Solar powered light bulb moments

I always knew that stepping into the world of international conversation work would be a steep learning curve for me. It was a very deliberate choice. I wanted to broaden my horizons, learn about working with different nations, cultures and habitats.

But if I’m honest, really honest, I was probably thinking about international advocacy – WWT’s work as a Ramsar International Organising Partner, a leader for CEPA (communication, capacity building, education, participation and awareness) and working with my equivalents in other global eNGOs. This was akin to my UK based comfort zone.

Of course I knew, and was excited to learn more about, WWT’s work in our global hotspots. Established teams in Madagascar and Cambodia plus a stated ambition to develop more in West Africa and along the East Asia-Australasian flyway. When I told people I was moving to WWT and about my role they invariably asked if I would visit my teams overseas, and I answered: I hope so!

And now I have. I’m on my way back from two weeks with WWT Madagascar visiting sites, meeting partners and spending time with the team.

Quite frankly, so many lightbulbs have gone off, I’m blown away.

For those working in the international sector, or even just better at travelling ‘off the beaten track’ than me, there is a risk all this narrative does is expose my ignorance. But as I posted recently the best way to overcome ignorance is to embrace it. So here goes!

The privilege of the Global North

Let’s start with the obvious. The combination of climatic and environmental conditions, basic or no (water, waste, roads, health and much more) infrastructure provision or maintenance and reliance on subsistence living are a world away from what most of us in the Global North deal with on a day-to-day basis. That gives us an advantage, privilege if you like, of which we have to be aware. So, a few (of many) reflections.

• Everything takes time. Travelling, collecting water, cleaning clothes, growing or catching food – or even buying it daily: literally everything. That means time for other essential activities, like learning, has to be carved out of every day. And it is! Everyone we talked to was keen to learn new ways of doing things that helped them be more productive and gain new perspectives. People need this to deal with the challenges of the world today. And they want our help. But the point is - innovation, problem solving, change all take time. And time is limited.

• People need nature, nature doesn’t need people. We heard this multiple times from officials in Madagascar. They have the courage to voice what we so often dance around: that it’s people who will suffer most and longest if we don’t change our ways. That’s because the Global North, largely - but not entirely as the recent horrendous flooding across central Europe has reminded us - can afford to ignore this fact. For now. But in countries like Madagascar, it’s starkly apparent every single day. We travelled through parched landscapes, literally burning. We crossed rivers with a trickle in the middle of a vast channel showing the magnitude of the extremes. And we heard about the shifts in weather patterns normally so reliable you could set your clock by them, or calendar in the case of the rain. The crises facing our world are utterly impossible to ignore here.

• Technology is available, in theory. I didn’t expect to see solar panels outside traditionally built mud houses. It makes sense in a country with between 2,500 and 3,000 sunshine hours a year. However, charcoal is still the fuel of choice for stoves, leading to a desperate need for sustainable forestry on an island where deforestation is one of the biggest challenges. The cost of technology, and perhaps even more so, the cost of the infrastructure to distribute the resources resulting from it, is prohibitive to much of the Global South. So it’s important our technological focus for the Global South should focus on helping the people who live there to thrive and develop not just be driven by creating sustainable ways to take what the Global North needs from them.

It’s (more than) OK to talk about poverty

There is poverty and need in the Global North and I am not in any way belittling that or saying it isn’t important. But the majority of us working in the environmental field based in the Global North, live a world away from the realities of the 6 billion people who live in the Global South.

And we’re uncomfortable talking about it. Especially to those who we consider to be poor. They don't share that discomfort.

I can’t claim this lightbulb. It was sarah fowler’s and she tested it with both our Madagascar team and the government officials we met. The message we heard back was loud and clear, our country is poor: it’s a fact.

Poverty isn’t something people do to themselves. There shouldn’t be any judgement in talking about a country as poor. I suspect most who read this will be horrified at the thought that there might be. So why can’t we talk about it?

We need to recognise and acknowledge poverty. Recognise the impact it has on people’s lives, the challenges they face and the solutions available to them. Understand the realities, the drivers, the limitations it causes. And then use that understanding to make more informed suggestions, give more informed advice, design more informed projects as a result.

Biodiversity hotspots matter… but in a world of inevitable compromise, so do the people who live in them

Madagascar is truly special. Particularly (but not only) in the richness of its biodiversity. According to research recently published in Nature on patterns of Evolutionary Distinct and Globally Endangered (EDGE) species, maximum EDGE species richness occurs in Northern Madagascar with 317 species. The next is Mexico with roughly 25% less.

Madagascar is undoubtedly a biodiversity hotspot. And it’s under threat. The system of protected areas gives some of the best-preserved habitat a degree of protection. But the contrast between these areas and those surrounding them is stark. And, with shifting climate patterns making southern Madagascar even more challenging to live in, the country is seeing a wave of migration which is making protection of these special areas even harder.

This issue affects us all in one way or another across the globe. But here in Madagascar the impact on nature is first order. Just before we left Lac Tseny, our team had a meeting with the community group who manage the lake (the Vondron'Olona Ifotony or VOI). Their focus was on how to manage the fact a group of migrants were clearing a protected area of forest to create land for farming and a place to live. If they didn’t act fast – within days – the small patch of forest would be gone.

At the moment, there is no answer to the question of where else the migrants will go. That’s true across the globe. But unless we find an answer we’re in danger of creating areas for people and separate areas for wildlife… which I’m not sure is the vision any of us are striving for. I'm left realising that migration within and between countries, can be a conservation issue. One that left unaddressed risks as a spiral of increasing poverty and decreasing biodiversity as resources are overused and become unavailable.

Partnership not paternalism

If you watched the UK Foreign Secretary’s speech at Kew last week, you will recognise I have borrowed the title for this lightbulb from him.

I’ve posted before on how central community engagement (preferably co-creation) is to us at WWT. Our work, particularly where it is project funded, doesn’t allow us to stay involved indefinitely: I’m not sure it would be right if it did. Which means the outcomes we deliver have to be ones our communities value enough to want to protect and understand enough to know how. Experience tells us that happens when a community is involved and shapes the vision right from the very start.

So whilst I applaud the commitment to partnership. I wonder if it goes far enough? Or is there a risk that it ends up being partnership delivery of Global North ambitions? I do hope not because I fear that would risk keeping us with one foot in the past.

Co-creation is hard. It almost always means compromise. But the relationships it forges bring wider benefits and better outcomes in the long-term. We have to hold on to how important this is.

So what does this mean for our day to day lives and work in the Global North?

For those working internationally, holding the realities of the Global South and the Global North in their heads is part of what they do. Despite my immersion and eye opening of the past couple of weeks, I suspect I’ll find that harder to hold on to as I get subsumed back into daily life in the UK. However, I know viewing the decisions I make about our international work through the lens of what I have learnt here will lead to better choices.

But I’m also reflecting on how these experiences and the knowledge I’m starting to gain, would have affected the decisions I made when my focus was just on England.

Which brings us back to my post on ignorance.

In it I said we should be better at acknowledging the things we don't know and seeing them as just as important as the things we do. What is expertise to one, is ignorance to another. Expertise isn't useful if it sits in isolation. I suggested we need to embrace our ignorance to access others' knowledge and join the pieces up to get better, more connected answers.

The Global North and the Global South are just labels. They are both part of one world and decisions in or for one affect the other. We can’t adapt to the environment we’re creating under the climate crises or the nature crisis without remembering that. Our world is connected, our environment is connected, our biodiversity is connected. We must be too.