Working towards strengthening community conservation, today we have with us Ruchinilo Kemp, co-founder of the Kenono Foundation, that’s focusing on community biodiversity conservation.
Tejal Sinha
Community biodiversity conservation, as it sounds, defines the efforts to protect biodiversity in which the locals and the community participate. It is possible to approach the conservation of biodiversity as a multilayered commons challenge. The importance of biodiversity to mankind as a whole, to ecotourism and other advantages in the region, and to local commons that create ecosystem services for human well-being in local communities.
In order to bring about a vision of communal ownership and responsibility for holistic community development in communities in Nagaland and the neighboring areas that depend on the forest, there is an organization in Nagaland called the Kenono Foundation. Its main focus is on building up local communities’ capacity for biodiversity and creating “conservation enterprise” models to aid in local conservation and set the bar for scalability and policy. And thus, for our weekly segment of the community-wise, we connect with the co-founder, Ruchinilo Kemp, who takes us through the cause.
He begins sharing, “In Nagaland, environmental conditions are a global problem, and we needed local connections to meet these global problems. While I was doing my fellowship programs, I worked around climate change, and with that experience, I continued to work in the same sector. So when I came to Nagaland, I saw there was huge potential to work with these huge channels. In order to work on community biodiversity conservation, the biodiversity that we have right now in Nagaland would fade away. So there was quite an urgent need to work on it. Nagaland is one of the hotspots. So Nagaland in particular has a long way to go.”
Conservation comes with a course. Particularly when it comes to community eco-tourism, and community biodiversity conversations, they are mostly people-led; they are not led by the government or forest people. And so, “as a part of their individual activities, they don’t really come up with budgets and funds. As part of monetary management, we do need resources. So wherever we look at the community, the conserved area is also a resource-rich area in terms of all biodiversity products. However, we need to conserve because we can go about exploiting these resources endlessly. So the idea behind eco-tourism is an alternative economic mechanism so that resources can be generated for other resources, which could be either used for the community’s sake or the poor people could live in the village and get access to these resources from the forests and have fun while managing the overall biodiversity conservation. Eco-tourism has a very strong business plan, but the use of profit doesn’t really go for the use of private individuals but goes to the community.”
Recently, on the occasion of World Environment Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the nation, stating that the country is moving ahead with a “very clear roadmap” to protect the environment and tackle climate change while also striking a balance between the present and future needs of people. However, in regard to this, Ruchinilo feels that this is slightly debatable. But he says, “I think right now, at least in terms of the articulation, everybody is saying that this is the roadmap to go, but no one is contesting. I wouldn’t say there is a roadmap, but there is a vision, a direction, that by 2030, India’s goals in terms of it would be better, and later green areas would be so much better. There is a broad direction in terms of a roadmap. But then the mobility and the mechanism, and as part of the implementation strategy, how you also include local electors and stakeholders, have to be discussed properly. Every year there should be a strong role for civil societies also.”
At present, they are working on a new initiative, as part of which they are working in two districts in Assam and Nagaland. Highlighting more on the initiative, he shares, “Through this initiative, we work around and support communities that are already working on conservation. We do not work on one thing and promote it; we also work towards developing alternate economic pathways to help communities do conservation. So as a part of this, we are working with farmer groups and cooperatives, where we sort of aggregate and procure coffee from them. These farmers and villagers are inhabited and live around conservation areas, so we try to create a better market source for their coffee. And then what we have done is develop community eco-tourism in these communities.”
