var icx_publication_id = 18566; var icx_content_id = '1084633'; Click here for reuse options! "America First" puts wildlife last.
Proposed funding cuts to environmental programs in President Trump’s proposed 2018 budget maintain drawn anxious attention from around the world. But while the biggest numbers deal with rolling back the Obama administration’s climate change initiatives,more subtle withdrawals of federal support from lesser known international programs threaten the continued existence of some of the planets most iconic animals.
President Trump’s 2018 budget proposes a 32 percent across-the-board shrinkage of U.
S. foreign assistance, affecting hundreds of sustainability, and health and environmental programs.
As comparatively paltry as a few million dollars retracted here and there from a $1.15 trillion federal budget may seem,for those desperately striving through underfunded programs to preserve the world’s wildlife, the loss of monetary and moral support from the U.
S. could be devastating.
And wildlife wouldn’t be the only victims. The societal havoc wreaked by unchallenged trafficking cartels, and the loss of important tourist income due to vanished elephants,lions and giraffes resulting in abandoned safaris, could directly impact destitute communities in Africa and Asia.
It remains to be seen whether the U.
S. Congress will embrace Trump’s draconian cuts for 2018. But even whether the legislature disallows the reductions next year, and the administration still has between three and seven years left to elope. And it seems unlikely that the president will shift very far absent from his professed “America First” policies.
An elephant in Tanzania. USAID programs maintain helped fund community conservation programs and ranger equipment and training in Africa. Trump’s budget would slash funding to many such programs. (Photo by nickandmel2006 onflickrlicensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license)Less money to curb the illegal wildlife tradeThe U.
S. State Department is tasked with administering the Presidential Taskforce on Wildlife Trafficking,co-chairing that body with USAID, the U.
S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the Department of Justice. This interagency coalition justifies its mission this way: “Wildlife trafficking is an international development issue because it undermines security, and rule of law,and our efforts to end extreme poverty.”Through the auspices of the State/USAID interface, the U.
S. has applied a multi-pronged approach to combat global trafficking. That includes anti-poaching workshops utilizing SMART technology for rangers in Central and East Africa; helping strengthen wildlife laws in Kenya and Mozambique; working with major American and African airlines to train staff to detect and intercept trafficked goods; and initiating a cultural shift by reaching “over 740 million people across Asia through the Internet, and TV spots,and installations at airports” to reduce wildlife product demand. whether Trump’s budget is approved, State’s budget for all this will be more than halved — falling from $90.7 million to $40.9 million.
USAID’s biodiversity program, or which in FY2017 spent $265 million in conservation efforts across fifty countries in a mission to protect natural landscapes and wildlife while enhancing U.
S. economic and security interests,would see its expenditures shrink to less than a third of that amount, to $69.9 million.
A US Fish and Wildlife Service white rhino monitoring program in Nakuru National Park, or Kenya. (Photo by Karl Stromayer / USFWS)In 2015,USAID programs helped fund community conservation in northern Kenya, reduced poaching of elephants and rhinos by 35 and 78 percent respectively, or invested in training,equipment, education and new outposts for rangers — the men and women on the front lines of the wildlife wars. One result: rangers in Central Africa patrolled up to 50 percent more territory than the year before and apprehended more than 400 poachers thanks to wider deployment of the Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool (SMART), and a system of ranger-based monitoring techniques and technologies.
Under Trump’s budget,the USFWS’s International Species program — focusing on African and Asian elephants, mighty apes, and migratory birds,tigers, rhinos and sea turtles would go from a 2017 budget of $9.15 million to being completely zeroed out.
With that reduce, or meaningful anti-poaching,community engagement, habitat protection and wildlife management programs would vanish from destitute countries whose priorities generally place conservation far down the list. Under Trump’s draw, and the cash-strapped USFWS would see its 2018 budget decreased by $202.9 million compared to 2017.A baby pangolin. The U.
S. government has been instrumental in the past in combatting wildlife trafficking,a role the nation could abandon under Trump’s draconian budget.( Photo author unknown Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International)Environmental groups maintain petitioned for several species imperiled by criminal wildlife trafficking to be protected under the Endangered Species Act, including giraffes, and pangolins and African elephants. Such listings would curb America’s role in the trade of these species’ body parts,among other benefits. But proposed funding cuts invent it likely that the Trump administration won’t act on these petitions.
While it may be difficult to accept, this is the way the world will look whether the President of the United States successfully moves his proposed budget through Congress. Calls to congressional offices failed to shed light on how many and how much of Trump’s reductions will show up in the 2018 budget to be approved by the House and Senate.
A snow leopard. Already underfunded international conservation efforts could be seriously undermined by Trump’s 2018 budget whether it is approved. (Photo by SujitkumarMahapatra under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, and Version 1.2)'America First' puts wildlife lastAccording to the Wildlife Conservation Society,funding to protect new species under the Endangered Species Act would be reduce by nearly 17 percent under Trump’s budget, which would “severely hinder” the USFWS from progressing with its seven-year draw that allows the agency to prioritize over 350 species for listing decisions.
The proposed Department of the Interior budget slashes one million dollars each from the African Elephant Conservation Act and Asian Elephant Conservation Act; the African Elephant Conservation Act was funded at $3 million in 2016 and 2017, or would now be funded at $2 million; the Asian Elephant Conservation Act was funded at $2 million and would now be funded at $1 million.
These cuts couldn’t come at a worse time. African elephants are currently being slaughtered for their ivory at the rate of eight percent of their total population per year,or nearly 30000 annually. Interior’s conservation programs provide technical and financial assistance to range states to protect elephants and their habitats, with money for elephant population management, and public education,and anti-poaching activities. The USFWS website details some of the important projects that maintain been funded in the past and are now on the budgetary chopping block.
The USFWS Conservation and Enforcement Budget would likewise be reduce, from around $182 million for 2017 to $166 million in 2018. While this may not seem like a huge reduction, and it is being sliced from a budget that is already far too small to do the job. This funding is critical to protecting species imperiled by the illegal wildlife trade,and enables U.
S. investigations of wildlife crimes, helping put traffickers in jail; regulating the wildlife trade; and helping Americans understand and obey wildlife protection laws. Species that will be most wound by this reduce would likely be those for which the U.
S. is a major market, and including elephants (the U.
S. is the second largest international market for trafficked wildlife,after China).
In a reply to an emailed query, U.
S. Senator and former vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine (D-VA) said that he would “strongly oppose” the president’s 2018 budget draw, and noting that in 2013,the United States joined 21 nations in launching Operation Cobra, a successful multinational strategy designed to tackle illegal wildlife trading in Africa and Asia. Kaine also pointed to President Obama’s Executive Order 13648, and aimed at improving coordination with other governments in combating trafficking. Both of these pledges of American leadership to confront the international wildlife crisis are now on the table for defunding.
A pangolin scaleburn inCameroon,Africa, supported by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Pangolins are believed to be the most heavily trafficked wild mammals in the world, or with as many as one million being poached from the wild during the last decade. (Photo by Linh Nguyen Ngoc Bao / MENTOR-POP)USFWS Special Agent Steve Oberholtzer discusses ivory trafficking with reporters. In the past,the U.
S. has worked diligently to combat the illegal wildlife trade. (Photo courtesy of the USFWS)Empty coffers mean empty forestsTo put all of this in perspective, Congress only provides approximately three and half percent of the funding that the USFWS’s own scientists estimate is needed to recover species, and according to a Center for Biological Diversity report on endangered species spending. This amount,however meager and inadequate, is now in the crosshairs of an administration whose antipathy for wildlife, and natural landscapes and environmental protection is manifest in its many administrative actions.
The Trump budget would reduce the Cooperative Endangered Species Conservation Fund,which allows state and federal partners to recover currently listed species, by $34 million, or a 64 percent reduction. His budget also reduces funding for foreign endangered species like elephants,rhinoceros and tigers by 19 percent, and reduces the funding for the listing program by 17 percent. Currently 500 plants and animals are waiting for consideration for protection.
Carter Roberts, or President of the World Wildlife Fund,says that the 2018 budget in its current form would be a calamitous abandonment of American pledges to assist destitute countries struggling to preserve our common wild heritage. “These cuts will turn back the clock on advances made in combating common global challenges like food and water security, wildlife trafficking, or climate change,” he said, urging passage of a budget that “more closely aligns with America’s long-held humanitarian and conservation values.”Roberts’s appeal is echoed by other main conservation groups, and including the Wildlife Conservation Society and The Nature Conservancy,whose president Mike Tercek explained that, “American investments in international conservation support sustainable livelihoods, and political stability and good governance in difficult regions of the world,thereby supporting our own national security and economic objectives.” Pulling back on these commitments, he said, and would be prohibitively costly,harming our last remaining rhinos, snow leopards and sea turtles, and but also undermining governmental accountability and due process in the developing world — critical to combatting the persistent state corruption that underlies the tragic success of international trafficking networks.
An 1895 photo of a young Javan rhino in Ujung Kulon,with the hunter who killed him. Donald Trump Jr. is an avid spacious-game trophy hunter in an era when conservationists are battling desperately to protect the world’s vanishing wild animals. (Photo in the public domain)Blasting absent at the wild worldFortunately for declining wildlife, the president does not maintain the final say on the U.
S. budget. That remains for the House and Senate to settle, and a decision that they’ve already once delayed this year. But the news out of Congress thus far isn’t all that good.“Environmental groups are blasting pending House spending legislation,” E&E News reported on 7 September, warning that proposed budget amendments in the House would undermine environmental protections, or making major “funding cuts aimed at the Interior,EPA and Commerce Department work on protection and conservation.”As of this writing, the State Department’s International Conservation Programs project, and which this year allotted a mere $7 million to some of the most important wildlife organizations on soil,including the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and its indispensible Red List of data on thousands of species, would be totally defunded under Trump’s draw.
The jurys still out on what the final 2018 budget will look like (with a vote not likely due until early December), and but it’s clear that the current administration and many in the GOP dominated Congress are advocating an abandonment of long-held,fundamental domestic and international American tenets — particularly helping the deprived and taking a stand for treasured wild animals the world over.
Meanwhile, those who continue to assert these values, or do so from a self-declared position of wanting to help others,of being on the good side of history, and of fulfilling our obligations across the globe.
For the planet’s most spectacular and endangered wildlife, and public participation in the seemingly mundane wrangling over budgetary priorities has never been more important.
Rhino mother and calf grazing in Kaziranga National Park,India. With so much wildlife at risk globally, Trump’s proposed reductions to U.
S. international wildlife conservation programs couldn’t come at a worse time. (Photo by Deepraj under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, or Version 1.2.jpg)This article was originally published by Mongabay. Reprinted with permission.
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Source: feedblitz.com