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Name: Paul Butler
Organisation: Rare (global conservation organisation based in the USA: www.rare.org)
Role: Senior Vice President
Nationality and main countries worked: joint British and St Lucian; worked all over the world including 25 years in the Caribbean. Now working throughout Asia (especially China, Indonesia, and the Philippines) as well as Central/South America (especially Belize, Colombia, and Brazil).
Why is conservation important in applied ecology?
Quite apart from their intrinsic value, humans rely on species and habitats and the ecosystem services they provide. Without ecology, humans simply could not exist, and yet our actions are often the main threat. People are the problem but they are also the solution.
What is your day-to-day job?
I work for the global conservation organisation Rare. Our approach is to work with local partners to achieve change in human behaviour that has the effect of conserving vital habitat, species, and ecosystem services, while also benefitting the local communities who live in those areas and rely on that environment the most. Social marketing for behaviour change is the core of our work, while capacity building through training local conservation leaders and practitioners is our delivery mechanism. Rare has worked in 56 countries on over 300 locally-led behaviour change campaigns focusing on threats as diverse as over-fishing, deforestation, bush meat, and pollution: we refer to these as Pride Campaigns.
As Senior Vice President, my role is multifaceted. About a third of my time is spent on our new program in China which is encouraging rural farmers in Hubei Province to switch to growing organic crops and organic cotton to make agriculture more sustainable. Cotton is one of the world’s thirstiest and dirtiest crops using massive amounts of water, fertilizer and pesticide. Moving to organic cotton reduces the adverse impacts of pesticide poisoning and eutrophication, while allowing local growers to command a higher price for their produce. A further third of my time at the moment is spent developing a new delivery platform for our training in the form of a ten-day workshop. Our typical Pride Campaigns involve a three-year programme that combines university-based training and field practicums back at the participant’s own sites. At the moment I am working on a “lighter touch” 10-day intensive course for situations when partners don’t need, or cannot afford, the three-year programme. The final third of my time is spent on the development side of Rare, especially visiting projects on the ground. A lot of my time is spent travelling!
You are involved with making conservation priority decisions. What’s your approach?
Conservation resources – be that time, money, or manpower – are finite. When you have limited resources, conservation initiatives have to be ranked in order of priority somehow. How this is done depends on personal views of individuals or conservation organisations and, in the latter case, also on their specific remit, scope and method of working. Rare undertakes in-situ conservation around the globe with local partners through its Pride Campaigns. We choose which Campaigns to support based a number of criteria, which include:
- Are the projects located in an area where there is high biodiversity under threat from human activities such as over-fishing, unsustainable farming practices, bush meat trade, and so on?
- Is there a human dimension – for example food security or water resources?
- Are threats primarily local in origin and is changing people’s behaviour likely to make a difference?
- Do we have committed local partners so the project has a good chance of success?
In terms of the first, the rationale here is simple – if you conserve a hectare of habitat that supports a very high number of species, then, in theory at least, you get more “bang for your buck” than if you conserve the same sized area with fewer species. That means much of our work is focused in the neo-tropics including Columbia which is listed as one of the world’s “megadiverse” countries, hosting close to 10% of the planet’s biodiversity. Worldwide, it ranks first in bird and orchid species diversity and second in plants, butterflies, freshwater fish and amphibians. We also work in the marine environment in Indonesia and the Philippines. This is at the heart of the coral triangle and has the most diverse coral reefs on the planet.
In terms of the second, our approach is fundamentally about the nexus of people and nature. We believe that conservation should not just be about working to conserve ecology; it should also be about improving the livelihoods of the people that depend upon this ecology. Any intervention should thus achieve both conservation and social results. For example, we work with fishers helping to establish functioning Marine Protected Areas that, through spill-over, both protect and preserve fish stocks but also improve fisher catch per unit effort and thus improving livelihoods.
As for the third, we are a behaviour change organisation so it is vital that change is possible by working with local people at a local level. As such, we work on problems that are driven by human behaviour, and even more than that, types of behaviour that we can directly influence using tools like social marketing. For example, there might be a low-lying coralline island in a very diverse area and where the human-nature links are very strong. However, if the main threat to that the island was sea-level rise due to human-induced climate change, there would be little we could do with the people on that island to change anything: the problem is external to that site. That is not to say that the problem is not a very real one or that the people and ecology of that island don’t need help, it’s just that it would not be a situation where we could realistically hope to effect change by working at a grassroots level. At best, our focus would be limited to helping them mitigate change through preserving reefs.
Finally, at Rare we do not deliver any projects directly so it is imperative to have good local partners who, with the right training, funding and support have the potential to effect the change that is needed.
The key thing is there is no one thing that can be used to prioritise action. We have a suite of criteria but we have to assess projects on a case-by-case basis to ensure that the tools we have are useful and needed. One thing that I think it is worth saying, though, is that sometimes it is important to take risks. We need to understand that not every intervention is going to succeed, or at least not every intervention is going to succeed to the level that we would like, but that does not mean that we should not try. The saying that really strikes a chord with me is “it’s better to light a single candle than curse the darkness”. Just because something is challenging does not mean that we should not consider it: challenges are made to be overcome. We just need to be as confident as we can be that we light the best candles we can with the resources we have got.
What is your most interesting recent project and why?
Oh there are so many to choose from! I’d probably say the Pride Campaigns that focus on near-shore fisheries and Marine Protected Areas, such as those in the Philippines. These campaigns are both challenging and exciting in equal measure. Marine areas are subject to what Hardin called the Tragedy of the Commons more than most environments – everyone takes from the common resource but very few people take any form or ownership or responsibility so very few people give anything back. That is especially the case with fishing, and it is an extremely challenging problem.
Rare is working with a host of local partners, including the Environmental Defence Fund, and the Sustainable Fisheries Group at the University of California, to empower the world’s poorest coastal communities to not just change the way they fish today, but to Fish Forever. Rare’s Fish Forever Programme has the duel aim of improving conservation of fish (and thus a whole host of other marine species) and improving the lives of local fishers and their communities – quite literally millions of fishers depend on the fish stocks and even more people rely on the fish protein that they catch. Our approach uses a concept often referred to as a TURF-reserve (Territorial User Rights in Fisheries coupled with reserves) – although it can be known by different terms, depending on local cultures and laws. The idea here is that there is a strict no-take zone, which is then surrounded by a buffer zone where fishers are given what we term privileged access (as distinct from a right, which is much harder to change or revoke if necessary). Science and experience has demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach. For example, studies of no-take areas have shown that they boost fish stocks by almost 450% (on average) inside the protected area and by over 200% (on average) in the area adjoining it. Healthy fisheries and coastal habitats provide additional benefits by enhancing coastal resilience and resistance to climate stressors while supporting the communities’ abilities to adapt to changing conditions. Think of the reserve as a bank account generating interest. Leave the account alone and you can live off the interest accrued and “paid out”.
The problem with many traditional Marine Protected Areas is open access means that anyone and everyone can take the spill-over. It’s like you carefully saving into your account but your neighbour takes the interest (and even raids the capital as well). In this case, you have no incentive to save as it’s the first person to get to the bank that wins. The TURF-reserve approach differs because of its concept of giving local fishers “privileged access” to the area to ensure that no one person takes everything. This encourages people to take “ownership” of their environment and zealously protect the no-take zone as they understand the benefits of doing so.
The TURF-reserve approach has not been developed by Rare, indeed this idea of assigning fishing rights or exclusive management privileges to individuals or a collective has existed for centuries, but we are one of the first to use the approach in so-called less economically developed countries. We also hope that using this method will help buffer other problems, such as the effects of climate change on coral bleaching, as protected and healthy reef systems have greater ecological resilience.
What’s the most satisfying part of your work?
All of the work we do is through our local partners: we are essentially capacity builders. These local institutions are often under-resourced and operating in impoverished areas. Watching them grow and seeing those we train blossom into leaders making a real and tangible difference in some of the most beautiful, most biodiverse, yet most threatened, ecosystems on earth is incredibly rewarding. We see the individuals we train, and the institutions they work for, learn new tools, deploy those in their local communities, build trust in their local communities, and actually achieve real conservation results. They grow in confidence and in their ability to do things like set up TURF-reserves in Asia or work on safeguarding important aquatic habitat in South America, thereby conserving biodiversity and habitats, is really, really, amazing.
What do you see as the main challenges in your field and how can they be overcome?
The challenges of what we do are often logistic. We are working in some of the most pristine, but also some of the remotest, areas on the planet. Moreover, these areas also tend to be impoverished and there can be quite high rates of crime or corruption. Challenges can vary from not having electricity or basic transportation to much more serious issues such as physical hazards to staff and partners. So, it is challenging for sure, but if there were no challenges, they would be no need. It’s easy to just say it is not worth bothering. But I don’t believe in that. Going back to the candle analogy, while one candle might not seem very bright, if each and every one of us lights one think what a light that will then be cast – a real beacon of hope for others to follow.
Finally, how did you get into conservation ecology and what advice would to others?
Well, my own story began when I was in my early teens and was fortunate enough to be able to travel to places such as Kenya, the Gambia, and Sri Lanka with people collecting for the Zoological Society of London. That, together with my love-term love of birdwatching, inspired me to want to become an applied ecologist. In my final year at University, I was part of a group of people who solicited commercial sponsorship went to census the St Lucian parrot, a bird endemic to the Caribbean island of St Lucia. That was in 1977, and there were around 150 parrots remaining in the wild. I was invited back to the island by the St Lucian government when I graduated the following year to start to put some of our recommended actions into practice. The upshot of that invitation was that I lived and worked on the island for 25 years, during which time I worked with the government and local communities to make the St Lucian parrot an emblem for St Lucia and for conservation. A lot of the work I did there laid the foundations for the Pride approach that we have subsequently used in Rare all over the world.
What advice would I give to others? In a nutshell seek out whatever experience you can and don’t give up! Conservation is competitive these days and it can take a while to break into the job market, especially if you lack experience. It’s a bit of a catch-22 as it is hard to get experience without being on the job ladder, but volunteering can really make a difference. That could be going on a volunteer expedition like I did or volunteering one day per month at a local nature reserve. All in all, though, being an applied ecologist in the conservation realm is a wonderful career and one that you can take an enormous amount of pride in, so make sure you chase your dreams!