Biodiversity perfect storm: 10 years on

In October 2023, I attended a workshop in Hanoi to review the results of three years of camera trapping in 10 protected areas in the Annamites as part of the USAID Biodiversity Conservation Activity (BCA), which WWF is leading in partnership with ENV, Fauna & Flora, HELVETAS, Re:wild, and IUCN. It was a chance to reflect on what has been accomplished over the last 10 years in terms of protected area management and wildlife conservation, and the challenges that remain.

The 2012 article concluded: “The major constraint on improved protected area management in Vietnam is the lack of a central body with the authority and capacity to support and intervene at the site level. All but six of Vietnam’s 164 protected areas are managed by the provinces. As a result, Vietnam does not have a national protected area system but rather a highly decentralized system in which biodiversity conservation is often subordinated to local development imperatives. Without stronger accountability and performance, very little else matters. Current discussions over best practices in zoning and benefit sharing, for example, do not address the fundamental problem, which is that protected areas are not primarily managed for biodiversity conservation.”

The October workshop confirmed that this conclusion remains valid. A handful of staff in Hanoi struggle to provide effective oversight over (now) 167 protected areas. (By comparison, Thailand’s Department of National Parks has a staff of 400 in Bangkok and a 2022 budget of $280 million.) The solution, which BCA and other internationally supported projects have long advocated, is to make protected areas legally responsible for reporting on the state of biodiversity on a regular basis. At present, the protected area managers are only legally responsible for reporting on forest cover and forest fires.

BCA has tested a camera trap-based wildlife monitoring protocol that could be immediately implemented in all forest protected areas. But until there is a legal requirement to monitor and report on wildlife this cannot, under the Vietnamese legal system, happen.

The other challenge raised at the workshop was the devastating impact of snaring on wildlife. Cheap to produce and easy to set, snares can catch all ground-based wildlife--emptying the forest, as the camera trap results show. Snares sustain the illegal wildlife trade by supplying wildlife restaurants with ungulates, civets, and other species that have survived in sufficient numbers to be worth hunting.

Photo: Snares were collected by forest rangers © Rewild

WWF presented the results of 10 years of intensive snare removal in the Central Annamites. After five years, the number of snares removed had fallen sharply, but the patrol teams are still removing about 20,000 snares/year from two protected areas covering 30,000 hectares. More worrisome, snaring seems to have stabilized in recent years, with no further decrease.

Investing more in snare removal clearly isn’t the solution. The fundamental problem is that law is so narrowly defined that snaring is de facto legal. Even if it were criminalized, rangers face strong disincentives when it comes to arresting and prosecuting snare layers. As a result, snares continue to get set in large numbers, extirpating ground-based animals. What’s needed is legislation that criminalizes the production, transport, and laying of snares inside Viet Nam’s protected areas and rangers must be backed by the protected area management and provincial government when they apprehend snarers.

BCA has another 18 months to run. An enormous amount has been achieved in terms of building capacity and generating knowledge. To ensure that this progress is permanent, there is a need to introduce legislation to, first, provide the legal basis for systematic camera trap-based monitoring in protected areas, and second, to criminalize snaring. If these are done, Viet Nam can start to restore wildlife through internationally supported re-wilding programs that can, over time, lead to the recovery of much of Viet Nam’s outstanding biodiversity.