- The Shouf Biosphere Reserve is a living laboratory experimenting with degraded ecosystem recovery in ways that also boost the well-being of the human communities living there.
- Previous conservation efforts in the area involved using land mines and armed guards to stem illegal logging and reduce fire risk.
- Today, the reserve builds local skills and creates jobs in a bid to help the local community through Lebanon’s severe economic crisis.
- Managers are also employing adaptive techniques to build resilience in this climate change-hit landscape.
SHOUF BIOSPHERE RESERVE, Lebanon — Late afternoon light falls across Talal Riman’s weathered face as he stands under the ancient cedars he’s tended for almost three decades in Lebanon’s Shouf Biosphere Reserve (SBR). Riman used to defend these trees against would-be loggers and human-caused forest fires with a pump-action shotgun. Now, the SBR team protects what’s left of Lebanon’s iconic cedars and the surrounding landscape with community engagement and a new generation of sustainability-savvy conservationists.
“I did my part, but these days it’s good to make room for a new, educated generation,” the 64-year-old, who picked up his first retirement check just the day before, says as he smiles at Farid Tarabay, 19, the new forest guide taking his place.
UNESCO Biosphere Reserves around the world put innovative landscape restoration and conservation interventions to the test, exploring how to recover degraded ecological systems in ways that also boost human well-being. At the SBR, rangers like Tarabay now educate visitors instead of keeping them out, while the organization creates jobs and training designed both to improve the ecosystem and benefit local communities.
If the SBR is a living laboratory, many of its experiments appear to be succeeding, despite Lebanon’s current economic and political crises.
“The idea is to manage this landscape in full cooperation and involvement with the communities who are living here,” Nizar Hani, director of the SBR since 2010, told Mongabay over Arabic coffee on a sun-dappled November day last year in the mountain village of Maaser El Shouf.
The sparsely clad peaks of the Mount Lebanon range march across the SBR into the misty distance, topping a scattered patchwork of agricultural terraces and old stone villages populated mostly by Druze people, who settled the land in the Middle Ages. The rest of the estimated 228,000 people living within the reserve are Maronite and Greek Orthodox Christians, Sunni Muslims, and people displaced by the Syrian civil war.
Thirty-two mammal species, more than 275 bird species, and 31 amphibian and reptile species also call the SBR home. These include wolves, hyenas, jackals, porcupines, chameleons, tortoises, badgers, eagles, hyraxes, snakes, storks and many more. Researchers have cataloged more than 1,100 plant species; 25 are nationally and internationally threatened, according to the IUCN Red List, and 48 are found only in Lebanon or the wider region.
At 50,000 hectares (124,000 acres), an area nearly 10 times the size of Manhattan, the SBR is the biggest biosphere reserve in the Middle East. Designated by UNESCO in 2005, it includes a 620-hectare (1,532-acre) nature reserve originally set up in 1996 to conserve ancient Lebanese cedars (Cedrus libani).
Joined up thinking
To balance the needs of its human and wild inhabitants, the SBR takes two main approaches, according to Hani.
The first is to manage and restore sites. This includes increasing the ecosystem’s resilience to climate change and protecting it from fires and other human activities that have degraded the region, such as logging, urbanization and quarrying.
The second approach encourages cultural practices that conserve nature while benefiting local communities, for instance by supporting ecotourism and agritourism and providing a slew of training options.
The reserve was hailed by Restor, an ecological restoration network, as an example of best practices from among 727 biosphere reserves globally, based on a case study by Sarah Wilson, a forest restoration expert and co-founder of Cities4Forests.
“This project was thought through from start to finish,” Wilson told Mongabay by email. “That sounds like it would be obvious, but it is so often not the case.”
Wilson said the SBR’s demonstration of economic and social value for locals and supporters is essential to generating the interest that underpins its success. Programs that provide locals with training and support for green value chains “from idea to sale” is also key, she said.
SBR communications manager Sarah Nasrallah told Mongabay this starts with local experts who teach farmers how to restore agricultural land, farm indigenous species sustainably, and sell their produce locally.
The SBR also trains small business owners to turn local produce into mouneh, traditional artisanal food products, and sell it. Furthermore, the program trains restaurateurs and guesthouse owners in hospitality skills. In turn, they buy mouneh and other local produce to serve to local guests and tourists.
“We are creating a circular economy,” Nasrallah said.
Times have changed
The Shouf has not always been so inviting.
The seeds of the reserve were sown in strife during Lebanon’s civil war that raged from 1975 to 1990. Back then, politician and local Druze leader Walid Joumblatt took drastic measures to conserve Shouf cedar forests near his home village. Joumblatt told Mongabay that his father, the socialist politician and civil war opposition leader Kamal Joumblatt, had instilled in him the value of nature, often quoting environmental movement matriarch Rachel Carson during his childhood.
Following his father’s assassination during the war, Joumblatt took over the Progressive Socialist Party, which had set up “a sort of mini state” called the Civil Administration in the Shouf region, he explained. He wanted to make sure cedar forests under the Civil Administration survived the war unravaged by logging for firewood, or uncontrollable fires accidentally started by smokers and picnickers in the arid region, he added.
“I decided to intervene and stop people coming in,” Joumblatt said. “But not everybody listened. So, I blocked the roads and I had to put landmines.”
In addition to laying explosives and earth berms across roads leading to the forests, Joumblatt employed armed guards to further deter would-be entrants and keep landmine accidents to a minimum. Occasionally goatherders would venture in illegally, resulting in at least one death, according to Joumblatt.