Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic, affecting all countries, with millions of cases and deaths, and economic disruptions due to lockdowns, also threatens the health and conservation of endangered mountain gorillas. For example, increased poaching due to absence of tourism income, led to the killing on 1st June 2020 of a gorilla by a hungry community member hunting duiker and bush pigs. Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), a grassroots NGO and non-profit founded in 2003 promotes biodiversity conservation by enabling people to co-exist with wildlife through integrated programs that improve animal health, community health, and livelihoods in and around Africa's protected areas and wildlife rich habitats. Through these programs, we have helped to mitigate these impacts. CTPH worked with Uganda Wildlife Authority and other NGOs to improve great ape viewing guidelines and prevent transmission of COVID-19 between people and gorillas. Park staff, Gorilla Guardians herding gorillas from community land to the park and Village Health and Conservation Teams were trained to put on protective face masks, enforce hand hygiene and a 10-meter great ape viewing distance. To reduce the communities' need to poach, CTPH found a UK-based distributor, for its Gorilla Conservation Coffee social enterprise enabling coffee farmers to earn revenue in the absence of tourism and provided fast growing seedlings to reduce hunger in vulnerable community members. Lessons learned show the need to support non-tourism dependent community livelihoods, and more responsible tourism to the great apes, which CTPH is advocating to governments, donors and tour companies through an Africa CSO Biodiversity Alliance policy brief.
Highlights
The One Health approach recognizes that the health of people is closely connected to the health of animals, plants, and their shared environment.In November 2019, a highly contagious novel coronavirus, SARS-COV-2 closely related to bat coronaviruses was identified in China and some of the index cases linked to a wet live animal market in Wuhan, Hubei Province [1]
In May 2020, Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH) got a new UK-based distributor, Moneyrow Beans, for its Gorilla Conservation Coffee social enterprise that had started in 2015 to provide above market prices for premium and specialty coffee sold locally and internationally to Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS) consumers who want to support gorilla conservation where a donation from every bag of coffee sold goes toward sustaining community health, gorilla health, and conservation education programs of CTPH
This social enterprise had reduced sales because it relied on international tourists who could no longer travel to Uganda for tourism to the gorillas and other wildlife and who were the main customers for the coffee
Summary
The One Health approach recognizes that the health of people is closely connected to the health of animals, plants, and their shared environment (https://www.onehealthcommission.org/en/ why_one_health/what_is_one_health/). The loss of tourism income for local communities bordering protected areas in Africa, due to a reduction in the number of tourists whose presence provides some protection for the wildlife contributed to an increase in poaching [18]. This could reverse the trend and conservation gains brought about by tourism for endangered mountain gorillas whose IUCN status was downgraded from critically endangered in 2018 as the only gorilla sub species showing a positive growth trend (Figure 1) in their population [19]. Though this tough sentence was a deterrent to other community members, the increasing hunger due to the lack of tourism was likely to result in other similar incidents among desperate community members
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