International Nature Conservation

Uzbekistan, a pearl of the Silk Road, is an area of extraordinarily accumulation of well-preserved medieval Islam towns and monuments remembering the then extensive empire controlling considerable parts of Central and Southwest Asia. The current Republic of Uzbekistan boasts from the natural science point of view valuable areas of international importance. The country has legislatively developed nature conservation system aiming particularly at protecting the human environment; nevertheless, it can only in a limited way reduce natural wealth destruction which has been threatened by demands from the rapidly developing most populous Central Asian republics. Therefore, we can visit a UNESCO World Heritage Site as well as to watch one of the world’s biggest environmental disasters ever there. 

If there are no customers, there will be no illegal wildlife trade.
Jane Goodall interviewed by Lauren Kearney (2016)

Five decades provide a suitable possibility to consider the birthday person’s life up to now and in future. Therefore, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) we not only remember establishment and mission of the important international hard law but we also try, although with a certain amount of subjectivity, to assess its implementation in the Czech Republic.

The country in a nutshell
By African standards, Gabon located on the Equator in the Gulf of Guinea is a small country (267,670 km²); on the equator in the Gulf of Guinea (3.5 times the Czech Republic’s territory), it has only around 2.2 million inhabitants. In The capital, Libreville, less than a million people lives, and the total proportion of the urban population is close to 90%. The number of inhabitants is growing by 2.5% annually, female fertility is approx. 4. Roughly, 80% of the country’s territory is covered by primary or secondary rainforest and a smaller part by savannah. Only approx. 1.2% is used as arable land: at the same time, the rainforest coverage has been practically stable (only a 1% decrease in 10 years). 

In 2021–2023, the Nature Conservation Agency of the Czech Republic (NCA CR) together with the Finnish Environment Institute SYKE, implemented a two-year project entitled as Strengthened protection and sustainable use of biodiversity in Armenia in line with the European standards funded from the European Union’s Twinning programme. The main project partner and beneficiary of the project outputs was the Ministry of the Environment of Armenia.

The damage caused to Ukraine’ s nature as a result of the full-scale military invasion of the Russian Federation started on February 24, 2022 has had a pan-European dimension and the consequences of hostilities for biodiversity will be seen across the continent. The network of protected areas in Ukraine is an essential component in preserving Europe’s biodiversity. The network protects mountain ecosystems within the Carpathian and Crimean Mts., key areas for migration and nesting of waterfowl on the coast of the Azov and Black Seas, peat-bogs, natural forests on Polissya, and unique steppe ecosystems on the East and the South of Ukraine. Protected areas are home to many wildlife species and represent different natural habitat types, some of them are unique within Europe including endemic ones.

When one says “nature conservation”, many people recall various boards with a notice “protected area”. It is no surprise. Not only in the Czech Republic territorial protection or area-base conservation is among the oldest and at the same time most common approaches in protection, conservation and management of natural and landscape heritage. Moreover, there have been recently appearing various opinions whether protected areas really fulfil their mandate and whether area-based conservationdeserves at least a significant renovation (BHOLA et al. 2020, FENG et al. 2021, WALSH 2021, JONES et al. 2022, RAYMOND et al. 2022, ROBSON et al. 2022, WAUCHOPE et al. 2022, WILLIAMS et al. 2022, ZENG et al. 2022). This prompts the question about the current state of the art in global protected area network and in particularly what we have known on its real effectiveness. 

The trade in wildlife, its parts and products is at least as old as recorded humankind´s history. Without wishing to start thoughtful intellectual considerations we would like to stress that it had initially been a swap or a barter, later accompanied by monetary trade which consequently mostly replaced the former. Wildlife trade has recently been moving increasingly to the Internet. 

The European Union has been aware of the specific geopolitical status of Africa and its extraordinary importance for protection and conservation of biodiversity including natural ecosystems as well as of need to support sustainable economic prosperity there. The European Green Deal states: “The EU will launch a “NaturAfrica” initiative to tackle biodiversity loss by creating a network of protected areas to protect wildlife and offer opportunities in green sectors for local populations.” The article aims at proposing possible measures to meet the above high ambition.

One of the significant preconditions for enhancing and improving nature conservation, biodiversity protection respectively in protected areas is ecotourism development, undoubtedly strengthening job opportunity/employment and economic prosperity in the countryside and at the same time also local community involvement in nature conservation (Eagles et al. 2002).

As students, we read Zdeněk Veselovský's book ‘Voices of the Jungle’ describing his stay in Kaziranga National Park. In addition to numerous interesting facts about wildlife bionomics, the reader will find a number of notes on nature conservation half a century ago. A very valuable article on the simplest problems of biodiversity management in this Assam park was published by Douglas Chadwick in National Geographic (2010). With some worries but also hopes, we visited this area in March 2019. However, the experience exceeded our expectations, despite many problems that persist in the national park. After all, over a hundred of the symbolic Indian rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis) have been poached in Kaziranga in the last ten years, and the population around the park has grown by a third.