Judy Oglethorpe: Fighting Environmental Change in Nepal Through Community Empowerment

Summary: “We believe that ecosystems can help people to adapt,” says Judy Oglethorpe in this week’s podcast. “But at the same time, people have to help ecosystems to adapt in order to continue to provide environmental services.” Oglethorpe has been working for the last three years to help communities adapt to environmental change in the Chitwan Annapurna and Terai Arc landscapes of Nepal as part of the World Wildlife Fund’s Hariyo Ban Program. Livelihoods in the two regions are heavily dependent on natural resources, and that dependency brings with it degradation through practices such as overgrazing and deforestation. On top of that, the area faces major climate-related changes. The program helps communities navigate the challenges of both climate change and man-made degradation by running 16-week classes that empower some of the poorest and most disenfranchised community members. Women and lower caste members are educated on climate change, sustainable landscapes, and biodiversity conservation, with the goal of encouraging communities to better manage the environment and have the confidence to advocate for better resources. A cross-cutting theme is gender and social inclusion, including non-environmental interventions like training women to become community health educators. One climate challenge the Hariyo Ban Program helps communities navigate is less predictable monsoons. Rains that stop and start intermittently or continue for too long cause flooding that can alter freshwater sources or create landslides with sediment that becomes available when forests have been cleared for firewood. Intense rains also create new health problems, including water-borne illnesses. In the community classes, participants learn how to combat these challenges by using biogas for fuel in place of firewood, limiting deforestation. They have also developed new techniques for conserving water that can be used to grow crops in the off-season and are encouraged to speak to their governments about additional healthcare resources, such as better-accessible health clinics Oglethorpe says empowering these communities to have conversations with government and business leaders is critical to the success of conservation and adaptation efforts. “You know, you can help people to protect themselves all you want, but if there’s bad land use up in the catchment – you can’t stop those landslides, you can’t stop their fields getting dumped with rubble,” Oglethorpe says. “We’re promoting upstream-downstream collaboration between communities and bringing in forest departments and others who can help.” Women’s empowerment, community health workers, and sustainable land management are not new concepts for development, but combining them and focusing on the community-level first are still fairly rare. Oglethorpe says helping communities combat both climate change and human environmental degradation is what sets this program apart. “Maybe we do the same activities that we used to do, but we’re doing them for a different reason. We’re doing them because we’ve identified that people are vulnerable to climate…and we’re using these mechanisms to overcome these vulnerabilities.”