WWF’s new direction
ONE OF THE WORLD’S TOP CONSERVATION GROUPS HAS A CONFESSION TO MAKE – IT’S FAILED TO STOP GLOBAL WILDLIFE DECLINES. BUT THE NEW HEAD OF CAMPAIGNS FOR ITS UK OPERATION, VETERAN ENVIRONMENTALIST TONY JUNIPER, BELIEVES HE HAS THE SOLUTION.
Tony Juniper has the solution to global wildlife declines
Working for WWF must sometimes feel like acting as the world’s environmental peace-keeping force – you’re trying to do the right thing, but you’re still hated on all sides.
The criticism comes from the likes of BBC presenter Chris Packham, who has penned articles on why it’s a waste of time and effort trying to save pandas and tigers, two of WWF’s flagship species. Or Survival International, which has alleged anti-poaching patrols funded by WWF and others have committed atrocities against tribal people in Central Africa.
Elsewhere, in 2012, German journalist Wilfried Huismann, in a book eventually published in the UK as PandaLeaks, accused the NGO of cosying up to companies accused of being environmental polluters such as BP, Shell and Monsanto. Some right-wing commentators have claimed its focus on climate change is leading WWF to ignore its primary role of protecting wildlife populations.
NATURE’S SPOKESPERSON
Whatever you feel about the organisation that started life as the World Wildlife Fund, became the Worldwide Fund for Nature and is now simply WWF, it would be hard to argue with the new director of campaigns for its UK operation, Tony Juniper, when he argues that something needs to change.
“Never mind WWF, the whole conservation movement is at a critical moment, because we’ve spent a century focused on species, key sites and ecosystems, and the evidence is that what we’ve been doing is not sufficient, and we need to change gear,” he says.
Along with David Bellamy and Jonathan Porritt, Juniper was one of the first environmental campaigners to achieve a level of national recognition when he led Friends of the Earth’s anti-road protests in the 1990s. After leaving FoE in 2007, he wrote the highly influential What Has Nature Ever Done for Us?, which popularised the idea that nature wasn’t just pretty, it was fundamental to the future of the human species.
Now back at a mainstream conservation group, Juniper wants to see this message spread further and wider. “We must change the perception of what nature is,” he says. “Progress has been made, the narrative is beginning to change, but it’s got to be a whole lot further and a whole lot quicker. WWF is planning to put its weight behind that shift in perspective.”
From songbirds in a Dutch orchard to vultures in India and pollinators in the USA, over the past two decades or so, nature’s balance sheet has been rigorously audited – and it’s come out fifirmly in the black.
Not only that, but policymakers are starting to take note. As Juniper points out, environment secretary Michael Gove has been talking up the idea that, instead of giving farmers subsidies on the basis of how much land they own – which is how the Common Agricultural Policy operates – once we leave the EU we could decide to dole out the £3bn on the basis of the environmental functions they perform.
“There will still be vested interests owning land, but can they be given a business case for doing things differently?” Juniper says. “Instead of being paid for shooting services, can they be paid for catching carbon and cleaning up the water supply?”
BOG BENEFITS
Companies are already jumping on board this bandwagon. South West Water has been putting money into blanket bog restoration on Exmoor, not necessarily because it’s right for wildlife, but because it reduces water bills for consumers. “We’re not only getting clean water coming off the hill, but cleaner rivers for trout and salmon and the restoration of habitat for declining birds such as dunlin and golden plovers. We’re also holding large quantities of carbon and getting flood-risk reduction,” Juniper says. Win, win, win, win.
Juniper believes that environmental issues are now back on the political agenda in a way that they haven’t been since the financial crash of 2008, and that those working within the conservation sector must make the most of this window of opportunity. “The moment may
last a short time or it may last a long time – politics is volatile, and in a democracy it’s always unpredictable, so we have to use the opportunities we have.”
CORPORATE POWER
There are, however, people working within the broader conservation movement who will have misgivings about Juniper’s plan to put the idea of natural capital at the heart of WWF’s agenda.
At the New Networks for Nature conference in 2015, Juniper debated natural capital with the rewilding proponent, George Monbiot, who argued that by putting a value on nature, conservationists would yield precious territory to those who run the world’s multinationals. The reason why conservationists have failed to reverse wildlife declines, he suggested, was not because their arguments were wrong, but because they had less power than corporations and governments.
Monbiot used the example of mangroves to make his point. As ‘natural capital’, they are worth $12,000 a year to local people as flood defences and nurseries for young fish, but only $1,200 a year if they are cut down and replaced with prawn farms. It’s no contest then – mangroves should win every time.
But they don’t, and here’s why. “The issue here isn’t one of money but of power,” Monbiot said. “Those people coming in and cutting down the mangroves dondon’tt give two hoots if it’s worth $12,000 a year to local people – they’re not local people, and it’s worth $1,200 a hectare to them, and they’re happy with that.”
But Juniper is not saying ecosystem services is the only game in town. There are other major issues to be overcome, and perhaps the most important is to get across at a public level the threat posed by the loss of biodiversity, which is as great a threat to food and water supplies and therefore human security as that posed by climate change.
“One of the things at the back of my mind,” says Juniper, “is a BBC survey from a few years ago [2010] which found that the single biggest perception as to what biodiversity meant to the British public was a brand of washing powder.”
COALITION CONSTRUCTION
So, environmentalists need to stop using the word ‘biodiversity’ and replace it with something else? Nature? Wildlife? Well, yes – but there’s more. Towards the end of his time at Friends of the Earth, Juniper helped build a multi-NGO campaign that included development and church groups, as well as the environmental sector, to highlight the need for action on climate change. This resulted in, first, the UK’s Climate Change Act, which was passed in 2008, and eventually to the Paris climate accord of 2015, which was ratified by most of the world’s major powers, including China, India, the USA and the EU.
“In Paris, there was an incredible alliance of pension funds, insurance companies, banks, manufacturers, and consumer goods companies alongside WWF, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and the people protesting on the streets,” Juniper recalls. “With biodiversity we do not have that yet, but one of the things we will do is to encourage that coming together to build a movement to create demand and get the political shift we need.”
Juniper is unapologetic about WWF’s policy of working with businesses, even those whose actions lead to the biodiversity declines that it is fig ghting to reverse. There is, , and should be, a spectru rum of environmental groups,g ranging from the direct-d action tactics of Earth Fi irst! and Greenpeace, thro ough to the more collaborativ ive approach of WWF and other rs. “It is quite a tricky place to work,”w he admits.
He also adop pts an unashamedly positivep approach that takes acc0unt0unt of what peo people are like, not how we’d like them to be – he wants to get results, not preach ideals. “If you tell people they’re wrong and it’s all their fault, they’re not going to respond very well,” Juniper points out. “If you tell them the positive solutions are good for them as well as the planet, then they’re more likely to listen.”
THE SINGLE BIGGEST PERCEPTION AS TO WHAT BIODIVERSITY MEANT TO THE BRITISH PUBLIC WAS A BRAND OF WASHING POWDER, WOULD YOU U BELIEVE?”