Benefits beyond bondaries

The often conflicting interests of the various government agencies that currently manage the area's resources make integrated planning difficult. Even with integration, however, challenges remain. The area is prone to natural disasters, and authorities will have to find a way to work with the many aboriginal people that make the area their home, often cultivating crops, such as betel nut, that reduce biodiversity and may lead to increased susceptibility to natural disasters.

The conference featured several presentations by Taiwanese delegates on sensitivity to aboriginal issues, and it appears that some progress is being made on this front. Taroko National Park Superintendent Yeh Shih-wen (葉世文) concedes that Aboriginals' concerns are justified: "You can't just walk into an area and take it from the people that have been living there for thousands of years -- even in the name of conservation -- without giving something in return." Yeh has been working on an innovative approach in Taroko, where the island's first Cultural Consulting Committee -- comprised of park officials, academics and Aboriginese from the Atayal tribe -- was convened earlier this year and is likely to lead to decreased restrictions on aboriginal hunting and fishing in the region.

Benefits of boundaries

Any biology student could tell you that boundaries are crucial to biodiversity. The existence of geographical barriers is an important mechanism for speciation (the emergence of different species of cats, for example, or primates). And yet, boundaries can also be impediments to diversity. This is the paradox encapsulated in the WCPA-EA conference's theme.

The paradox can perhaps best be illustrated by the example of a road that humans build to get from point A to B, which also happens to be a formidable barrier for many plant and animal species. In the same way, globalization is generally seen as a process that does away with barriers, "but in this process the very infrastructure that allows global transportation and communication to proceed is carving up new boundaries that are leaving many of the world's species isolated on `islands' of ever-decreasing size," says Lund University (Sweden) Department of Social and Economic Geography Professor Eric Clark.

The trick for conservation planners seeking to fortify biodiversity in areas under their stewardship is to identify which boundaries are helping their cause, while eliminating those that work against it, whether this involves breaking up a road that disrupts the natural proliferation of indigenous species, establishing an ecological conservation corridor, restructuring a fragmented administrative regime, or breaking down communication barriers to better cooperate with colleagues facing similar problems in a very different locality.