Landscape Conservation Approach in Nepal

1

Leveraging the

Landscapes Conservation beyond the Boundaries

Leveraging the landscapes conservation beyond the boundaries i

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ISBN: 978-9937-2-3974-5

Citation: Acharya, K.P., Tripathi, D.M., Joshi, J. and Gurung, U.M. (eds.). 2011.

Leveraging the Landscapes: Biodiversity Conservation beyond the Boundaries in

Nepal (Edited) 2011. Nepal Foresters Association (NFA) Kathmandu.

Published by Nepal Foresters Association (NFA)

Copyright: © 2011 Nepal Foresters Association (NFA).

Publication support: WWF, WTLCP and NTNC

Leveraging the landscapes conservation beyond the boundaries ii

Table of Contents

Preface

1. Landscape Conservation Approach in Nepal 1

Dinesh Raj Bhuju and Amulya Ratna Tuladhar

2. Landscape Conservation in Nepal: Achievement and

Lessons from Western Terai Landscape Complex Project 15 Ekraj Sigdel, Dinesh Karki, Jagannath Koirala, Basan Shrestha, Prakash Man Shrestha and Bijendra Basnyat

3. Terai Arc Landscape: A Sustainable Conservation Approach 30 Shiv Raj Bhatta, Ugan Manandhar, Santosh Nepal

4. Conservation Initiatives in Sacred Himalayan Landscape, Nepal 35 Ananta Bhandari

5. An Assessment of the Landscape Management Approach in the 42

Annapurna Conservation Area, Nepal Siddhartha Bajra Bajracharya, Ratna R. Timsina and Kiran K.C.

6. Community Seed Bank: Reaching to Poor Farmers and Building

Climate Resiliency in Western Nepal 54

Shree Kumar Maharjan, Abishkar Subedi, Pitambar Shrestha, Assa Gurung, Sajal Sthapit, Ram Rana, Ek Raj Sigdel, Dinesh Karki and Bhuwon Sthapit

7. Learning Perspectives and Analytical Framework for Framing PES in Nepal 68

Laxmi Dutt Bhatta and Rajan Kotru

8. Trans-boundary Landscape conservation in the HKH Region:

An Overview from Global and Regional Perspective 89 Krishna Prasad Oli

9. Role of Corridors in Linking Transnational Protected Areas in

Terai Arc Landscape 101 Shyam Bajimaya

10. Leveraging the Landscape: An Assessment of Options 118 Krishna Prasad Acharya, Rishikesh Ram Bhandary and Buddi Sagar Poudel

11. Towards Integrated Landscape Planning:

A Paradigm Shift in Conservation Planning in Nepal 128

Dinesh Karki, and Bijendra Basnyat

Leveraging the landscapes conservation beyond the boundaries 1

Paper 1

LANDSCAPE CONSERVATION APPROACH IN NEPAL

Dinesh Raj Bhuju1 and Amulya Ratna Tuladhar2 1Faculty of Science, Nepal Academy of Science and Technology

GPO Box 3323 Kathmandu 2Khwopa College, Tribhuvan University Affiliate

Dekocha, Bhaktapur

dineshbhuju@gmail.com

Summary

With the beginning of 20th century, the governments around the world started on setting the

core habitats aside as the solution to the dwindling wildlife population, the charismatic ones at

first. This management approach of protected areas did progress fundamentally from the twin

tradition of conservation and ecological discourse. As the scientific knowledge expanded and

practical experiences matured, we find the conservation approach undergoing a fundamental

shift. The protected areas are now planned with local people, and featured with ecological

corridors and other landscape characters to provide more space for species movement and

natural processes. Nepal set up its first national park in 1973, but very soon it not only realized

some of the adversities faced by the local people living around the park but also the space

constraint for population distribution and dynamics. Taking the advantage of new progresses

in conservation biology, Nepal adopted landscape approach and implemented in some of the

key areas without much delay. This paper discusses Nepal’s debut in conservation at

landscape level with theoretical antecedents in global contexts. Some of the works with

theoretical perspective pioneered by individual researchers and practical application involving

conservation organizations are described with examples. The paper is concluded with brief

mentioning of emerging issues like climate change and ecosystem services.

Key words: Chure Hills, Landscape ecology, Sacred landscape, Terai Arc Landscape Project,

Trans-boundary

Leveraging the landscapes conservation beyond the boundaries 2

Introduction

Species know no boundary but their fundamental requirements to exist and proliferate. The

ecological intricacies as revealed by scientific understanding of organisms living in the natural

environs have called for conservation beyond species and/or their protected habitat. Landscape

level conservation, thus, has been a realized management practice today. Nepal's commitment

to save and secure biodiversity is evidently reflected with the creation of an impressive

network of protected area system. As these areas are now turning out to be an island in the

midst of human dominated landscapes, landscape level conservation appears as a fitting

solution. The landscape conservation approach practiced in Nepal holds an exciting possibility

to effectively deliver conservation plans. This essay will look into the theoretical antecedents of

landscape conservation, its application in Nepal, and its promise to deliver effective

conservation.

Part I: Theoretical Antecedents

Landscape Conservation Approach in Nepal is one of the sustainable development solutions to

the threats of biodiversity loss. The approach is a practical, policy implementation mode that

draws its theoretical roots from two intellectual traditions: conservation and ecology.

Conservation has tried to harmonize the twin goals of protecting Nature from human activities

and finding ways to develop within the laws of Nature. On the other hand, ecology has tried

to understand the relationship between living organisms and their non-living environment so

that human beings, as living organisms, can thrive better in their environment. The following

paragraphs will outline key developments in these two intellectual traditions to the point

where they converge in the current ‘Landscape Conservation Approach in Nepal’.

Beginning with the alienation of human beings from Nature as a result of industrialization in

the 1700s in the West, as a result of rural, close-to-Nature livelihoods converging into the

dense, squalid, far-from-Nature livelihoods in the urban, Dickensonian factories, people of all

strata began to hanker for a reengagement with Nature (Adams, 1990). This reengagement of

Nature was perforce variegated according to mainly spatio-temporal variables but an entry

into this understanding can be made by adopting political economic stratification as an optic.

According to the political economy optic, following Marxian category of a ‘superstructure’ of

political and cultural processes on the ‘base’ of economic processes and structures in society

and nature/society relationships, the class that controlled political economic processes, the

ruling class of industrialists, politicians, feudal landlords, princes and regents, and residuals of

colonial power structures had better access to opportunities to re-engage with nature than

those at the bottom: menial labor, farmers, women, underclass and oppressed, and

marginalized ethnic groups who were forced to trade all of their labor output for bare survival

in the machine mode of the industrial era.

Leveraging the landscapes conservation beyond the boundaries 3

The political economic elite in the West, thus, went back to remnants of pristine Nature in

Europe (very little available) by means of country castles, manors, newly invented motor

vehicles but the satisfaction received was not enough. There was a growing call for unsullied

pristine Nature to wash away the spiritual grime of dirty wealth from the protean

industrialization. This phenomenon was seen in all walks of life from painters such as Paul

Gauguin exoticizing the earthy colors of Trinidadian women to romanticizing, celebrating and

idealization of Nature in Arts and Literature. Such inchoate socio-political strivings began to

congeal into discrete intellectual traditions to save Nature at a societal level in the beginnings

of the twentieth century.

In USA, for example, John Muir (1838-1914) was an early proponent of the ‘Preservationist’

Movement who argued for total hands-off from human beings (meaning money-making

industrialization, agriculture, mining, damming) to save pristine Nature like the Yellowstone

Geyser, the Old Faithful, Grand Canyon and the Hecht-Hechty spectacular landscape of the

Wild West of USA. His efforts represent the longing of the powerful elite that got a hearing

under President Theodore Roosevelt and the first National Park was established in 1872. Till

date, ‘National Park’ retains the heritage of ‘protected’ areas, carrying the baggage of an

antagonistic attitude towards the grubby, money-making by industry and agriculture that

privileges the rights of the elite to their aesthetic and spiritual satisfaction with coercive laws,

e.g. the National Park and Conservation Act 1973 laws and military protection of Royal

Chitwan National Park in Nepal.

For the super elite of Europe, the ex-colonialists, they did not have access to much undisturbed

Nature like the boundless Wild West their counterparts of USA had; so they ventured to their

colonial holdings in Africa, Asia and South America, the Tropics, where half of existing known

biodiversity still exists. It is in Africa, the land of teaming wildlife of zebras, lions, giraffes and

wildebeest that the ex-colonial big game, trophy hunters morphed their love of ‘shooting to

kill’ to ‘shooting to photograph’. As these ex-hunters were in the cutting edge of interaction

with pristine Nature, they were the first to be alarmed by the dwindling fate of the truly ‘wild’

wildlife and they sounded the call for protection of the objects of their hobby: the ‘wild’

wildlife. To this the burgeoning fields of biology, ecology, botany came to the service of

managerial tropical science, which offered a secular excuse to interfere in the affairs of their ex-

colonies in the name of science and nature preservation. Adams (1990) documents such

colonial roots of now secular conservation oriented international non-governmental

organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), IUCN, UNEP, FAO, etc. All of these

global organization got together to enunciate a World Conservation Strategy in 1980, to teach

the world how to save Nature and justify continued interference of the First World in the

affairs of the Third World in the guise of global nature protection (Redclift, 1992).

Along the way, over the last 200 years of inchoate First World elite actions to preserve Nature

for the satisfaction of their own kind only, there began a more articulated engagement with the

needs of the lower class for socioeconomic upliftment, ‘progress’ in the West and

Leveraging the landscapes conservation beyond the boundaries 4

‘development’ in the Third World. Even while John Muir was convincing Theodore Roosevelt

to set aside lands and laws to start the birth of the National Park movement first in USA then

worldwide, his contemporary Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946), who went on to establish the US

Forest Service argued equally effectively for ‘conservation’- defined as the management (not

preservation) of Nature for the maximum satisfaction of the most people for the longest time as

the rallying cry for the establishment of the US Forest Service at the start of the twentieth

century but also to manage natural resources rationally for both Nature and People (read low

class people), including the damming of the Colorado river to supply irrigation and electricity

to the people of California. During Pinchot’s time, ‘conservation’ was only a political slogan, a

pragmatic approach not buttressed with solid science or policy dimensions. Over the last

century, the science that contributed to the backbone of conservation was ecology and the

policy dimension was strengthened by development in economics.

In ecology, a term coined by Haeckel in 1866 the systematic study of the relationship between

biota and abiota developed from the vocation of natural history or observation of all nature in

the tradition of Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin to a more systematic study of

the relationship between larger life communities in lakes and dune landscapes by S.A. Forbes

(1844-1930) and H.C. Cowles (1869-1939) while F.E. Clements (1874-1945) H.A. Gleason (1882-

1975) argued over succession concepts. Early studies of temperate plant communities were

enlarged by study of tropical forest communities as well as community structure including

animal world. Later into a more experimental and mathematical study of individual organism

in controlled environmentalists by auto-ecologists such as G.F. Gause (1910-1986), A.J. Lotka

(1880-1949) and V. Volterra (1860-1940). In the meantime, animal ecologists introduced the

concept of ecological niche, e.g. Charles Elton (1900-1991). The latter half of the twentieth

century saw the development of ecology from the hierarchical scales from individual,

population, community to ecosystems, landscape, biomes and now global systems like the

Gaia.

The latter developments of post 1950s was aided by intellectual contributions of Geography,

the technology of air planes, rockets, photography, satellites, which was first pushed by the

Nazi Hitler’s desire for world domination with the latest technology of aerial photography; to

do this Carl Troll came into the picture by developing ‘landscape ecology’ in 1939 (Troll, 1939)

to study scales of lands rendered visible by aerial photos, hitherto not possible by land-based

platforms. The contemporary definition of ‘Landscape’ refers to a portion of land or territory

which the eye can comprehend as a single view, including all the objects so seen, especially in

its pictorial aspects. When this ‘eye’ was substituted by remote sensors such as air borne

cameras and satellite sensors, the landscape took on bigger dimensions, however, landscape

has traditions in both human geography and physical geography, referring to areas altered by

a unit of human processes or physical processes (Johnston et al., 1995). Geography, with its

long intellectual enquiry into the category of ‘space’ and how it changes, ‘spatial heterogeneity’

has used ‘landscape’ as a geographical category for over a century. With the technology

development of remote sensing driven by war industries and cold war defense motivations

Leveraging the landscapes conservation beyond the boundaries 5

and dollars, Landscape Ecology emerged as a sophisticated applied science that can capture

processes higher than ecosystems to global processes; however, in many countries, landscape

ecology is used to understand sub-national processes of nature-society relationships. While

general ecology theory focused on the study of more homogenous, discrete community units

organized in a hierarchical structure, landscape ecology built upon heterogeneity in space and

time, and frequently included human-induced landscape changes (Sanderson and Harris,

2000).

The recent emergence of landscapes as appropriate subjects for ecological study resulted from

three main factors: 1) broad-scale environmental issues and land-management problems, 2) the

development of new scale-related concepts in ecology, and 3) technological advances,

including the widespread availability of spatial data, the computers, softwares to manipulate

these data, and the rapid rise in computational power (Turner et al., 2001). Landscape ecology

emphasizes the interaction between spatial pattern and ecological process, that is, the causes

and consequences of spatial heterogeneity across a range of scales. The term landscape ecology

was introduced by the German biogeographer Carl Troll (1939), arising from the European

traditions of regional geography and vegetation science and motivated particularly by the

novel perspective offered by aerial photography. Landscape ecology essentially combined the

spatial approach of the geographer with the functional approach of the ecologists (Naveh and

Lieberman, 1984; Forman and Godron 1986).

Two important aspects of landscape ecology are: 1) it explicitly addresses the importance of

spatial configuration for ecological processes, and 2) it often focuses on spatial extents that are

much larger than those traditionally studied in ecology. The role of humans, obviously a

dominant influence on landscape patterns worldwide, is sometimes considered an important

component of a definition of landscape ecology. Indeed in the landscape approaches

characteristic of China, Europe and the Mediterranean, human activity is perhaps the central

factor in landscape ecological studies. Landscape ecology is sometimes considered to be an

interdisciplinary science dealing with the interrelation between human society and its living

space- its open and built up landscapes (Naveh and Lieberman, 1984). Landscape ecology

draws from a variety of disciplines, many of which emphasize social sciences, including

geography, landscape architecture, regional planning, economics, forestry, and wildlife

ecology.

One such use is the use of landscape ecology to develop landscape conservation approach

(Groom et al., 2006; Haufler, 1999; Brown et al., 2004). Here, the basic categories of landscape

ecology such as heterogeneous patches, matrix, corridors, edges, edge-effects, ecocline and

ecotones are used to explore ways to recoalesce fragmented patches of protected areas.

National park approach to protected area, despite phenomenal development this century,

covers only 10% of the land area in the world, with some areas like Nepal approaching 20%

and Bhutan nearing 60%. This was not considered adequate to address the degree of threats to

biodiversity worldwide and the ecosystem services biodiversity provides for the very survival

Leveraging the landscapes conservation beyond the boundaries 6

humankind. Increasing the areas under protection is clearly too costly in terms of political

capital, manpower, money and legitimacy in the face of poverty of the millions that demands

lands for economic upliftment (Budhathoki, 2003).

Even partial protection by means of buffer zone management and other options as community

based conservation management, while increasing the areas under partial protection, is not

considered adequate for the dispersed biodiversity and biodiversity outside of protected area

system such as the many species of medicinal and aromatic plants, non-timber forest products,

and other ecoregions of the Nepal Midhills. Now, climate change the prospect of global

warming is expected to be the biggest threat to biodiversity over the next century (Groom et

al., 2006) so there is an urgency to join fragmented patches of protected areas so they can be

operated at higher levels of ecosystem harmony, including for example the enabling of viable

metapopulations of tiger and rhino in the Terai Arc Landscape Project (TAL) (Karki et al., 2009;

Wikramanayake et al., 2004; Dinerstein and McDougal, 1998) and the snow leopards, Red

panda and Himalayan wildlife as in the case of Sacred Himalayan Landscape, Transboundary

Landscape Conservation and Mount Kailash Landscape Conservation (Sharma et al., 2007).

Part II Application in Nepal

In the landscape conservation approach in Nepal, the key approach is to relieve the bottlenecks

to migration and movement of animals so that a minimum viable population can be

maintained with genetic diversity and stability (Groom et al., 2006; Karki et al., 2009). This

ecological objective does present, however, novel policy challenges, since there are people

living in these bottlenecks, and some of them are rather poor and sometimes of different ethnic

groups, administrative and political jurisdictions or even different countries, and operating

under different sectoral outreach like forest, agriculture or local development ministry as well

as many local non-governmental organizations and community based organizations. There is

no ready-made policy road map that has been tested, so active learning from innovations made

in landscape conservation approaches in Nepal bear significance worldwide for greater cause

of biodiversity conservation in the larger context of sustainable development or the

harmonization of the needs of nature and the people. The following two figures summarize

the changing approaches biodiversity conservation leading to landscape conservation

approach in Nepal, extracted from Budhathoki (2005).

In the rest of the article, we will examine the case studies of landscape conservation approach

and analyze them from the perspective of their contribution to landscape ecology, conservation

Leveraging the landscapes conservation beyond the boundaries 7

Fig. 1. Landscape conservation complexes in Nepal. Source: Budhathoki, 2005

Fig. 2. Shifting conservation paradigms from island networks. Source: Budhathoki, 2005

policy, and their general contribution to the cause of global biodiversity services to humankind

and the sustainable development of poor peoples of Third World and Nepal.

In Nepal, landscape approach has been spearheaded by geographers and conservation

biologists. Specifically since 1990s, Nepali conservation scientists have been looking to enhance

conservation in areas outside protected areas and calling attention to contiguous landscapes

that are fast being fragmented. Beginning with 21st century, these theoretical approaches have

been supplemented by policy related approaches coming from sustainable development

paradigms such as participatory management and inclusion of marginalized groups of gender

and Dalits and greater awareness to address root causes of human development aspirations

Leveraging the landscapes conservation beyond the boundaries 8

and social inequity driving environmental degradation including the deterioration of

landscapes. Among the proponents are the UNDP/WWF/ICIMOD programs in Terai Arc

Landscape (TAL) Project, Western Terai Landscape Conservation Project (WTLCP), Sacred

Himalayan and Transboundary Conservation Projects in cooperation with Government of

Nepal line agencies such as the Ministry of Forests and Soil Conservation and its departments.

Harka Gurung (1939-2006) was one of the early eminent Nepali geographers who were

interested in the combination of both human and physical processes affecting the spatial

variability of human landscapes. As early as 1971, he wrote on the landscape patterns of Nepal

as determined much by its geographic setting and then the human activities (Gurung, 1971,

1989). The emphatic ridges that run east-west and numerous south-flowing rivers have defined

the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the country’s physiographic component, while the

lateral disposition of the country has caused bio-climatic variation from the arid west to the

humid east. As human attempts to adapt himself to the natural environment and in the

process leaves his imprint on the landscape. Thus, the three major geographic regions, viz.

Tarai, Hill and Mountain correspond to latitudinally arranged ecological zones. Based on these

natural settings, the major watershed, and population dimension, Gurung proposed regional

development plan, which surfaced in the Fourth Five-Year Plan of 1970-1975 (Sharma, 2007).

The other groups of leaders who have worked and contributed in developing and/or applying

the approach of landscape level conservation in Nepal are from landscape ecology domain:

forest ecologists, botanists, foresters and wildlife biologists.

In 1999, forest ecologist Dinesh Bhuju initiated and led a research team to prepare baseline

information on the ecology of the Chure Hills, the southernmost hills of the Himalaya also

known as Siwaliks (Bhuju, 2000). To conserve the Chure Hills, at landscape level, this study

aimed to identify key areas, with two-prong approach: 1) First determine areas with significant

changes in land use since 1958, 1978 and 1992; and 2) gather ecology-based information on the

Chure using grid-based samples (Bhuju, 2000, 2006, 2010). The project, supported by Resources

Himalaya, a Kathmandu based research organization, Nature Conservation Society of Japan

(NACS-J), and WWF/Nepal surveyed Chure (total area: 1,886,000 ha, length: 840 km) from east

(Mechi) to west (Mahakali) Nepal covering all major watersheds (Fig. 3), and accumulated

information on: i) land-use change, ii) forest structure and regeneration, iii) tree species

association at different altitudes, iv) local knowledge on plant use, and v) distribution of birds

and other fauna. Once a backwater of conservation, Chure is now in the national priority (see

Proceedings of National Seminar on Chure Environmental Study, June 15, 2010 organized by

Department of Soil Conservation and Watershed Management).

Leveraging the landscapes conservation beyond the boundaries 9

Fig. 3. Chure range in Nepal.

At corridor scale of landscape conservation, NTNC (National Trust for Nature Conservation)

took up a UNDP supported project on the Tiger-Rhino Corridor in 2001 (Thapa and Basnet

2006). The project focused its study in Barandabhar Corridor Forest adjoining to Chitwan

National Park (CNP) and aimed at promoting landscape level biodiversity conservation with

strong community-based management links to conserve endangered species. Very

significantly, the corridor is inhabited by relocated people from CNP. The Barandabhar Forests

serves as an important corridor of the Terai Arc Landscape (TAL), a program initiated by

Government of Nepal with the support of WWF Nepal Program encompassing 11 protected

areas of Nepal and India in 2001. Envisioning to set a landscape level management model for

safeguarding biological wealth and vital ecological functions of western Terai districts (Bardia,

Kailali and Kanchanpur), Government of Nepal in partnership seven national and

international organizations including UNDP, launched a 8-year long project of Western Terai

Landscape Conservation starting from 2005.

A cultural landscape study has also been conducted to describe and understand the

relationship of natural habitat and diverse ecosystem viz. agriculture, forest and grassland

ecosystems managed by human activities. Ram P. Chaudhary, a plant taxonomist and

biogeographer, got involved in an interdisciplinary research undertaken by a group of

biological and social scientists from Tribhuvan University and University of Bergen, Norway

between 2002 and 2006. The research project made invaluable contribution in cultural

landscape of Manang, a remote Trans Himalayan region in Nepal (Chaudhary, 2006).

The interpretation of landscape approach in Nepal, however, had been varying. In 1999,

Ministry of Forests and Soil Conservation of Nepal proposed Shey Phoksundo National Park

(SPNP) for inclusion on the World Heritage Convention for inscription for which it produced

Leveraging the landscapes conservation beyond the boundaries 10

six criteria, three natural and three cultural. The SPNP is a southern margin of Tibetan Plateau,

but along with adjoining Tscharka Bhot and Mustang. Therefore, conservation biologist Pralad

Yonzon (2001) argued with strong basis of landscape characters such as geology, soil, climate

and vegetation that the proposal was unempirical to truncate SPNP (Dolpo) from similar and

contiguous landscape of Mustang together with Tsharka Bhot.

The importance of trans-boundary cooperation in protected area management was realized in

mid 1990s; however, it remained at political level organizing few bilateral meetings with

bordering countries China and India and organizing a few training activities (Paudel et al.,

2008). The trans-boundary landscape approach was finally adopted with the initiation of the

Sacred Himalayan Landscape. The SHL includes five of the 19 eco-regions that comprise the

Eastern Himalayan Conservation Complex, and the high topographical relief, climatic

variation, and its position at the ecotone of several biogeographic regions confer the area and

the landscape, with a high level of biological diversity. Chandra P Gurung (1950-2006), a

geographer, who went on to be an eminent conservationist of Nepal, played a key role in

implementing the plan. This approach called for the combination of attention on human

processes of both cultural and economic dimensions in addition to the standard ecological

dimensions in the landscape conservation approaches for Nepal both in the mountains and the

plains (Gurung et al., 2006).

A group of researchers associated with ICIMOD (International Centre for Integrated Mountain

Development) also advanced the concept of trans-boundary conservation landscape. Chettri

and Sharma (2006) proposed developing a landscape with conservation corridors as

connecting links to existing protected areas (total number: 12; total area: 5,904 sq.km.) in the

Kangchenjungha complex that spread over a wide spectrum of ecological zones in eastern

Nepal, Darjeeling and Sikkim in India and western Bhutan. The landscape provides contiguous

habitat and unique situation where within a 100 km N-S transect, habitats range from Tropical

to alpine vegetation.

One recent example of application of landscape approach in Nepal is Kailash Scared

Landscape Conservation Initiative (CDB-TU 2010). The Kailash Sacred Landscape (KSL)-

Nepal complex is a part of the proposed trans-boundary landscape with the international

boundaries with China and India. This trans-boundary landscape totals about 31,252 sq km of

area around Mount Kailash, of which 42.5% falls in Nepal, 34.7% in China and 22.8% in India.

The proponents of the initiative have set three categories as primary criteria for delineation,

viz. (i) ecological, (ii) cultural, and (iii) planning and management. However, in application

only the third criterion of management is in effect as the KSL-Nepal includes four districts

Baitadi, Darchula, Bajhang and Humla, where Baitadi, a mid-hill district does not fit with the

rest three high mountain districts. On the other hand, districts such as Bajura, Mugu are not

included in the complex, though they contain similar geographic and cultural settings like that

of Darchula and other high mountain districts. The application of landscape concept in KSL-

Leveraging the landscapes conservation beyond the boundaries 11

Nepal, thus, indicates the fact that the concept has much been used with development motives

following the existing district administrative set-up.

The main contribution of these authors has been to argue for the inclusion of more areas for

conservation outside the existing protected areas due to endangerment of particular flora,

fauna, ecological and sometimes even cultural processes.

A review of landscape conservation approach in Nepal reveals a heavy commitment to the

social dimensions of conservation, ways of eliciting, sustaining and, if possible, enhancing the

effectiveness of local communities to rehabilitate and restore the human altered landscape

matrices outside the protected areas of national parks and conservation areas for maximal

ecosystem health (WWF/Nepal, 2004; NPC/UNDP/UNEP, 2010; Gurung, 2006). The social

dimensions may include community forestry, buffer zone management in which local

communities are given a share of protected areas incomes to buy their cooperation with legal

guarantees of their rights. On a continuum of interventions, help may be offered in awareness

raising informal education and publicity, trainings for capacity building, investment in gender

mainstreaming, or such social and economic upliftment that addresses the root diversity of

biodiversity degradation: poverty and social inequity.

At other end maybe explicitly ecology and biological rehabilitation of such human altered

landscapes from anti poaching efforts to ensure safe corridor for migrating animals to the

rehabilitation of greenery and degraded landscape to the level of protected areas natural state.

One of the early investments in landscape management is the enhancement in the quality and

quantity of database to allow sophisticated management. This may include inventorying of

landscape close to its natural state as was done by Bhuju et al. (2000) in Churiya or drawing of

GIS map for transboundary landscape conservation for Mt Kailash by ICIMOD.

IUCN, WWF and Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation (DNPWC) have

spearheaded the biology end of landscape conservation form tiger census and tiger ecology

and enhancement to restoration of tiger prey habitat in the protected areas and the reduction of

pressures on the protected areas by enhancing tree resources outside protected areas. The

Government of Nepal and UNDP have a more livelihood sustenance and social equity goals

within human altered matrix outside protected areas whose successful spinoff is the

restoration of ecological services to biodiversity and humans living there (WWF/Nepal, 2002).

Part III Promise of effective conservation

In a 2004 review paper, Budhathoki (2005) discusses the opportunities and challenges for

landscape conservation approaches in Nepal. He calls for a careful integration of national,

regional and local interests in planning and management of landscape conservation in order to

fulfill the integrated objectives of landscape level conservation.

Leveraging the landscapes conservation beyond the boundaries 12

Despite much experimental and supposedly secular and non-ideological experimentation with

different governance regimes, institutional innovations to co-opt the locals in the biodiversity

conservation across a landscape, there is much negative international and national baggage of

being perceived as external (outside country, outside village) interests on esoteric biodiversity

benefits over local (internal) needs to survive on the local natural resources without interfering

external legislation, policy, other demands.

On top of this is the changing milieu of decentralization in the country over the last few

decades giving birth to local rights for community forestry, local decentralization, and now

calls for institutionalizing federal decentralization of authority over the top-down command

and control management which INGO and central government and ministry have been doing

so far. In periods of political upheaval, all associated with earlier repressive power structures,

including military administered protected areas are rendered in to paper parks, i.e.

conservation only in reports with nothing on the ground.

Landscape approach is, therefore, an attempt to enlist a larger cross-section of people in

between the networks of protected areas in the cause of biodiversity conservation.

The emerging issues and options of Payment of Ecological Services (PES) of Biodiversity

Conservation, the implications of Climate Change policy initiatives such as Reduced Emissions

from Degradation and Deforestation (REDD), the National Adaptation Plan of Action (NAPA)

to effects of climate change on Nepal’s biodiversity, the implications of Federalism and the

trend towards decentralization of authority in nature conservation from the tradition of

centralized command and control policy administration just taking baby steps with

partnership with community participation in New Nepal. In one way new challenges and

opportunities will turn up. For instance, the trend towards federalism and the fears of political

fragmentation and decision making over a landscape opens up new opportunities for

developing payment for ecological services between and among landscape elements in country

for a federal set up or transboundary and global exchange as in REDD and NAPA climate

change adaptation protocols.

Leveraging the landscapes conservation beyond the boundaries 13

References

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