YOU CAN HELP

Support our work by adopting a tiger or a family of giraffes, elephants or lions at bornfree.org.uk/adopt and visit bornfree. org.uk/climate-change-and-biodiversityloss for other ways to take action.

“Born Free’s conservation programmes focus on hero species, such as the tiger, giraffe, elephant and lion and operate at landscape level, aiming to preserve the species and its habitat. So, all our work inherently combats climate change, because we enable wild animals to continue playing their unique roles as part of natural, evolving ecosystems.”

Will Travers OBE Executive President

We must all take action to halt carbon emissions to prevent runaway warming. We need to embrace transformative change – how we live and consume, and value nature. As a society, we must direct a huge global investment into protecting and restoring wildlife and natural habitats, to lock in carbon and ensure the stable climate on which all life relies.

Born Free is doing its bit. With your invaluable support, our team protects natural habitats, reduces humanwildlife conflict and empowers people to positively co-exist with wildlife. Just a few examples:

• Every month we remove about 80 deadly wire snares – set illegally by poachers – in Meru, Kenya, thereby securing grassland habitat for grazing wildlife such as giraffe

• We help farmers use composting instead of ‘slashand-burn’ farming in Dja, Cameroon, and restore vital gorilla-habitat forest on abandoned plantations

• We help a network of eight local organisations in Satpuda, central India, ensure safe access for tigers moving through corridors between protected areas

• We distribute thousands of energy-saving stoves and water storage towers to empower families in remote areas to cope with climate extremes such as drought

• We help farmers live alongside animals like lions and elephants, fortifying 380+ livestock ‘boma’ enclosures and installing our first ‘beehive fences’

Please join me and do what you can. Support our work to protect wildlife and play your part in combatting the global climate and biodiversity crises.

Dr Nikki Tagg Head of Conservation nikki@bornfree.org.uk

The Born Free slogan, ‘Keep Wildlife in the Wild’ will resonate with readers of Wild Life for a variety of reasons, mostly I would guess, based on an empathic understanding of the frustrations of captivity – something we all felt during ‘lockdown’. Concern for the suffering of animals whose natural urges are thwarted at every turn by the confines of cages, or fenced paddocks, drives us to work to improve their lives and where possible, return them to their natural habitat.

‘Romantic tosh’, some would say, ‘as long as they are given the right food and a mate and a bit of environmental enrichment they are better off in captivity – safe from poachers and receiving veterinary care when ill.’ This debate between the pro- and anti-zoo factions has raged for decades, but times are a-changing. How does it look in our newly carbon-conscious world, or in the light of recent research into the role of animals in ecosystems?

On land and in the oceans, there is a growing awareness of the importance of our ecosystems as life-support systems for the planet. Given the agreement reached at CBD CoP15 (page 11) in Montreal last December, to protect 30% of the world by 2030, and the muchdiscussed ‘biodiversity funding gap’ of $700 billion+ per year needed to pay for this, there are new arguments to consider and a new question: what is the true value of nature and, indeed, of individual animals?

One of the landmark moments in my life was finding the body of Digit, a young silverback mountain gorilla who had been speared by poachers and decapitated. Digit had been studied by Dr Dian Fossey in Rwanda’s mountain forests for a decade, from 1967 when he was a playful bundle of fluff with a crooked finger (likely a snare injury, hence his name) to him becoming the splendid young silverback I first met when I became Dian’s assistant in 1976. At that time, he was still living on the periphery of the group in which he grew up and, lacking peers of the same age, he would sometimes come over and sit beside me during rest periods and watch me taking notes on the behaviour of the other members of his family.

Ten years later, it happened again. In 1987, I found myself standing beside the rotting remains of Charles, one of the famous underground elephants I was studying on Mount Elgon, Kenya. He was barely a teenager and I knew him because he had previously proved tolerant of the biologist cautiously following him into a side chamber of Kitum Cave, to photograph him mining the mineral-rich rock. His patience wore thin, though; after a couple of flash photographs, he turned round and stuck his ears out (which is why I named him Charles). I backed away and clearly this was enough to reassure him because after a pause, he resumed his tusking. Again, like Dian, I was winning the trust of a wild animal by inter-species communication as a way of doing research.

From that perspective, talk of the economic value of gorilla beings is anathema. A gorilla is an autonomous self-aware member of his or her community, living in a society with rules and able to make decisions about what to eat, where to sleep and with whom to spend time. Success in life will be determined by those decisions. To a traditional economist, these philosophical ideas may be interesting but in economic terms – bearing in mind this was before gorilla tourism was developed – Digit had a dollar value of zero… until he was speared. Then, his head and hands were worth $20 to the poachers, who had been told by a local trader that they would be paid that amount if they brought him these gruesome trophies.

Charles was killed by ivory poachers as he and his family entered Kitum Cave. The poachers evidently knew of the mining behaviour and saw it as an opportunity for an ambush. In a hurry to escape the rangers, who would have heard the gunshots, they sliced off the tusks in a single plane, apparently with a chainsaw. At that precise moment, Charles went from a dollar value of zero, alive, to a few hundred dollars, dead – maybe eventually a few thousand dollars once the ivory was carved. Why does our modern society only value nature when it is dead?

Just as Dian had established the Digit Fund to channel her anger into something positive (now the Gorilla Organization in UK and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International in the USA), I launched an appeal – The African Ele-Fund – with the help of BBC Wildlife Magazine and several charities – including Zoo Check, to fund practical elephant conservation. In 1989, we launched the Elefriends campaign to lobby for a ban on the ivory trade. This was so successful, it became a bigger enterprise than Zoo Check, and so the trustees (Bill Travers in particular) decided to change the name to the Born Free Foundation, under which Elefriends, Zoo Check and other campaigns and projects could operate.

What can we conclude from these two incidents? Like Digit, Charles had no economic value as a living elephant (there being virtually no tourism to Mount Elgon). The lesson seemed to be that in the absence of a dollar value ascribed to living organisms, conservation funding must depend on philanthropy or – if attractive to tourists – the ‘ornamental’ value of animals and plants.

Fast forward to 21st February 2023 and the inaugural Natural Capital Conference in London, where I spoke about the state of the planet, and how gorillas and elephants can help. This was not my usual audience of students or naturalists (though there was a smattering of both), it was a 450-seater lecture theatre packed with senior corporate, financial and business people.

Organised by Rebalance Earth, a community interest company of which I am a co-founder and Born Free is a charity partner, it was designed to outline and discuss our exciting proposal to apply the new economic paradigm developed by Dr Ralph Chami (see page 21). This values living nature by looking at the role of ‘keystone species’ in ecosystems and calculating a dollar value for the ‘work’ done by each animal.

Taking the examples of Digit, Charles and other poacher victims, I asked the audience to consider not just the suffering of the individuals killed and their family, but to think of what was lost to the ecosystem as a result of their death. Digit might reasonably have lived to 35 years, like his younger brother Titus or Pablo, the gorilla who sat on Sir David Attenborough in the famous Life on Earth BBC TV series, who both reached that age and fathered numerous offspring.

A silverback produces more than 10kg of dung per day, 365 days a year for more than 20 years – therefore the death of Digit at about 13 years of age deprived the soil in his home range of more than 80 tonnes of first-class organic manure, spread over 22 years. An elephant such as Charles might produce about one tonne of dung per week, 52 weeks per year, but his life was shortened by about 50 years, which equates to 2,600 tonnes of manure NOT spread around the forests of Mount Elgon.

According to research by Dr Fabio Berzaghi, Congo Basin forests with elephants are more productive than similar forests from which elephants have long been extirpated, resulting in 7-14% more above ground biomass (wood, stems and leaves of vegetation). This is because the elephants eat the softer (low-carbon) plants, which both reduces competition and fertilises the big (high-carbon) trees.

In our carbon conscious world, this effect is worth money – Ralph Chami calculates that the additional carbon capture attributable to each forest elephant over the course of his or her life is worth $2.6 million. Rebalance Earth proposes to sell the services of elephants and other keystone species to companies and individuals wishing to reduce their ecological footprint, thereby bringing significant new conservation finance as well as generating jobs for indigenous people and local communities in and around these ecosystems.

Currently, the only ecosystem service with a market value is carbon sequestration, but the ‘nature credits’ we envisage will include other services – oxygen, fresh water, biodiversity, etc – and will also help contribute to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Animals really are our allies in the fight against climate change and ecosystem collapse, and yet the past 50 years has seen their numbers decline on average by 69%, according The Living Planet Report

You Can Help

If, like Ian, you have a passion for gorillas or elephants, adopt one of our wild families today to help keep them safe and fulfil their roles as keystone species: bornfree.org.uk/adopt

Zoos add to global warming

The UN has declared this to be the Decade of Ecosystem Restoration. Born Free’s projects help depleted animal populations recover, work with communities to reduce human-wildlife conflict, and help stabilise the climate. Contrast that with a zoo animal walking around an enclosure like a cog taken out of a machine; instead of being a gardener of the forest or savannah, captive animals are unemployed, and actually increase greenhouse gas emissions from all the fuel and energy used by zoos.

It turns out that keeping wildlife in the wild is important not just for the welfare of the animal but for the good of the planet too.

The keeping of wild animals in captivity is expensive. Not only financially, but also in terms of carbon. As highlighted in our recent report, Born to Roam: The Suffering of Polar Bears in Zoos (page 3), zoo enclosures are typically made from materials whose production generates large amounts of greenhouse gases. Steel and concrete production are each responsible for eight per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, while the production of glass further contributes to the problem. The animals who end up being incarcerated within these enclosures are not able to deliver any carbon-saving contribution to their natural ecosystems.

Ian Redmond OBE Senior Wildlife Consultant ian@bornfree.org.uk

A global deal for nature

“With your support, our team called for transformative change to stop biodiversity loss at the UN’s crucial COP15 summit in Montreal, Canada last December. Protecting and restoring wildlife is essential for its own sake and for the myriad ‘services’ it provides, including regulating our climate since the natural world absorbs the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, stores carbon, and buffers against extreme weather and its consequences. Conversely, combatting climate change improves animals’ health and well-being, and that of their habitats.

“In December, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. While not perfect, it provides the basis for the global collaboration so desperately needed if we are to rescue nature and limit global warming. Born Free was heavily involved in the negotiations that led to this historic agreement, and we will be working hard to ensure its robust implementation.”

Adeline Lerambert International Policy Specialist

Born Free

Wild elephants have been dubbed a super-keystone species due to the profound impacts they have on their habitats, which benefit countless other species. The removal of these ‘mega-gardeners of the forest’ not only disrupts family groups but has consequences for the wider environment. Each adult elephant produces roughly one metric tonne of dung per week, 52 weeks per year for decades, which fertilises soils, feeds invertebrates, helps seeds germinate and enriches biodiversity. The activities of individual forest elephants demonstrably and significantly contribute to the sequestration of carbon. The unnecessary removal of even one individual to be housed in a zoo therefore results in measurable losses to their habitat and their wider environmental contribution.

The importance of animals as a vital part of functioning ecosystems is becoming more widely recognised. Born Free’s Wildlife Conservation and Animal Welfare Manifesto released in February 2023 (page 4) calls for the next UK government to phase out the keeping of large mammals in captivity. On top of the litany of welfare issues such species face, keeping these species confined begs the question whether zoos are doing more harm than good to the ecology of the planet.

Chris Lewis Captivity Research Officer Born Free