Do environmental advocacy campaigns drive successful forest conservation?

When a final agreement to protect the Great Bear Rainforest was announced in February 2016, it was hailed as a major victory for First Nations and environmental activists. More than 85 percent of the vast temperate rainforest on the Pacific coast of British Columbia, Canada, was made off-limits to industrial logging, and the rights of First Nations as decision-makers on their traditional lands were codified into law. The impacts of the Great Bear deal will likely be felt far beyond British Columbia. “They really set a global precedent for large-scale conservation,” Nicole Rycroft, executive director of the Vancouver-based environmental group Canopy, told Mongabay at the time. “The fact that it’s human well-being alongside large landscape conservation means it can be applied to places like [the] Leuser [Ecosystem in Indonesia] where millions of people live on the land and depend on it.” At 3.6 million hectares (13,900 square miles), the Great Bear Rainforest represents roughly one-quarter of all intact temperate rainforest left in the world. By the mid-1990s, it had become the scene of a fierce struggle between activists concerned about the destruction of old-growth forests and the forestry industry that was clear-cutting British Columbia’s forests. Newspapers dubbed this struggle “the War in the Woods.” More than 900 people were arrested in 1993 alone for taking direct action to stop the logging. But while protests and blockades were halting loggers’ work in one valley, the next valley over might be razed to the ground — and this fragmentation of the forest…

from Conservation news https://ift.tt/2uwyCSF
via IFTTT