Andrew N. Vorkink (World Bank Country Director for Turkey)
Bilkent Hotel, Ankara - May 22, 2006
Distinguished guests from the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, representatives from other Ministries and partners and civil society organizations.
It gives me great pleasure to be able to address this particular gathering, which is meeting over the next two days to provide conservation practitioners in Turkey an opportunity to exchange experience, to raise the national profile about biodiversity conservation, and to provide a platform for discussing issues of common importance. This meeting comes at a very good time, as discussions are underway about how best Turkey can integrate into the European Union. Nature conservation initiatives are central to the Environment aquis, and it is quite important that Turkey is orienting its approach toward the more commonly accepted global principles toward biodiversity conservation. I am pleased to say that even before the recent acceleration of discussions about the prospects for European integration, Turkey had already taken important steps to develop and introduce principles of nature conservation which are consistent with emerging global best practices. These efforts have been pioneered here by your Ministry, Minister Pepe, under the leadership of the General Directorate of Nature Conservation and National Parks and its staff. The World Bank has had a small part in this effort by providing support through the Biodiversity and Natural Resources Management Project, with funding from the Global Environment Facility, to pilot these efforts and then to support their wider dissemination. Now, as we enter the final stages of this particular support, I can confidently say that you have really helped to move the nature conservation agenda forward to align Turkey’s approach more fully with accepted international practices for protected area management, for example, those outlined by the World Commission on Protected Areas, and other international organizations. I would like to speak this morning about some of the global environmental issues related to biodiversity conservation, especially those which represent continuing challenges to Turkey, to comment upon Turkey’s response to these challenges, and to outline subjects where we in the World Bank think work remains to be done. Globally, over the last ten years the international community has spent some $4 billion to conserve biological diversity, which is of course on top of expenditures by national governments and others for the same worthy purpose. This has paid for a lot of good work and some important wins have been made. But overall, we are failing to stem the deadly dynamic of chronic poverty, growing population, and unbridled consumption which is destroying natural species a thousand times faster than ever before. The world needs to do conservation differently if we are to cope with the potentially catastrophic impact of these pressures on the natural systems that support life on earth. Let us start with some of the global success stories. Along the coast of Brazil, the pressures on the Atlantic rain forest are gradually receding as local communities, private groups and state governments work together to put in place an action plan to safeguard the unique habitat they share with 20,000 different kinds of plants, of which more than 8,000 are found nowhere else in the world. These groups have come to understand that there are viable alternatives to deforestation. Increasingly, they see more opportunities in protecting the forest -- for low impact and environmentally sound tourism for example, as well as for other productive uses—than in cutting it down. Africa and Asia also offer a few compelling examples of how we can turn the destructive tide by working together and setting priorities. Projects with strong community support show that it is possible to fight poverty by protecting the ecosystems that underpin agriculture and rural livelihoods. Unfortunately, there is far more evidence to the contrary: of outright destruction proceeding apace in the face of what are too often uncoordinated attempts to do the right thing. The result is that some 12 percent of mammal species and 11 percent of bird and plant species are threatened with extinction. This is bad news for us all, but particularly for poor people. For them, conserving biodiversity is not just about long-term welfare. It is about survival because so many of them depend on the habitats that support biodiversity for their daily needs. As I am sure that many of you know, Turkey is one of the most biologically diverse countries in Europe. Around 1,200 of its 10,000 plant species are native. These include many wild relatives of important domesticated species on which the world is heavily dependent – for example, wheat, barley, chickpeas, lentils, cherry, pear, apple, and so on (which I might add makes Turkish cuisine among the best in the world!).Turkish flora also includes many important medicinal, aromatic, industrial, and ornamental plants. Three Global Biodiversity Hotspots (the Mediterranean basin, the Caucasus mountains, and the Irano-Anatolian hotspots) are found partly within Turkey's geographic borders. There are a large number of Important Bird Areas found in various wetlands across the country, and these are of crucial importance for millions of migratory birds which rely on three major flyways as they move between the Western Palearctic and Africa, and which cross Turkey. Just this month I had an opportunity to visit the new national park at Sultansazlığı near Kayseri, which is a Ramsar designated site in which more than 300 species of birds are found in numbers approaching 1.5 million birds a year. Why should this biodiversity be conserved in Turkey? In fact, Turkey’s biodiversity is of great immediate and direct economic importance on account of the many benefits derived from its use. Turkey’s biodiversity is also of global significance because of its exceptionally rich genetic diversity. The genetic resources of wild relatives and landraces represent essential inputs in the research and development efforts of the pharmaceutical industry in the search of new drugs, and the agricultural industry in the search of new strains resistant to disease and capable of improved yields. Direct economic values of plant resources can also be very high. A couple of years ago, we supported research which showed that the gross value of sustainable chestnut production could be as high as $2000 per hectare annually in some areas, while the benefits of bayleaf production, under sustainable management, could be as high as $3000 per year. These kinds of revenue flows can be especially important for poor rural communities. Plant-based medicinal products are of particular importance. A little known fact is that Turkey ranks as the third largest exporter of medicinal plants of wild origin after China and India. Gross revenues from non-wood forest product exports are estimated at around $200 million per year. Accepting, both at the national and local level, that Turkey’s biodiversity is worth conserving, what needs to be done to see that this happens? And in asking this question, I also want to place it in the context of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which grew out of the agreements of conferences organized by the United Nations in the past decade. These have now been commonly accepted as a framework for measuring progress in tackling poverty, and the World Bank Group is committed to working to help achieve these goals. The MDGs can only be attained if countries choose an environmentally and socially sustainable development path. This requires managing the physical, human, natural and social capital that underpin development in ways that meet the needs of the present generation without foreclosing options for the future. This task is particularly challenging in the case of natural capital where the goods and services provided by ecological systems to sustain human development continue to be overexploited, degraded and – in cases such as biodiversity – irreversibly lost, on a scale that causes worldwide concern. The priorities for action for meeting the MDGs include, among many other activities, conserving terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, to preserve critical ecological goods and services and arresting the degradation of soil and water resources to help improve agricultural productivity. I would like to focus on four tools, all starting with the letter “P”, for addressing priorities related to biodiversity conservation and the MDGs, namely programs, partnership, protected areas and planning. Firstly, addressing biodiversity conservation priorities – and building environmental sustainability at the country level – starts with sound national policies and programmes for economic growth that improve people’s lives and the local environment. However, unless we collectively act to preserve the global environmental commons – the climate, the ozone layer, the diversity of life and the oceans – we will undermine the sustainability of national and regional development. Limited economic incentives to conserve biodiversity follow inherently from the regional or global public goods character of environmental services. As a consequence, decisions taken at the country level on the use of natural resources for national economic development do not always adequately reflect their global impacts. Since markets for trading many global environmental goods and services do not exist, global non-market values are today captured primarily through international resource transfers. The Global Environment Facility (GEF) was established to help underwrite and leverage such transfers and plays an important role, as it has here in Turkey, in supporting measures to conserve biodiversity. Secondly, biodiversity conservation cannot succeed without the active partnership involvement of all segments of human society. Around the globe, civil society represented by NGOs, the private sector (individual landowners and the business community), scientific institutions and local communities, has played a key role in the effort to protect rare and threatened species, manage protected areas, and increase understanding of the natural world. Although in many countries the State has the primary responsibility for managing national parks, increasingly these responsibilities are being shared with civil society, and partnerships are being developed for conservation, both within protected areas and in the surrounding land and seascapes. In many countries, NGOs work in co-management arrangements with national governments to raise funds and implement park protection activities. Local communities and private landowners often manage and preserve areas of natural vegetation on which they depend for their livelihoods. The Sultansazlığı Park is an example of this partnership cooperation in Turkey among government agencies, villagers living on the edge of the marsh who depend on their livelihoods from sustainable cutting of reeds and grazing of livestock, and NGOs which support environmental practices. Thirdly, successful national programs for biodiversity conservation depend on the establishment of a viable, well-funded and managed national network of protected areas. These networks cannot serve to conserve all the most important aspects of species diversity and endemism, but they can serve effectively to identify, protect and manage priority sites and habitats which are subject to the greatest risk of degradation or which contain particularly high levels of species endemism and diversity. The idea of focusing on biodiversity hotspots – areas of greatest diversity and threat – is one way of tackling where limited resources are targeted to achieve the greatest impact. Protected areas need not be established along exclusionary lines in isolated enclaves only of interest for their natural beauty or to botanists and ecologists – indeed, the increasing practice has been to recognize that biodiversity can be best conserved in multifunctional productive landscapes which incorporate human activity. The challenge, of course, comes in findings ways to mediate between multiple interests in these landscapes to ensure that habitat conservation remains a priority in the face of growing economic pressures. But carefully managed, such landscapes can form the basis for dynamic economies incorporating agriculture, tourism and other activities. Fourthly, the establishment of protected areas needs to be backed up with multifunctional and participatory planning which seeks to engage a wide range of stakeholders in identifying and managing conservation priorities. The planning process itself can help to establish investment priorities on the one hand, while on the other, providing a platform which ensures that local cultural, social, and economic interests are also considered.
We have to ask both how Turkey has been doing in using these types of tools, and also to identify how far it has to go to ensure that this important biological heritage is conserved long into the future. In an assessment prepared for this years’ World Economic Forum in Davos, which sought to link specific environmental outcomes with policy targets, with respect to biodiversity conservation and habitat protection, Turkey was ranked 21st out of 28 OECD countries, well below countries like Finland, France and the UK, but performing better than Poland, Austria and Germany. Part of the problem is that such a relatively small area of Turkey has formally protected status. Only 1.6 percent of Turkey’s land area comprises national and natural parks, compared with a European average of nearly 7 percent. This is indeed surprising, given the extent and importance of biodiversity found in the country. We see similar features when we consider productive natural resource sectors as well. Turkey’s forests cover only 13 percent of the land area, while the European average covers three times this area. Creating new national parks on paper is not the solution either. Not only do we need good surveys of flora and fauna in some of the most critical habitats to help identify priorities for future conservation – work which I understand is already underway in various parts of the country -- we need to support the development of effective institutional and legal mechanisms for bringing these areas under sound, participatory management. This brings me to my next point: the capacity for managing national and natural parks needs to be vastly increased. I understand that out of the Ministry’s staff of 4,500, fewer than 2 percent have any formal training in biology, botany, or ecology. These skills also need to be complemented by skills in a wide range of other areas, including economics, the social sciences, archeology, and participatory planning, to best capture the potential of protected areas in the planning and management process. One possible solution is to find ways of diversifying the institutional mechanisms for managing protected areas. In Italy, for example, a large number of nature reserves, natural parks, and monuments are managed by local community groups, NGOs, and other civil society institutions – sites which gained formal protection because of the initiative of these groups. The bulk of Turkey’s biodiversity actually falls outside of formally protected areas, and we need to find constructive ways of ensuring these resources can be protected and managed, working with local communities and other groups. Turkey also needs a strong enabling policy and legal environment to support progressive systems of protected area management. I understand that new protected area legislation has been drafted through a highly consultative process which seeks to meet this particular objective, and I would like to complement the Ministry for the progress to date and encourage it to find ways of moving this legislation forward so that it can be quickly passed. This legislation will greatly ease the process of aligning the legal framework to the EU Birds and Habitats Directives. Other sectors need also to begin to integrate an awareness of the importance of biodiversity conservation into their activities. Water policy and legislation, for instance, needs to be modified to account for the environmental impacts of water use, particularly in areas of high biodiversity such as wetlands and riverine systems. In visiting Sultansazlığı National Park, I was struck by how costly it has become to rectify the environmental costs of past years of poor water management in this important site, which illustrates how valuable preventive action is over remedial steps. Forest management, too, should more fully incorporate biodiversity conservation measures, and some efforts are underway to modify the technical guidance for forest management planning to do this. Tools include those related to the identification of High Conservation Value Forests, and their management, and the adoption of measures to certify forest management to internationally accepted environmental and social standards where this is economically appropriate. Finally, I would like to mention the important challenges facing the private sector in promoting biodiversity friendly business. This has been a key undertaking of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector wing of the World Bank group. The IFC’s Environmental Finance Group incubates new “bio-businesses” and helps develop markets for businesses that “use” biodiversity as their business platform. For example, in South America the EcoEnterprises Fund is providing economic incentives for biodiversity conservation by helping to build a network of innovative partnerships between non-profit organizations and private sector businesses. The program empowers the community-based organizations to engage in small and medium-size businesses that integrate biodiversity conservation objectives in their business activities. Another example of this model is provided by a project sponsor in the Philippines. The Asian Conservation Company (ACC) is a private equity investment holding company that is purchasing majority ownership of companies operating in areas of important coastal or marine biodiversity. It then helps companies move toward biodiversity-friendly activities in their business in partnership with NGOs including WWF- Philippines, and the El Nido Foundation. The project is designed to provide a financial return for investors while generating a biodiversity ‘conservation return’ via protection of critical habitats. In closing, I would like to emphasize once more the contribution that Turkish biodiversity makes to the global agenda. It was a gene in a wild strain of Turkish wheat that was used to develop cultivated wheat varieties that were resistant to rust, a disease that threatened the world wheat crop. As this example shows, Turkish landscapes and the ecosystems that they preserve are recognized world-wide for their importance. Your skills and capacity will help strengthen protected area and landscape management in Turkey, to sustain this country’s biodiversity, to help develop the economy within a well managed environment, and to ensure that Turkey retains its role as a key player in the global environmental agenda. We look forward to hearing of the results of this important Conference in contributing to the worthy goal of protecting biodiversity for the common good of the planet and mankind. Thank you. |
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