Matschie’s tree kangaroos in Papua New Guinea. (© CI/ Russell A. Mittermeier)

Coffee-crazed Seattleites are about to taste something new: the first-ever coffee made available in the U.S. from a remote part of Papua New Guinea — the Yopno Uruwa Som region of the Huon Peninsula.

The region is home to the endangered Matschie’s tree kangaroo (Dendrolagus matschiei), the little-known animal that inspired this whole effort. Native to the Huon Peninsula, the tree kangaroo is one of Earth’s more unique creatures with a bear-like head, bushy tail and marsupial’s pouch.

So how did we get from ‘roo to brew? To protect an endangered species like the tree kangaroo, you first need to protect its habitat.

Picking coffee cherries in the shade in Papua New Guinea. (© Ryan Hawk/Woodland Park Zoo)

After several years of collaboration between Woodland Park Zoo’s Tree Kangaroo Conservation Program and CI,  in 2009 Papua New Guinea villagers in the remote Huon Peninsula formally agreed to protect 73,000 hectares (180,000 acres) of their land, establishing the nation’s first conservation area.

This month, the zoo has completed a $1 million fundraising effort, which will be matched in full by a generous grant from CI’s Global Conservation Fund, creating a $2 million YUS Conservation Endowment to ensure sustainable funding to manage the protected area in the future.

But to make sure that land stays protected not just in name but in action, we had to make it possible for these villagers to find an ecofriendly, alternative income source that would give them the money they need while protecting their land from destructive activities like logging and mining.

In comes the coffee.

The villagers in this area have long farmed coffee, but their nearly impossible-to-reach location made it unlikely that their product would ever reliably be made available to any market. The Huon Peninsula is characterized by some of the most extreme, rugged landscape in the world; the villages of the YUS Conservation Area are remote and accessible only by small plane service. In the past, the high cost of small plane travel and freight has made the profit margin for YUS coffee growers prohibitive.

Seattle’s Caffe Vita helped us cross that hurdle by using their coffee importing and marketing expertise to bring the beans here and roast them at their facilities, marking the first-ever coffee from the YUS region made commercially available in the U.S. — purchased directly from the growers at a fair price.

Huon Peninsula, Papua New Guinea. (© Ryan Hawk/Woodland Park Zoo)

Now you can get your hands on limited edition, 12-ounce bags of “Papua New Guinea Yopno Uruwa Som” Farm Direct coffee — grown in the shade and without the use of pesticides — available now in the Seattle area and online. Made up of the best in beans from 54 Papua New Guinea farmers, the coffee is mellow and honey-like, with flavors of toasted hazelnut, orange zest and guava, finishing with cocoa and sugarcane.

When you drink this coffee, you are not only helping conservation, but you’re also directly improving the lives of these farmers and their families, who for the first time are earning a fair price for coffee —  money they need to put their children through school and provide for their family’s healthcare. (Learn more about the coffee project in the video below, produced by the Woodland Park Zoo.)

Try a cup — and if you like it, tell a friend. The more beans we can spread around, the bigger a difference we can make for the people and wildlife of Papua New Guinea. Thanks for your support!

Dr. Lisa Dabek is the director of the Tree Kangaroo Conservation Program and a senior conservation scientist at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo.

A man harvests greens at dawn in Tanzania. The Africa Monitoring System will examine the tradeoffs between agricultural development, nature and human livelihoods. (© Benjamin Drummond)

Q: Tell me about your vision for the Africa Monitoring System and the need for it.

A: The world is very connected and resources are diminishing; we can no longer afford to have siloed policy and decision-making with separate decisions for agriculture, poverty alleviation or nature conservation. And there is a growing need to increase agricultural production on the African continent — not only to feed Africans, but to feed the world.

The Asian Green Revolution was massively successful at increasing crop yields, but are the living standards of smallholder farmers in Asia better off now than they were 20-30 years ago? And can those yield increases be sustained in the face of depleted water tables, diminished soil health and the loss of pollinators? If we don’t start measuring agriculture, nature and human well-being in an integrated way, we can’t answer these questions.

Looking at all these challenges from a very high level, we realized that one of the pieces we urgently need to put into place is the ability to offer consistent, transparent, integrated information that decision-makers and individual farmers can easily access to see the big picture: the sum of many parts. I describe it as an ability to take Earth’s pulse and gauge how its support systems are holding up. It is only with this view that we feel that policymakers, farmers and investors alike can make smart decisions that fully consider the tradeoffs and synergies between the likely agricultural outcomes, ecosystem service outcomes, and human well-being outcomes.

This integrated global monitoring system will provide that information, initially in five regions of sub-Saharan Africa that are all priorities for agricultural intensification and which are also very important for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services.

A man sells dried corn, beans and grain at a market in Iringa, Tanzania. Efforts are being made to double the region's food production in the next three years. (© Benjamin Drummond)

Q: Why now?

There have been many recent calls for this sort of holistic and science-based monitoring system building over the past year, from the private sector, to governments like the United Kingdom, to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which wrote in its recent Agricultural Development Strategy about “creating a new and innovative monitoring system to evaluate environmental impacts…[that] brings to light any potential problems and builds in the ability to change approaches if necessary.” The Africa Monitoring System will align with the Agricultural Policies area of the foundation’s strategy, which focuses on “helping farm families increase their yields while preserving and enhancing natural resources over the long term.”

Q: You say it will be an integrated and holistic tool for decision and policymakers. Tell me what that will look like. How will it work?

We developed the model for the Africa Monitoring System primarily in rural Tanzania through the work of the Tropical Ecology Assessment & Monitoring (TEAM) Network and numerous partners, where we demonstrated our proof of concept. The pilot project brought together scientists, the government of Tanzania, the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to assess and report on agricultural productivity, ecosystem health and human well-being metrics such as livelihoods.

The international scientific community will decide on the standards for this data, and our intent is for it to offer a “gold standard” environmental monitoring system. Perhaps most importantly, we’ll have national and international policymakers telling us what information they need, and the funding to build capacity for the system and design its implementation to meet their needs.

We need to distill complex scientific information into a set of holistic indicators that have meaning for policymakers. But we also want to make sure that those indicators can be decomposed in a transparent way into the raw data and analyses that went into them. Right now there are many maps of agricultural yield gaps, or maps of ecosystem service values, but you can’t readily get at all the information that went into creating those maps and there is a disconnect between the scales at which decisions are being made and the scales at which the data are available. That’s a serious limitation.

The foundational principle of the Africa Monitoring System will be this transparent, open-access, standard and quantitative data which will be collected at several scales, from household, to plot, to landscape, to region, and eventually global. Policymakers will see a simplified, online dashboard which will allow them to look at the tradeoffs and see, for example, what will happen to water quality or water availability if they decide to intensify agricultural production in the lowlands, if they plant a certain rice or use a particular fertilizer.

An agricultural field in Tanzania. (© Benjamin Drummond)

Q: That sounds like a pretty massive undertaking. Who will gather all of this data?

A: Our aim is to build capacity in African countries to collect, analyze and interpret the data, working through local scientists and organizations. We will give grants to local organizations to collect the data; and we will develop partnerships with existing data collection efforts such as the Tanzania National Bureau of Statistics or the World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Study; and through collection and analysis of remote sensing imagery. As much of the work as possible will be done in Africa by Africans.

Q: You live in California, quite far from these rural African landscapes where agricultural intensification and hunger are key issues. What is your motivation? What drives your passion for this initiative?

A: We face this huge challenge that boils down to this one pressing question: in the next four decades: how are we going to feed the 9 billion citizens of this planet without destroying nature, especially in the face of climate change, and all of the uncertainty it brings? To do that, we can no longer afford to make decisions without really seeing the full picture of what’s happening to the planet. To provide that picture, we need to measure the right things in the right places and translate that information into something policymakers can use.

On a personal level, I lived in Africa for 10 years and have worked there for more than 30 years. My son spent his early childhood in Africa. I don’t want my grandchildren to be born into a world that is dying. But no one should go hungry so we can conserve nature.

Q: Last summer in the scientific journal Nature, you talked about “conservation science outside the comfort zone” and the need to think bigger and faster to tackle Earth’s challenges, sharing your vision for a global monitoring system. Is Africa the beginning of this larger global system? What’s next?

Sandy Andelman

Yes, this is the first step; phase one of a 10-15 year plan. Our intent is to create a multi donor fund that will support the implementation of a global system in priority places in Asia and South America, in addition to Africa. Our hope is that other donors jump on board to help us scale it up. Developing and implementing the Africa Monitoring Systems in five regions of sub-Saharan Africa represents phase one (three years) of a three-phase process (10-15 years) to create an Integrated Global Monitoring System for Agriculture, Ecosystem Services and Human Well-Being.

Dr. Sandy Andelman is a vice president at CI who will also serve as executive director of the Africa Monitoring System.

Costa Rica's Cocos Island, Greg Stone's intended destination. (© Flip Nicklin/Minden Pictures)

As Continental’s Boeing 737 touches down late evening on the runway of San José’s airport, I realize I have finally made it to Costa Rica, but sadly 12 hours too late! I was delayed due to a missed flight from Los Angeles, and spent two frustrating days waiting for another one. The research vessel Argo, with the rest of our team and equipment, has departed without me; I have quite literally “missed the boat.”

As I explained in my last post, the expedition’s main goal is to explore a seamount located over 300 miles [483 kilometers] off shore. To do this we have chartered Argo which operates a submarine, named Deep See, that will take us down to a depth of 1,500 feet [460 meters] to survey the summit and sides of this underwater mountain. We also have a robot to help with this work, called a remotely operated vehicle (ROV).

The combined costs per day for these assets are significant, so the team was forced to head off shore on schedule, to achieve our objectives with the precious 10-day charter. Each day counts and is critical to success. In order to get me to the ship, we have chartered yet another vessel, the storied Undersea Hunter, which will provide me, the sole passenger, with the most luxurious oceanic taxi ride of a lifetime.

Outside the airport, a man named Marco holds a sign with my name; bleary-eyed from travel and many hours waiting in airports, I greet Marco with a smile and my few words of Spanish, which match his few words of English. Thus, the three-hour drive to the coast is pleasant, albeit silent, as we occasionally look and smile at each other, unable to share a common language. The nighttime world of rural Costa Rica — restaurants, bars, farms, small homes, dimly-lit stores, people walking — all of it flashes past my window, as I drift in and out of sleep. The air is acrid from fires.

A bump in the road jars me awake; it’s now just after 1 a.m. I see the lights of the dock shining on the white hull of the 90-foot [27-meter] Undersea Hunter, as she sits patiently upon the still waters of the estuary of Punta Arenas, which connects us to the Gulf of Nicoya, and the vast beautiful Pacific Ocean beyond. Undersea Hunter is a live-aboard dive vessel that I have long heard about; she pioneered diving around the spectacular Cocos Island. This boat was one of the very first vessels to take people from all walks of life to some of the most amazing undersea places on Earth — places that had only previously been visited and dived by scientists, explorers and the likes of Jacques Cousteau.

I feel like Jason Bourne, as I am the sole person boarding this large vessel at such a late hour under cover of darkness, off a remote side road in Costa Rica; it feels very clandestine. Since I am the only passenger, I have my pick of her 10 cabins. The captain jokes that I can move every two hours into a new cabin if I like. I can tell the crew has never taken only one person such a long distance — especially departing at this time of night, it all feels like something from a movie. But this is the only way for me to get out to our research site and join the team to accomplish our mission.

Greg Stone

I drop my dive gear with a thump on the aft deck, the crew stores it, and they show me to Cabin 5. There I fall into a lovely double bed, and just before sleep overtakes me, I hear the engines rumble to a start, a few calls from the crew as they loosen dock lines, and we are underway.

Greg Stone is CI’s chief scientist for oceans. This expedition is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DRL-1114251. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Newly-discovered species of skink in Veun Sai-Siem Pang Conservation Area. (© Gabor Csorba)

Following on the recent bat and gibbon discoveries, a new species of lizard (Lygosoma veunsaiensis) has also been described from the Veun Sai-Siem Pang Conservation Area (VSSPCA) in Cambodia’s northeastern forests, adding further conservation value to this site.

The lizard is a new type of skink whose most striking features are its iridescent skin and its long form. Its tail is considerably longer than its body, which together with its very short legs — less than half a centimeter long — amplify its long appearance.

This new species has been named after the region in which it was discovered as a tribute to the area and to underscore the importance of Veun Sai-Siem Pang Conservation Area for the conservation of Cambodia’s threatened biodiversity. This is the third new species in the last two years to be discovered in VSSPCA. Last year a new type of bat was found here, and in 2010 a new gibbon species was described.

These discoveries are the result of biological assessments led by Fauna & Flora International in partnership with CI, which were carried out in 2010-2011 in VSSPCA. This new species was described from one specimen from the hundreds collected at the site. Of the 45 amphibian and reptile species that have now been recorded, this was the only Lygosoma specimen collected — and a very lucky find, as this type of lizard typically spends much of its time underground.

The results of biological survey work keep coming, and with each new discovery, the case for greater protection of this area is strengthened. As a result of this work, VSSPCA is now known to be extremely high in biodiversity. This species abundance, coupled with the resources and cultural values that local communities receive from this beautiful area, lend additional scientific weight to our hope that VSSPCA will be officially designated as a “protected forest” for its biodiversity value and the well-being of current and future generations.

Ben Rawson is the Veun Sai-Siem Pang Conservation Area Scape manager for Cambodia.

Fish swimming near Cocos Island off the coast of Costa Rica. The marine protected area surrounding the island is an important part of the Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape. (© CI/ Photo by Sterling Zumbrunn)

I’m briefly back home in Hawaii and am preparing to fly to Central America to begin a National Geographic expedition to explore seamounts off the coast of Costa Rica. With the large amount of travel I’m doing these days I’m very much beginning to feel like Jules Verne’s famous character Phileas Fogg from “Around the World in Eighty Days.”

First, let me backtrack; we’ve been talking about a story on seamounts for many years and have made a number of trips: beginning in the Sea of Cortez, and more recently including a trip in early 2011 to Raja Ampat, Indonesia and later to the Cortes bank off the coast of California. Seamounts are underwater volcanoes — some extinct, some still active — whose size and expanse can rival the Rocky Mountains. They are unique for their biodiversity which rival that of any coral reef system. Many endemic species (species unique to a specific geography) — as well as species new to science — have been found around seamounts, so they provide a significant opportunity for study.

My good friend and world-renowned underwater photographer Brian Skerry will be co-leading this trip with me; together, we hope to paint a compelling picture of these unique systems. Our team will also include Dr. Larry Madin from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Dr. Peter Auster from the University of Connecticut; Alan Dynner from the New England Aquarium; and Mike Velings, a Dutch entrepreneur and founder of the Netherlands-based “A-Spark – Good Ventures,” a company focused on environmentally-friendly business models.

Our destination is Cocos Island, which is found 300 miles [483 kilometers] southwest of Cabo Blanco in Costa Rica. In 1994, Jacques Cousteau called it the “most beautiful island in the world.” In order to get there we will be travelling on the Argo, a 130-foot [40-meter] vessel that includes both deep-diving submersibles and ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicles), which we’ll use to help us explore the surrounding seamounts and to hopefully better understand these systems.

Greg Stone

I’m very excited to reach Costa Rica and to begin this final chapter of our seamounts adventure. The final story will come to fruition later in 2012 in National Geographic Magazine.  I look forward to providing another blog update during the expedition to let you know how things are going — stay tuned!

Greg Stone is CI’s chief scientist for oceans. This expedition is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DRL-1114251. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Liberia currently contains about half of West Africa's remaining forests, yet illegal logging continues to destroy these valuable resources. CI is working with the Liberian government to build a more sustainable economic system. (© CI/Photo by John Martin)

I’ve been to Liberia numerous times over the past several years; however, my visit last December promised to be different. I was part of a CI team hosting a workshop on a particular approach to community-level conservation and development that simply would not have been possible until now.

When I started working in Liberia in 2004, the country was focused on recovering from nearly a decade and a half of civil war. Now, the government of Liberia is focused on economic development and jobs for its people, which necessarily involve an emphasis on exploitation of natural resources ranging from mineral ores to land for forestry and commercial plantations. CI is committed to ensuring that the ecosystem value of Liberia’s wealth of biodiversity and forests— almost half of the remaining forest in West Africa’s Upper Guinea Hotspot — is considered in the country’s development planning.

2012 will be a big year for conservation and economic development in Liberia, and CI is poised to play a vital role in shaping the way that these two arenas interact. Our partnerships with the national government, the private sector and civil society allow us to advance cutting-edge thinking on how to maintain healthy ecosystems as the foundation for human well-being.

However, to convince the people of Liberia that this is possible, we will need to turn nature’s value into concrete benefits for families. We need to bridge the gap between abstract mechanisms like forest carbon deals, biodiversity offsets, or spatial planning and people’s everyday lives. CI-Liberia proposes to do so using conservation agreements — an approach developed by CI’s Conservation Stewards Program.

A woman works at a tree nursery in Liberia. (© CI/Photo by Rob McNeil)

Conservation agreements promote sound management of biodiversity and ecosystem services — freshwater provision, pollination and many more — through negotiated arrangements with resource users.

Under such an agreement, a local community commits to conservation actions such as maintaining forest cover in important habitat areas and monitoring to detect illegal poaching. In return, conservation investors (which can be governments, companies or any source of conservation finance) provide funds to address the community’s self-defined needs and priorities, which typically include things like school fees, educational materials and investments to improve agriculture or other livelihoods. NGOs like CI play an important role as brokers that make these agreements possible by engaging communities, designing monitoring systems and generally taking care of the nuts and bolts of the deal.

Back to my December visit: to set the stage for using conservation agreements in Liberia, CI hosted over 20 people from local NGOs, government agencies and private sector partners in a training workshop.

For three days, participants learned about how CI has used conservation agreements in places like China, South Africa and Guatemala, and discussed details of how it could be used in Liberia. To dive into those details, we worked through a series of exercises to become familiar with key steps like using biodiversity threats to define conservation actions, identifying development investments that would make good community benefits, and thinking through ways to monitor project impacts.

Everyone at the workshop quickly embraced the idea of conservation agreements and began to think about how this tool would work in Liberia. Government staff see the model as a way to include local communities in co-management of nature reserves; private sector partners are keen to use conservation agreements to structure their relationships with communities; and local NGOs are eager to use this tool to achieve conservation and development objectives.

On the final day of the workshop we held a panel discussion to reflect on how the conservation agreement approach can be scaled up to the national level following demonstrations planned in Nimba and Grand Bassa counties. The variety of economic activities throughout the country — timber concessions, mining, offshore oil and gas development and commercial plantations, as well as carbon initiatives and landscape conservation — presents an opportunity for many different potential applications for conservation agreements.

The workshop generated much energy and enthusiasm from the participants and the trainers. One participant said, “It gave me a lot to think about … and I learned a lot I can use in my day-to-day to experience with the community.” Another agreed: “The training provided ideas about how to engage communities in designing a simple and satisfactory conservation agreement.”

For my part, I was thrilled to see that more than 20 people of highly varied backgrounds and perspectives were unanimous in their optimism and confidence regarding prospects for a national program of conservation agreements. We are now eager to move to the next phase, which will be to conduct feasibility assessments for conservation agreements with specific communities around the East Nimba Nature Reserve and the region around the port city of Buchanan.

Eduard Niesten is the senior director of CI’s Conservation Stewards Program. Many thanks to Borwen Sayon and Jessica Donovan-Allen of CI-Liberia both for organizing the workshop and contributing to this blog.

The "Friends of Environment Nature and Development Society" youth group making T-shirts — all with the message "Save the Sea Turtle." (© Keith Ellenbogen)

In addition to photographing marine wildlife, one of the most rewarding aspects of my job is being able to meet and visually communicate the culture and traditions of local communities. From the Turtle Islands, I took an hour-long speedboat ride to Taganak Island. Upon arrival at the dock there was a crowd of teenagers eager to say hello.

My welcoming party was made up of participants in an innovative program that engages the youth to think about conservation and raise awareness throughout the island community. The program, called “Friends of Environment Nature and Development Society,” is led by Marion Daclan and Orlando Maliwanag of CI-Philippines. Like many community-based programs, a large part of its success is found in the leadership and relationships that have been developed over a long time.

A "Save the Sea Turtle" silkscreen design created by local youth leaders on the Turtle Islands. (© Keith Ellenbogen)

Between the ages of 13 and 15, the group’s approximately 30 members are involved in a number of environmental projects that range from cleaning up the beach to educational art projects. For example, their youth leader, Joel — who happens to be an excellent artist — drew designs that were then silkscreened on T-shirts. Each design read “Save the Sea Turtle.” I bought one for myself, and one for my niece. Right now these shirts are only sold to local people on the islands, a place with no tourists. However, the group hopes to generate revenue through the sale of these shirts — possibly reaching a larger market like Malaysia or even better the United States.

I pose with Joel (left), local youth group leader and artist, who gave my camera case some personality. I will send him a photograph of a sea turtle to say thanks! (© Keith Ellenbogen)

By far one of the most captivating and profound moments for me was an interaction I had with a 13-year-old girl who is part of this youth program. When I asked her why we should care about sea turtles, I expected she would reply with something about wanting more food or a better life for herself and her family. Instead, her answer was more worldly and selfless: she answered in broken English, “I really want to help the world around me to protect the sea turtles — so that we can live peacefully and save Mother Earth.”

Twin sisters stand in front of a mural with sea turtle designs. Sea turtle are often depicted in local art. (© Keith Ellenbogen)

This girl probably has the equivalent of a second grade education. She is poor. She may have never left the small island where she lives, yet she has a holistic view — understanding that when it comes to conserving the oceans, we are all connected and share a common responsibility and destiny.

Keith Ellenbogen is a member of the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP). Check out more of Keith’s sea turtle photos and videos on the New England Aquarium Explorers Blog.

After hatching on the beach, baby green sea turtles immediately take to the sea. (© Keith Ellenbogen)

One of my most awe-inspiring moments on the Turtle Islands was when I observed and photographed baby sea turtles breaking through the sand and racing to the water’s edge. At that moment before being swept up by the sea they appeared to pause and watch the wave breaking — like a surfer running with a board into the sea.

A baby green sea turtle entering the ocean for the first time. (© Keith Ellenbogen)

For the hatchlings, this is truly a life-or-death drama. Most don’t make it past the hungry gauntlet of the seabirds and fish within the coral reef; it’s estimated that less than 1 percent survive. There is still much we don’t know about the ocean and the animals living in it, but it’s clear that those that survive to adulthood are the lucky ones.

A simulation of how enforcement agents and park rangers apprehend sea turtle egg poachers. (© Keith Ellenbogen)

One evening on the sandy beach I asked Romeo Trono, the executive country director of Conservation International Philippines, to describe what it was like before he and others established this conservation area. He humbly told me that it never dawned on him that he would see the hatchlings they released in the eighties return to the same beaches 20-30 years later. In 2011, both the Malaysian and Philippine park rangers reported a record number of nesting sea turtles on their beaches — most likely a direct result of the conservation work over the past two to three decades.

A baby green sea turtle at night swimming over the coral reef. (© Keith Ellenbogen)

The Turtle Islands are a success story and a testament to the long-term triumphs of conservation efforts. They remind us that, like the sea turtle hatchling racing for the water, we too can beat the odds.

Keith Ellenbogen is a member of the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP). See more of Keith’s sea turtle photos and videos on the New England Aquarium Explorers Blog.

A woman herds sheep and goats in Namaqualand, South Africa. (© CI/Photo by Tessa Mildenhall)

Modern food systems have been very successful at producing vast amounts of food to feed our growing world. However, this has come at a high cost. Many waterways have become depleted or greatly polluted. An expansive amount of natural habitat has been lost or fragmented due to conversion to agriculture. And this loss and degradation has resulted in a huge decline in the world’s species — a decline which must be curbed if we wish to maintain — let alone expand — global food production.

Healthy natural ecosystems are the backbone of a productive, resilient planet; they’re also essential to food security. They provide a bountiful supply of wild foods that nourish billions of people. Fish in particular represent an important source of nutrients. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, more than one billion people depend on seafood as their primary source of protein.

Ecosystems also support our ability to continuously cultivate food by providing critical services such as fresh water; nutrient cycling and soil formation; pollination; regulation of climate, pests and diseases; and the genetic diversity that may hold the key to more productive, more nutritious, or more resilient crop or livestock varieties in the future.

About 7,000 species of plants and several hundred species of animals have been used for human food at one time or another. As the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment points out, some indigenous and traditional communities depend heavily on biodiversity, using more than 200 species for food. Wild sources of food are particularly important for the poor and landless. This is especially the case during times of famine, insecurity or conflict, but even in normal times many wild foods are important complements to staple foods to provide a balanced diet.

Conservation International’s (CI) approach to food security recognizes that human well-being, sustainable food production systems and healthy natural ecosystems are all interdependent. Working at the landscape and seascape scale, we aim to demonstrate how the conservation of ecosystems and biodiversity, implemented together with appropriate production and harvest practices, can make food production more resilient and sustainable.

Case in point: South Africa’s semi-arid, biodiversity-rich Namaqualand region, where the majority of the population’s livelihoods depend on livestock production, yet overgrazing and degradation of freshwater resources are making it even more difficult for people to make a living. Forty percent of residents currently live below the poverty line.

The Biodiversity and Red Meat Initiative (BRI) — created by Conservation South Africa and local partners — is working with local farmers to strengthen pastoral livelihoods by reducing herd size, protecting key wetland areas and encouraging wildlife-friendly predator management (i.e. using guard dogs instead of hunting or trapping the animals). In exchange for membership, participants receive technical support and training in improved production practices, monitoring and help with infrastructure. As a further incentive, the initiative is working to create more secure markets by linking herders to a national meat processor.

By combining improved grazing practices with protection of sensitive riparian areas within a larger watershed, this project illustrates the importance of taking a broader approach to sustainable food production that not only looks at specific production practices, but also considers the role of nature in the larger production landscape.

To this end, CI is proud to join a strong set of partners in the creation of the Landscape for People, Food and Nature (LPFN) Initiative. Through this collaboration, we hope to ensure long-term food security and ecosystem health by promoting “multi-output” food production systems that are able to provide services beyond food provisioning. For example, farming systems can provide watershed services in the form of rainwater infiltration and water quality regulation. Agricultural systems also have potential to serve as carbon sinks, provide wildlife habitat, and create connectivity between natural areas in the landscape.

There is no “one size fits all” for agriculture, but these integrated approaches to sustainable food production — developed with local stakeholders and tailored to local conditions — are essential to conserving biodiversity in agricultural landscapes while meeting the needs for food production.

John Buchanan is CI’s senior director of food security.

A silhouette of mating green sea turtles within the Turtle Islands Heritage Protected Area. (© Keith Ellenbogen)

The Turtle Islands Heritage Protected Area (TIPA) consists of a group of nine islands: three in Malaysia and six in the Philippines. They are appropriately called the Turtle Islands and represent a transboundary conservation agreement focused on protecting the endangered green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas). These nine islands are some of the most important nesting beaches in Southeast Asia.

Nesting endangered green sea turtle digs a hole to cover her eggs. (© Keith Ellenbogen)

The story of the sea turtle and its life cycle is an inspiration to me — a motivational message about overcoming the odds. Each day and night I walked along the beach in search of nesting sea turtles. Most often in the early morning light, I would see the tracks, but occasionally I would encounter a nesting turtle that pushed its massive body across the beach from the sea to lay its eggs on land, starting a new generation. I can only imagine the transition from mobility to immobility, from agile swimmer to awkward walker, from weightlessness to the immense weight of gravity outside the suspension of water. A testament to perseverance. While graceful at sea, like a quirky cross between a “Star Wars” spaceship and ballerina, on land the adult turtles make slow, laborious, deliberate movements. The entire nesting process looks like a struggle.

Nesting green sea turtles return to sea after laying eggs throughout the evening. (© Keith Ellenbogen)

What is difficult to communicate is the length of time that this process takes. Photographs and video give the illusion of compressed time, but the real-time process to crawl up a beach, dig a hole (typically multiple holes before settling on a location), lay eggs, cover the nest and return to sea takes a whopping four to six hours and appears to be a struggle for every bit of it, until they return to the familiar comforts of the sea.

These tracks tell the story of a nesting green sea turtle that laid eggs and returned to sea. (© Keith Ellenbogen)

Keith Ellenbogen is a member of the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP). Check out Part 2 of our blog series, and see more of Keith’s sea turtle photos and videos on the New England Aquarium Explorers Blog.