The Department of Forests and Park Services and World Wildlife Fund will be starting the High Conservation Value Project in Paro next month. The project is to protect areas rich in biodiversity and culture that fall outside the protected areas. To this effect, the stakeholders endorsed the National Interpretation for the project yesterday. National Interpretation will help identify the high conservation value areas.
In the pilot phase, the forestry officials will identify six high conservation values surrounding environmental, social and cultural values in Paro.
A high conservation value area is any area such as a forest, grassland, watershed or landscape ecosystem that needs to be properly managed to maintain its value. The project will ensure that these areas are managed sustainably.
“The areas include categories across six different regimes including not just conservation activities but also values that people derive from forests and nature and also looking at cultural values of places. We have to look at which HCV a landscape falls into. Then have to come up with the management framework,” said Kinley Tshering, Chief Forestry Officer with the Department of Forests and Park Services.
Later, the department will be initiating the project in eight other districts of Thimphu, Haa, Samtse, Chhukha, Tsirang, Dagana, Zhemgang, and Sarpang.
“We have more than 51 per cent under a network of protected areas. We often find through a national survey including the tiger survey that we have a lot of biodiversity including tigers, sometimes more in numbers, occurring outside national parks. So, I think this is one way of giving impetus to focusing our efforts at conservation and of course meeting public service demand outside national parks,” added Kinley Tshering.
The concept of High Conservation Value was introduced in 1998 by the Forest Steward Council, an international non-profit organisation. It promotes the responsible management of world forests. The concept was initiated to be used as a tool to protect important environmental, social and cultural values within forest landscapes.
Karma Wangdi
Edited by Phub Gyem
