AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION OF THE ECO NATURE PROGRAM FROM AUGUST 17, 2023
Opening credits: < Eco Nature, a programme produced by RVS to talk about ecology, nature and the ecosystem related to the environment. Eco Nature with Ony Rasolomalala >
Ony (O) : Hello and welcome to Eco Nature with Ony Rasolomalala. And as we said, we’re going to talk about the ecosystem, ecology, nature and the environment. As with every show, we have a guest to talk about a particular topic. Today, we have Roda OPERMAN, Communication and Advocacy Officer at Madagascar Protected Areas and Biodiversity Fund (FAPBM). Hello Roda.
Roda (R): Good morning Mrs Ony Rasolomalala, thank you for inviting me. I’m very happy to be with you today.
O : Well, my very first question: what is a protected area?
R : A protected area is really a delimited territory, either terrestrial or aquatic, that has significant biological or economic value. I’ll try to simplify the definition a little. Basically, to define that a place can potentially be a protected area, that a place should be protected, it’s already necessary that there is a wealth of biodiversity in that place. For example, there must be an endemic species, or a unique landscape (e.g. Isalo), or a place where lemurs live (e.g. Andasibe Park). But the place can also be of cultural importance to the Malagasy people, as I said earlier about Isalo, which is also a Bara tomb, so it also deserves protection. There are also many protected areas with sacred forests. And a third criterion, which is also very, very important, is that the site may also be the guardian of a natural capital or natural resource that is important to the local, national or regional economy, so clearly if the site has a water source that actually supplies all the surrounding communities, or if the site has a lake that is vital to regional or local agricultural activities, then that site can become a protected area.
O : Okay, and if we’re talking about Madagascar, how many protected areas does Madagascar have and how many categories of protected areas are there?
R : At the moment, Madagascar has about 125 protected areas that make up what’s known as the Madagascar System of Protected Areas or SAPM. In addition to these 125 protected areas, which are owned by the state, there are about a dozen other protected areas with provisional status, i.e. potential status, which are also owned by the state and are in the process of being created. Apart from the protected areas that are part of the SAPM, which I repeat belong to the state, there are also private protected areas and community protected areas. I don’t have the total number, but the 125 official protected areas represent about 10% of our territory, or 7,000,000 hectares. For the second question, how many categories of protected areas are there? There are 6. Category I, the first extreme, consists of protected areas and integral reserves. In practice, they’re for research purposes and we’re not allowed to go in. And in category II, III you have national parks, which have strategic resources inside, you can do tourism inside, but you can’t really use the resources that are inside, because they’re important for everybody, like water and so on. And then we have categories V and IV, which are protected areas, which are for research and you can’t go in. Then there are categories V and VI, where use is much freer, but of course it has to be sustainable. So in these protected areas there’s a part we call the hard core and a part around it we call the sustainable use zone, where there are communities living within the boundaries of the protected area.
O: Right. We can’t mention all the protected areas that exist in Madagascar, but can you name a few that are very well known?
R : I’ll mention the most famous national parks – there are 43 of them, but I’ll mention maybe 2 or 3. So you know Andasibe, which is next door, Isalo, Bemaraha, Menabe Antimena, l’allée des Baobabs
O : Oh, right.
R : They’re among the most famous, but if you want the full list, there’s a website called protectedareas.mg where you can find a complete list of the 125 protected areas in Madagascar. And on FAPBM website there’s also a list of the protected areas that FAPBM has funded.
O: Okay. Let’s talk about threats, Roda. What are the threats to Madagascar’s protected areas?
R : There are about 3 categories of protected areas in Madagascar, if I classify them, so I can classify them into three: there are marine protected areas, terrestrial protected areas and mixed protected areas, which have both a marine and a terrestrial part. So the threats are different, that’s why I’ve classified them into 3. In the terrestrial part, where there are mainly forests, the biggest threat is fire, which causes fires, which in fact causes a lot of deforestation in these places, and all our resources are directed towards fighting fires in general. As far as marine protected areas are concerned, there are two main threats: unsustainable fishing practices, so I’ve included illegal fishing, and the use of unregulated fishing nets, for example, which is bad fishing practice. You can also include overfishing. And the second biggest threat is climate change, because warming oceans cause coral reefs to bleach, which destroys them, and these reefs are home to significant marine biodiversity. Let’s put it this way: fire for the forests, bad fishing practices and climate change for the marine environment.
O : OK, my next question for Roda is: what is the Fondation pour les Aires Protégées et la Biodiversité de Madagascar doing to protect these protected areas?
R : Well, our main mission, and this is why we were created, is to give the experts and the local communities who work in these protected areas the means to protect the biodiversity that is there. So we were created in 2005 to solve the problem of sustainable funding for the ANGAP network of parks. And also in 2055, or a little earlier, in 2003 or 2004, Madagascar government committed itself to tripling the area of these terrestrial protected areas, and the question was how we were going to finance that, because today the protected areas essentially live on donations, and the disadvantage of these donations is that they’re limited in time, over five years, and then we have to look for other funding. So Madagascar government and two major NGOs, WWF and Conservation International, decided to create FAPBM. FAPBM is a sustainable funding mechanism. Let me explain: we receive donations and raise funds, and instead of giving these donations directly to the protected area managers, we capitalise these funds in what we call an endowment fund. So we invest in the financial market, we invest in companies, we save, etc… and the money generates interest or income, and it’s this income that we use to finance the protected areas. So overall we don’t touch the capital, we just use the interest. And as long as there is capital, there will be interest, so we can finance protected areas in Madagascar ad vita meternam. Our primary mission is to ensure the financing of protected areas, and we finance 4 types of activity: the first is operations. We make sure that there is a permanent physical presence on the ground, so we secure jobs and pay the salaries of the people who work in the protected areas. That’s the first thing. And then there are operational costs, because other donors generally don’t want to fund operational costs. The second category of expenditure, the activities that we fund, are all the conservation activities. So on the ground: they have to build firebreaks, they have to patrol, they have to buy equipment to monitor the biodiversity that exists. So if there are three lemurs, are there still three lemurs, etc… After that, we also fund all community development activities, because we need to support the communities that can put pressure on the protected area. For example, if they ask us to develop beekeeping or tourism around the reserve, we fund these activities as well. Finally, because it is not our role to fund 100% of the protected area’s budget, we also support the financial sustainability activities that the manager wants to undertake. For example, I was talking about tourism earlier and he wants to set up an eco-lodge, we can also support that kind of activity.
O : Okay, very interesting.
R : In 2023, FAPBM will fund 68 of the 125 protected areas in Madagascar, which is about 5.2 million hectares, and we will provide about 30% of their annual budget. And we’re actually very proud to be working with the NGO managers, because in our last performance evaluation, almost all of them were at 70%. So what I wanted to say is that we have experts and we’re very proud to support them.
O : We’re going to finish the show Roda. We’d like to remind you that our guest is Roda Operman, Communication and Advocacy Officer fo Madagascar Protected Areas and Biodiversity Fund. There’s also a competition for journalists on the environment, Roda, can you tell us a little bit about it?
R : Very good. So FAPBM has launched a reporting fellowship for journalists called Media for Protected Areas. Let me go back to the genesis of the idea. We have 123 protected areas, many of them in the interior. In these protected areas, as I said earlier, there are two categories of people who work in these places : there are the experts, the botanists and scientists, and there are the local communities. They do a lot of work in the field to defend these commons. And because they’re in remote areas, we don’t see their work. We hear that the forests are burning, but we don’t see who is there to protect them when they’re not burning. When these protected areas are burning, we don’t hear when Andasibe is burning, for example. And we wanted to give these communities and these experts a voice through this reporting fellowship, so they could share their experiences and best practices and explain why their forests aren’t burning. We also wanted to give visibility to these protected areas that are landlocked, so that everybody knows what’s going on there, why it’s beautiful, why it’s worth going there, who the people are, the faces, the voices that are really behind these protected areas. And what’s also important for us is to give journalists the means to report on protected areas, because we don’t talk about them very much, because you have to travel, because it’s difficult to travel in Madagascar, because the media is concentrated in Antananarivo and the big cities in general. So we really wanted to give journalists the means to tell these stories and give biodiversity and conservation much more airtime in the media.
O: What are the rules of the competition and how do I apply?
R : Well, there are three categories: written press, which of course can include anything that’s online, but written press, then radio press, which is anything that’s a radio broadcast, and audiovisual press. Radio press can also include online podcasts. We are going to award 6 journalists, two in each category, with a grant of 3,000,000 MGA per journalist. To apply, each journalist must come up with an idea for a possible story, pitch it and say why it’s important, why it’s interesting, why the public will be interested in the story he or she is going to tell – in short, he or she must come up with something. And in their proposal, they have to choose one of the 125 protected areas that they want to cover and also tell us the angle from which they want to report. There is a form to fill in on FAPBM website, www.fapbm.org. Journalists have until midnight on 17 September 2023 to return the completed form to us.
O: There’s still a month to go
R : There’s still a month to go. So what are the eligibility criteria? The eligibility criteria are: you must already be a professional journalist, but there’s no age limit. In any case, the report must be based in Madagascar.
O: Not necessarily in Antananarivo?
R : Not necessarily in Antananarivo. Precisely because there’s only one protected area in Tanà, I think. You have to have a good command of Malagasy and/or French. As I said, you have to apply for a specific reserve. The report he wants to do has to be broadcast by the 31st of October, so if he wins the prize, he has to make sure that the report, his research, is done between the date of the announcement of the results and the 31st of October, when he has to broadcast it. The report must be original, so it can’t be a report you’ve already done and are going to resubmit; it must be a report that hasn’t already been broadcast on any medium. Applicants must also be able to demonstrate that the project will be published or broadcast, so there should normally be a letter of commitment from the editor to broadcast the story. So, as I said, you have to fill in the online application form, a project outline, a CV and a letter of commitment, as well as a piece of work or a report that the journalist has already done, so that we can be sure that he or she is really a journalist. The language of the report can be Malagasy or French, but the application file, i.e. the specifications, must be in French because one of the members of the jury is French-speaking. So, as I said, the deadline for the grant is 17 September 2023 at 11:59 pm. You can send your application to mail@fapbm.org with the subject line “Candidature pour la bourse de reportage”. I’ll finish with the criteria, so there are 6 criteria: the subject must be original and fit well with the theme, the writing style, the level of language, especially French, the clarity of the text, the conciseness and the quality of the pitch. Here you are
O : OK, I think that’s all for today, Roda. I’d like to thank you for agreeing to be our guest on Eco Nature today.
R : Thank you Ony for inviting me, thank you to the listeners for tuning in and see you soon.
O : I’d also like to thank our technician Rova Rajaonah for broadcasting the show, and I’d also like to thank you, dear listeners, for always tuning in to the wave of wisdom. Goodbye and see you soon.
End credits: < It was Eco Nature, presented by Ony Rasolomalala >
