between the capital Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar, where the local traditional sailing boats would be in danger and also obstruct the way of large vessels. Also, when we started to develop Chumbe in the early nineties, few boatmen could afford the outboard engines needed to go to this most distant of the islets surrounding Zanzibar town.
After much search around Zanzibar in 1991, I actually choose Chumbe for the park for this very reason, that it wasn’t much fished and that there would be no need to displace local people!
Nevertheless, there was some local fishing going on in the area of the future park, and it was to be expected that fishing pressure would increase with the growth of both, the local population and tourism. Therefore, conditions appeared favorable for the creation of a marine park that depended on co-operation with local fishermen, not government enforcement. From the very beginning our main argument with local fishers rested on the potential of a small no-take zone, to become a major breeding ground for fish, and thus restock fishing grounds in the vicinity, the famous ‘spill-over effect’!
Thus ex-fishers were recruited as Park rangers from neighboring fishing villages and employed and trained by volunteers from 1993, mostly for communicating with local fishers, on why healthy coral reefs were important for the future of fisheries and the reasons for totally closing the reef sanctuary.
This approach worked well. Indeed, after a few years some fishers started reporting increased catches around the park, though the effect can of course be reduced by more fishers coming to the area.
Fortunately, for over a decade, and due to the committed work of our park rangers, we have no major problems with fishers or other users, and the project is well accepted by the local communities. This puts us in a unique position among Tanzanian parks, but then the closed area is relatively small which makes surveillance easier of course.
As a measure of success, we were very pleased indeed, when some fishers interviewed by a researcher some years ago even suggested that CHICOP should close and manage another reef in the area, to also turn it into a fish breeding ground!
As a bottom line, we strongly believe in the benefits of training local fishers as park rangers, rather than recruiting civil servants for this role who often come from upland regions with a different cultural background, as is the case in most Tanzanian marine parks. We understand that government can only employ formally educated people, while fishers have less access to the education system traditionally and very rarely study at universities. You may actually not find a single marine biologist in the country who has a fishing background!
It is one of the advantages of private park management that you are not bound by such restrictions and can employ and benefit local people directly, which makes a huge difference to them. The time and costs of training on the job are considerable of course, but then you have very competent and committed staff who are also respected by their communities. Our rangers now run the park and all monitoring and education programs, assist researchers and also act as enthusiastic and very knowledgeable guides. Indeed, our visitors’ book is full of praise for our rangers and for all staff, most of whom we trained ourselves on the job! I also find the website www.TripAdvisor.com very interesting for independent guest feedbacks, where the rangers are often mentioned by name.
Are the attitudes towards conservation – including the actions of governments, private enterprise, and civil society – moving in a positive direction in Africa?
This is an interesting and complex question, I can only answer from our perspective.
Certainly, the large-scale plundering of forests and oceans has accelerated massively in recent years, also in Tanzania, driven by corrupt networks of government officials and local and foreign business people, often from China. Though national parks generate income like never before from the booming tourism industry that has become a leading sector of the economy, the government nevertheless promotes massive infrastructure projects and resource extraction in protected areas, such as the building of a soda ash factory in the world-famous tourism attraction and Ramsar wetland site Lake Natron that would wipe out the endangered Lesser Flamingos, and the planned new deep sea harbour in Mwambani Bay, which happens to be an area also earmarked for a marine park to protect the Coelacanths, a recently found sizeable population of this Cites I species of extremely rare fossil fish. Not to mention local fishers and seaweed farmers who would loose their livelihoods!
Local people start reacting as resources they lived on for centuries are being depleted and they are driven out, the tourism industry is up in arms, and the press has become very outspoken to report such plunders, something unheard of only a few years ago.
Therefore, Yes, - there is much more awareness, much more sense of urgency about protection and preservation of parks and wilderness areas, their biodiversity and ecological services, and more understanding of the role of ecological services in supporting sustainable development for local people. Certainly there is also more awareness and involvement of communities and private enterprise in conservation.
For example, in Tanzania, policies and legislation were enacted for community-based conservation and community-based tourism, but implementation by government is slow or even stagnant. Therefore, some tourism operators have now taken the initiative and started working directly with local communities, to win their cooperation in exchange for a share of the profits, in the photographic tourism and hunting industry and even around coral reefs. The Friends of Maziwi Island Society is one interesting case, where tourists pay an extra snorkeling fee to local fishers for patrolling and keeping dynamite fishers out of this island off Pangani, which is a national park but not managed on the ground by Government. These are encouraging developments of direct win-win arrangements between resource users from the formal and informal sectors who share a common interest in preserving nature for the benefit of all.
On the other hand, No, as governance problems, lack of transparency and accountability remain a major problem, and short-term, sometimes personal, profit seeking schemes supersede concerns for long-term sustainable management and environmental conservation of resources for the majority of people and future generations. Also, even where well-funded, many conservation activities still only manage of fraction of what is needed to ensure ecological integrity. There is also a real problem of lack of political will for law enforcement (e.g. concerning dynamite fishing in Tanzania), and lack of coordination and duplication of efforts by international agencies. Development agendas are sometimes donor-driven and follow well-funded international fashions, while effective action on the ground that responds to local problems is sacrificed for the sake of ‘staying in business’ in a particular country.
If you could meet any African artist – author, painter, sculptor, musician, lyricist, singer, designer – who would it be? Why?
We are lucky to have an African musician working with us as Management Assistant: David Murphy who has his own band in Zanzibar called “Akenathon Family”. Zanzibar has also become a regional cultural center with the yearly Festival of the Dhow countries, the Zanzibar International Film Festival ZIFF and Busara Music festival. I personally love good movies, both documentaries and feature films, and make sure to see as many films as possible shown during ZIFF and rarely found elsewhere, and meet the directors who are sometimes present. Last but not least, tourism has created a thriving market for local artists and handicraft, and you can still find many beautiful pieces of artwork, such as paintings and carvings among the mass-produced souvenirs. Our bungalows on the island are decorated with original TingaTinga paintings, a style typical for Tanzania that has become famous around the world.