Word: madagascars
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...walking through the Réserve Spéciale d'Analamazaotra, a few hours' drive west of Madagascar's capital of Antananarivo. The reserve is one of the few remaining patches of untouched forest on Madagascar, where more than 90% of the native tree cover has already been lost; chameleons, rare frogs and lemurs make their home here. It's late afternoon, and patches of early spring sunlight (this is the Southern Hemisphere) peek through the Ravenea louvelii, the native palm. Lemurs are sleeping this time of day, though, and a sleeping lemur is hard to spot. But then...
...hard to say how long the indri itself will stay with us. Madagascar's native plants and animals evolved in isolation for some 80 million years; as a result, the 587,000-sq-km country, which sits just off the coast of southeastern Africa, has perhaps the highest level of biodiversity per capita in the world. It's what conservationists call a "hotspot" - one of about 25 places on Earth that have suffered massive habitat loss and account for less than 2% of the planet's land surface, but are home to about half the world's plant species...
That's why Mittermeier and I are here, to see Madagascar's wildlife while we can, and to see what's being done to save it. After a day in Antananarivo - a sprawling, diesel-soaked city that earns the adjective "teeming" - we leave by car for Andasibe, a former logging village that is now home to a burgeoning ecotourism trade. On the winding road we see the result of centuries of tavy, traditional slash-and-burn agriculture. The verdant forests that once covered much of Madagascar have been burnt or torn down, replaced by muddy rice paddies and secondary shrubs...
...makes sense, then, that sustaining the forests would be the first step in saving the wildlife. For decades in Madagascar, as in much of the world, that has meant the creation of protected parklands like the Réserve Spéciale d'Analamazaotra, where one goes hunting (with cameras) for lemurs. But now scientists recognize that deforestation in tropical countries like Madagascar could be responsible for up to a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, giving another new incentive to save and expand forests...
...shelter of the forests, and we don't have to cut trees for charcoal," says Herve Tahirimalala, 28, who is paid about $100 a month to work the plantation - a decent wage in one of the poorest nations on Earth. Poverty and habitat loss go hand in hand in Madagascar and in much of the developing world, and only win-win solutions will work for conservation...