World Travel & Tourism Council is starting a new monthly series of interview with past winners of the Tourism for Tomorrow Awards. To kick off, they interviewed Les Carlisle, Group Conservation Manager for &Beyond, which won our conservation award in 2013.

WTTC: When you won the Conservation Award in 2013, we wrote about your relocation work with Rhino. Looking back a year or so later, how have these projects worked out, and are there plans to develop them?

LC: The Gaur project in India has really had substantial knock on effects. The most obvious is that the Gaur population in the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve is now bigger than it was when recording of populations numbers started. And this is the reserve with the highest densities of tigers in India.

The project had the expertise of the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) and knowingly translocated the gaur into this high predator density. The WII developed a population model that established the minimum size of reintroduced population should be 50 and hence the number that were introduced. This has reinforced the confidence in the modelling and translocation abilities of the WII and coupled with the success of the fencing in preventing the Gaur from crop raiding has major implications for Indian conservation.

Fencing is an anathema in conservation circles and they believe that open systems are the way it has always worked in India but this is slightly short sighted as the population pressures are so big now that human wildlife conflicts exist at almost every reserve and domestic cattle wander freely into protected areas and consume the grass that the prey species need. This forces the prey species out of the park… and the tigers follow. Fencing the cattle out of Indian parks will increase the density of tiger prey species and thereby increase the densities of tigers that the protected areas can support ,and thereby reduce the conflict. This approach needs to be adapted to local conditions but is slowly gaining acceptance, supported by the fencing at Bandhavgarh’s ability to reduce conflict and contain species. This is a much bigger influence than we had predicted when we simply wanted to translocate a founder population of Gaur.

This 48hr trip conformed that it is possible and that the Botswana authorities were a delight to deal with and totally supported this type of initiative. The total support from the state has given us the confidence to join hands with Great Plains Conservation and together we are well on our way to start to move up to 100 Rhino to Botswana in 2015.

WTTC: So many difference proposals are made for how to protect rhinoceros from poaching, with Colin Bell recently proposing a conservation levy on all visitors to South Africa, for example. What would your preferred approach(es) be? 

LC: One of the most valuable lessons I learned when I started travelling up Africa is that there literally is no one size fits all solution to conservation issues. The only thing that works is to “implement locally crafted solutions to local issues”. We have to do everything more and better at every level – reserve, state, national and international – and we have to try lots of new things. I believe we need to be doing more community development around our Parks as the community are the best security money can buy if they value a resource. Colin’s idea is fantastic – it is a new revenue stream to fund the war. We have to get international co-operation and alignment on the same plan. We need more co-ordination and to use technology more effectively. We need to try every avenue to devalue Rhino horn. Ultimately we need to make Rhino worth more when they are alive, than when they are dead, to ensure that they do not face extinction.

WTTC: Can you tell us about any new sustainability projects that you have going on right now?

LC: On the conservation and research side, we have the formalisation of the Aders Duiker project on Mnemba island with the University of South Africa, based on the incredibly successful Suni Breeding project that has continued for the last 15 years. The really important off road driving research has been initiated at Phinda to assess the long term impact of this practice in conservation areas. We also have a new hyena research project and two Sand forest research projects underway at Phinda.
On the sustainability side we have the rebuild of Kichwa Tembo with the solar hot water system and the rebuild of Sandibe camp in the Okavango delta with more than 70 % of its power requirements being supplied by solar energy. The incredible savings that two water bottling plants at two of our lodges have had is really amazing. The bottling plants at Kichwa Tembo in Kenya and Phinda Mountain lodge in South Africa have resulted in 150,000 less plastic water bottles to dispose of. (Story By World Travel & Tourism Council)