Conservation: one million hectare more of protected area in Madagascar

Madagascar on track to triple its nature reserves.
By Tim Cocks
Mon Jan 9, 2006 1:28 PM GMT
Reuter

ANTANANARIVO (Reuters) - Madagascar has reached a milestone in its plan to triple its nature reserves by the end of 2008, protecting a million extra hectares since the plan was drafted, a top conservation group said on Monday.

President Marc Ravalomanana pledged to boost the huge Indian Ocean island's protected forests and wetlands to 6.0 million hectares from its then 1.7 million in September 2003 at a World Parks Congress in South Africa.

Herilala Randriamahazo, marine director for Madagascar at the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), said the government was on track to meet Ravalomanana's pledge after the plan was finalized last year.

"The plan was to make a million extra hectares last year, starting last year. This has been achieved," he told Reuters.

"With the new system, local communities are involved in making protected areas. This approach enables better enforcement by motivating them (to protect wildlife)."

Three quarters of Madagascar's tens of thousands of plant and animal species are found nowhere else, making it second only to Brazil for unique biodiversity.

But wildlife on the world's fourth largest island is under growing threat from poverty and population pressure.

Seventy-five percent of its 17 million people live on less than a dollar a day, most of them eking out a living as subsistence farmers, where competition for land is encroaching on the island's remaining forest.

"Madagascar has scored a significant victory for conservation by bringing one million hectares of ... landscapes and seascapes under protection to conserve the island nation's unique fauna and flora," WCS said in a statement.

"The newly established Makira Protected Area -- one of the country's five new protected areas -- now forms along with existing Masoala National Park the largest contiguous tract of rain forest under protection on the island," it added.

Madagascar is known to have at least 10,000 plant species, 316 reptiles and 109 bird species found nowhere else.

Its treasures include a colorful cast of chameleons and dozens of species of lemurs -- a cuddly primate unique to the island that also stars in the recent DreamWorks animation, "Madagascar."

But conservationists say traditional "slash-and-burn" agriculture, in which forests are cleared for planting subsistence crops, has decimated the island's rainforest cover, threatening many species with extinction.