FORUM | July 25 2017, Bangkok, Thailand
Dramatic expansion of agriculture, cities and industries, coupled with population growth, this relationship shift has become more troublesome. Incidents, including death, can occur when people are protecting their plantations; getting water, crossing roads and also in cities, as animals are losing their natural habitats and migrating to urban areas. Increased competition for habitat and the basic life necessities of food and water, which may only be further aggravated by climate change, is mainly responsible for the worsening situation involving human-wildlife interaction. Increased back and forth transmission of known and unknown infectious pathogens involving humans, livestock, and wildlife is another result of these ecological imbalances. This simultaneously puts people’s livelihoods and health, as well as biodiversity at risk. This 3rd Forum on Health and Biodiversity highlighted discussions on wildlife – human interactions in the context of land use change in Thailand. Experiences from Researchers, Veterinarians and conservation practitioners were shared and solutions were brainstormed.
BEYOND PARK BOUNDARIES: INTEGRATING PROTECTED AREAS AND SURROUNDING LAND CONSERVATION
Although it is arguable that our understanding of the mechanisms underpinning health and biodiversity relationships is improving, the focus has been understanding biodiversity predominantly from the standpoint of its biophysical properties and processes, and an anthropocentric perspective with human societies as an external stressor and beneficiary of biodiversity, a substantially different set of issues and gaps emerge when biodiversity, as well as health, is considered in the context of rural, tropical developing environments and livelihoods, from an intervention perspective—particularly in the logic of evidence based intervention for community resilience in their complex social-ecological systems.
Rural societies are potentially, if not actually, the de facto stewards of much, if not most, of the world’s ‘biodiversity’. Unlike biodiversity ‘stakeholders’ represented by conservation biologists and their organizations, their livelihoods and health is directly dependent on the biodiversity in their immediate surroundings. Also, the rural environments in which these stakeholders live are changing more rapidly than any other lands, and as such are most subject to the ecological and evolutionary instabilities which place them at risk of impacts of changing weather patterns, and potentially altered VDB transmission dynamics associated with climate change.
Like health, biodiversity is a social construct dependent upon cultural perspectives and social and environmental circumstances. This, and the lack of a comprehensive framework that encompasses this reality apparently both represents and contributes to gaps in research and practice consistent with evidence based approaches to intervention.
The Forum on Health and Biodiversity is an attempt to provide and discuss elements underlying a needed conceptual reframing accounting for these unacknowledged realities and set the basis for contextualised discussions, integrated action and sustainable beneficial outcomes.
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