8th World Wilderness Congress Generates Conservation Results!

Anchorage, Alaska – October 10, 2005 – The 8th World Wilderness Congress met for almost 2 weeks from late September into early October, including several pre-Congress wilderness management training sessions and 7 days of plenary and concurrent sessions. The Congress achieved all of its conversation objectives and generated several unexpected results: new protected areas (both native and governmental); new wilderness legislation; increased inter-governmental and organizational cooperation yielding several new initiatives and networks; scores of professionals and volunteers trained in wilderness management, communications, and advocacy; and new funding to safeguard wildlands, wild species and human beings around the world.

The 8th WWC involved 1200 delegates from up to 60 nations, and heavily emphasized the role of native peoples in protecting wilderness and wildlands. The 8th WWC also tackled contentious issues such as the proposed oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, global warming. Following is a summary of the 8th WWC’s major accomplishments, with more details on each available on the links provided, or through info@wild.org.

• New Wilderness and Protected Areas – Cemex, one of the world’s largest producers of cement, announced the designation of the El Carmen Wilderness Area  on critical biodiversity habitat owned by the corporation in northern Mexico. In cooperation with their partners, including Sierra Madre, Conservation International, Birdlife, The WILD Foundation and others, Cemex is creating a wilderness management plan for the Maderas del Carmen “Sky Island” and its stunning escarpment, as part of a significant new protected area initiative called the El Carmen-Big Bend Conservation Corridor Initiative. This involves up to 10 million acres (4 million ha) (including private ranches, corporate land, and government land on both sides of the Mexico/US border.) Cemex has purchased more than 175,000 acres (70,000 ha) of new conservation land, and entered into agreements with adjoining private landowners for an additional 60,000 acres (24,000 ha) of new land under conservation management, including wilderness.
  
  In addition, the Congress closed with the announcement of the Bonobo Peace Forest Initiative in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A joint project of Vie Sauvage and the Bonobo Conservation Initiative (Washington DC), the Bonobo Peace Forest includes conservation agreements with local communities and concessionaires covering over 20,000 square kilometers (5 million acres) of habitat in one of the largest blocks of contiguous rainforest left on earth, and home to the bonobo, the smallest of the endangered great apes. It includes core wilderness areas as well as community-managed forest reserves and sustainable development zones.
   

• The WILD Planet Fund – New funding for a proactive global wildlands initiative was announced, with Cemex partnering with The WILD Foundation to launch the WILD Planet Fund, the funding mechanism for The WILD Planet Project. The Project’s goal is to integrate new data on the benefits of wilderness conservation into a concise and compelling case for decision makers.
  
  “We need to do a better job of explaining and quantifying the economic, biological and social benefits of intact wilderness, and we need to communicate this information to the public and to decision makers more effectively,” said Cyril Kormos, Vice President for Policy for The WILD Foundation and head of the WILD Planet Project.
  
  In addition to assembling the state of the art information on the benefits of wilderness conservation, The WILD Planet Project is also compiling the latest information on mapping wilderness in terrestrial, marine and freshwater systems, reviewing management techniques for wilderness protected areas, and conducting a comprehensive assessment of how wilderness areas are designated – via government protected areas, private sector designations, or indigenous conservation initiatives. The Global Environment Facility, associated with the World Bank, has also endorsed the initiative as “important to the protection of biodiversity, especially in tropical countries and key desert habitats.”
   

• New Wilderness Legislation – Ernesto Enkerlin, (President of CONANP, National Commission for Protected Areas in Mexico) announced that “wilderness” will be a new official category of Mexico’s protected area framework, with the capability of being applied on all types of land including corporate, federal, communal and other private lands. This is the first such legal use of the term “wilderness” as a protected area category in all of Latin America.
   

• Freshwater and Marine Wilderness – Under The WILD Planet Project, a consortium of organizations including Conservation International, The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and others unveiled new and improved inventories and definitions to address the protection as “wilderness” of marine and freshwater systems around the world.
   

• Native Lands and Wilderness Council – Also a part of The WILD Planet Project, indigenous people from 25 nations around the world formed the Native Lands and Wilderness Council and set initial goals for the group. This process – funded by the Christensen Fund, Ford Foundation, WILD and others – passed a resolution to continue meeting and will produce a handbook aimed at encouraging and informing tribal communities around the world on managing their lands as “wilderness”.
  
  “The purpose of the Native Lands and Wilderness Council is to form an indigenous group to guide the use and management of wildlands, and to demonstrate unequivocally that we are an important part of conserving wildlands globally,” said Terry Tanner, work project coordinator with the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribe in Montana. Tanner co-chaired the initial Council with Grand Chief Herb Norwegian of the Deh Cho First Nations (Canada) and Larry Merculieff, deputy director of the Alaska native Science Commission in Anchorage.
   

• International League of Conservational Photographers – A new working group was initiated by 40 of the world’s finest conservation photographers. The International League of Conservational Photographers will further environmental and cultural conservation through photography, and will work on global campaigns to highlight critical issues. As part of this process, more than 150 nature photographers gathered in Anchorage at the 8th WWC to determine how photographers can best contribute to the conservation community’s efforts in protecting wilderness, endangered species and threatened cultures around the world. This initiative was coordinated by Cristina Mittermeier, and the ILCP will be a project of The WILD Foundation.
   

• AIDS in Africa – The Wilderness Foundation (South Africa), working with HOPE Worldwide and other partners, announced a new initiative to assist young people orphaned by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Umzi Wethu – “our home” – will give orphaned young people housing, training and jobs in the ecotourism, hospitality and other industries.
  
  “We recognize that wilderness is a force for social change, and that this project can offer a safe and supportive environment to invest in young people in a way that is crucial to families and governments in Africa,” said Andrew Muir, executive director of the Wilderness Foundation.
  
  Umzi Wethu training centers will combine mentoring with the transformative power of wild areas, with young people trained in a combination of life skills, hospitality and conservation skills for a minimum of one year on a residential “campus” adjacent to Parks and Reserves. They will then be interns and eventually employees of conservation-related companies and agencies.
   

• Numerous other professional networks and conservation organizations were formed – The 8th WWC continued the WWC commitment to creating targeted, collaborative professional networks. The Wilderness Policy Council (a US federal, inter-agency group) convened the first Global Wilderness Seminar for Government Agencies, involving 150 participants, the result of which was a new network of government agency professionals and wilderness managers to share information and techniques in safeguarding wilderness on public lands.
  
  A delegation of over 25 Russians, principally from the Russian Far East, met in numerous settings during several days of the Congress, for specific negotiations with their counterparts in Alaskan and US federal land management agencies operating in Alaska Their intent, nurtured through several pre-Congress meetings organized by The WILD Foundation with the support of the Trust for Mutual Understanding, was to enhance protected area management in Kamchatka and the Russian Far East through better professional links with Alaska. This collaborative network has now been established, with the next follow up meeting to occur in Kamchatka in the Spring of 2006.
  
  The Conservation Writer’s Rendezvous, convened by Fulcrum, Inc, had 40 of the best conservation writers review the history of conservation writing, and provide on-site mentoring for many aspiring writers.
  
  The Africa Wilderness network was established by the Zambezi Society (Zimbabwe) and the Wilderness Action Group (SA), in collaboration with the Wilderness Task force of the IUCN.
  
  The World Wilderness Youth Network was established by the youth and young professionals whom participated in specific programs at the 8th WWC. This network will concentrate at first on communicating and expanding their network, and an anonymous donor agreed to fund their first web portal and e-outreach efforts.
   

• Public Outreach in Alaska – The 8th WWC Executive Committee worked closely with all concerned sectors – development, conservation and education – in Alaska for 2 years prior to the 8th WWC.. Aware that “wilderness” is often a highly polarizing word in Alaska, and the subject of many pitched conservation battles, the Executive Committee developed numerous ways to outreach to the local community to help inform and educate Alaskans on the values of wilderness and wildlands:

● partial and full scholarships to virtually any Alaskan who wished to attend the Congress and had financial constraints of any manner. This was conducted through both native groups and local conservation organizations.

● provided free-of-charge to the Alaska public were an international film festival, “Nature Screen”, presented over 5 days prior to the Congress in downtown Anchorage; the WILD Expo ran for 2 days during the Congress; and, every day during the Congress there was an extensive schedule of audio-visual presentations and lectures from many countries, presented at the Public Lands building in downtown Anchorage.

● finally, a juried competition was initiated and funded by The WILD Foundation, the result of which is a public sculpture by Rachelle Dowdy, Alaskan artist. This sculpture, consisting of 4 larger-than-life figures with animal heads and human torsos, was displayed at the 8th WWC and will be installed in central Anchorage in the Key Bank/Starbucks plaza, as a lasting gift from the 8th WWC to the people of Anchorage. It highlights both the important and inescapable link between wildlife and people, as well as the commitment of The WILD Foundation and the WWC to the role of culture in communicating and enhancing positive conservation solutions.

• Technical Information and Training – Numerous training programs occurred before and during the 8th WWC. 30 professionals from 21 countries completely an accredited Wilderness Management course. 15 youth from 6 countries participated in numerous communications and information trainings, worked as communications interns during the 8th WWC, and then established the World Wilderness Youth Network mentioned earlier. Over 200 scientists and managers participated in three days of almost 70 concurrent sessions.
  
  During the 8th WWC, several publications were launched: Transboundary Conservation and The Alaska Reader among them. From all of the program material during the Congress will come many publications, including an illustrated trade book aimed at the mass market; a full technical proceedings published by the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute (a significant WWC partner); a wilderness law and policy handbook for policymakers worldwide; a manual on native management of wildlands for indigenous communities around the world; and more.
   

• Resolutions – Delegates worked hard on, debated, and eventually approved a targeted list of 49 resolutions that addressed broad conservation concerns as well as specific areas and issues needing international and local attention and action.