The World Wildlife Fund for Nature
is the world’s largest conservation organization,
with a stated mission to
“create a world in which people and wildlife thrive together.”
This is not about saving one panda,
one forest,
or one habitat.
This is no act of charity.
It’s an act of survival.
But in 2019, accusations emerged that they had funded park rangers
that were implicated in murder, torture, and rape.
We’re being abused.
A child—about this small—died.
They started to rape us.
We were powerless as they has weapons.
In the Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo,
indigenous people speak of suffering beatings, rape, and murder
at the hands of guards.
WWF-DRC is extremely involved in the running of the park.
It wasn’t until a year later
that one of the more senior people in WWF-DRC asked,
“What’s happening with this?”
He found out that the park director and the country director
had blocked further investigation
and that they did so pretty clearly because they were concerned about
adversely affecting their relationship with the government.
Other examples of WWF-linked human rights abuses
have emerged in the Central African Republic,
the Republic of Congo, and in Cameroon.
The guards, they can set fire on the camp.
They say the fire belongs to a poacher,
but sometimes it is a camp
of the Baka communities.
WWF staff members on the ground in Cameroon
were aware of abuses by eco-guards
and didn't address those complaints.
But WWF International staff continue to ignore
the reports of instances of rape, of murder, of torture,
particularly of indigenous communities.
The illegal wildlife industry is estimated to be worth
up to $23 billion a year.
It's the world's fourth largest illicit market,
and it’s run by violent organized crime groups
ready to go to war with anyone who gets in their way.
He tried to shoot me like this, he says.
In its efforts to stamp out poaching,
the WWF has supported governments and co-sponsored forest rangers
which provide cash, weapons, training,
and high-tech enforcement equipment.
But these anti-poaching units now stand accused of
carrying out atrocities against indigenous communities.
When they come and do their conservation,
and they see us in the forest, will they let us into the forest?
No, they beat us.
It’s too much for us.
So how did this happen?
How did an organization which aims to preserve animal life and biodiversity
end up accused of supporting groups that rape and murder?
This is the story of the WWF’s system error.
[System Error]
Founded in 1961, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature
was created to support the work of existing conservation groups
struggling to save endangered species.
The WWF helped fund many programs around the world
and, as early as 1963,
published an important paper on the threat of global warming.
The organization has since grown exponentially,
expanding beyond preserving endangered species
to promoting biological diversity and sustainability,
reducing pollution, and slowing climate change.
But in 2019, a BuzzFeed investigation
starkly challenged the image of the WWF
with accusations they had funded eco-guards
that committed human rights abuses and murder.
They started beating everyone.
We fled into the forest
and two people died: an old man and a child.
What the allegations specifically revolved around was beatings,
torture, and extrajudicial killings
by eco-guards who had been trained and funded by WWF.
In all cases, they were essentially alleging that WWF was funding
despite knowledge of the park rangers
at least allegedly being involved in human rights abuses,
including murder and torture.
John Knox was a member of the independent panel
the WWF created to investigate these allegations.
What they discovered was that the WWF had a systemic problem
that it had chosen to ignore for years.
We didn’t find evidence that WWF itself was directly involved
in any murders, tortures or rapes
in the sense that WWF staff members were somehow carrying them out.
The WWF, for years, has had very strong commitments on paper
to make sure that they’re safeguarding human rights,
and the problem is they have not put the necessary implementation
to do what they say that they’ll do.
The organization has not publicly apologized to the victims
or their families,
while the independent report has cleared WWF staff
from direct involvement in the allegations.
There’s a kind of sleight of hand there.
While they weren’t directly directing those abuses
and WWF staff were not engaged directly in abuses,
they were part of a wider system that led to those abuses.
In other words, offices within WWF
always tell each other only the good news in the DRC,
where they simply didn’t report
the fact that they were receiving serious human rights allegations.
But when that report was presented to the international board,
they actually made the situation sound better than it really was.
The failure of the WWF to act on serious allegations
was repeated in Cameroon,
where human rights abuses were also reported.
The failure was on the part of WWF as a whole,
as an entire organization.
It’s the responsibility of WWF International
and the WWF International Board of Directors
to make sure that these kinds of abuses didn’t happen.
The WWF is a federalized organization,
meaning that each branch operates independently
with supervision from the head office.
And different countries have different ways of accepting funding.
So although the WWF provides the cash,
how that money is spent is often at the discretion of local governments.
WWF-DRC co-manages the park,
so they’re able to provide funding more directly for park management,
including park rangers.
And other places like India and Nepal,
the government is much more, let’s say, exclusionary to WWF.
So it really varies quite a bit from government to government.
And eco-guards do face very real threats on the ground.
Nearly 50 were killed in 2018 alone.
They undoubtedly need appropriate equipment and training
to face off against the poachers.
These more militarized strategies
have led to abuses of local communities
and even PTSD amongst rangers
because they believed that they were going to be doing a job
that was about wildlife management.
And they had roles in kind of ecological monitoring and so on,
but then as poaching escalated
and as conservation became more militarized,
they found themselves drawn into
engaging in much more forceful forms of conservation
that perhaps they didn’t sign up for.
But in some instances, as in the Central African Republic,
guards received paramilitary-style training in weapons handling
and combat tactics.
Without proper oversight,
it is believed by many that this training
was then turned on innocent people from indigenous communities.
And in Cameroon, guards were incentivized to catch poachers,
ivory, and weapons with bonuses,
increasing the potential for human rights abuses.
Charles Nsonkali, an indigenous Baka from the DRC,
has produced documentaries on the indiscriminate manner
in which these park rangers operate.
There was a serious case,
what we call the “anti-poaching squad.”
Some go with violence
and beat the Baka,
who are settled in the forest,
just to tell them where the poachers are.
They’re kind of induced to go after these really bottom level poachers,
but they don’t have the resources,
and frankly, I think there’s political opposition
to them going up the line to get the higher ups
because often those people are quite wealthy and well-connected,
and the government doesn’t really want to go after them.
Amidst these scandals, the WWF continues to receive funding
from major corporations like Coca-Cola and IKEA
seeking to greenwash their image.
It’s really hard to see
how partnering with some of the world’s biggest corporations
is going to solve any of the environmental problems that we face
because those corporations are deeply involved
in creating the environmental crisis in the first place.
Conservation organizations
are in a really highly competitive funding environment,
and so, of course, they were going to turn to corporations
to get finance to support their work.
The WWF’s problems are not simply issues of poorly trained
or corrupt park rangers.
There are issues with the organization's entire strategy
of advocating for the isolation of protected areas
from any human impact.
Historically, the underlying idea of a lot of national parks,
starting in the United States with Yosemite and Yellowstone,
was that certain areas should be kept completely preserved
for future generations.
In Africa, the early national parks were colonial game preserves
where people from Germany or France or the UK
wanted to go and be able to hunt.
What these things often had in common
is that they disregarded the people who already had lived there
for many, many generations.
Locally known as “fortress conservation,”
these areas are often run by militarized units
that keep locals off the lands where they have lived for generations.
Currently, 17 percent of land on the globe
accounts for protected areas, including national parks.
The law in the DRC is that it’s illegal to hunt or fish
or live in Salonga,
and there’s pressure to basically move out the remaining villages.
There’s only a handful left in a park the size of Belgium.
There’s still pressure from this kind of fortress conservation idea
to make the parks a kind of protected natural area
that no humans are allowed to step foot in.
This model has since been replicated by countries around the world
and recognized through programs
such as UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites.
And now, organizations like the WWF
are supporting the expansion of these natural areas
through the UN’s convention on biodiversity,
which aims to expand the world’s protected areas from 17 percent
to 30 percent by 2030.
There are a great many of us
who are really concerned that this easy banner headline of 30 by 30
will actually give new impetus
for possibly the biggest land grab in history,
which will result in the violent displacement eviction
of some of the world’s poorest people.
Local people are rarely factored into the equation,
increasing the potential for conflict and human rights abuses.
As indigenous people are run out of their forest,
beaten and abused for living their lives
the way they have for generations,
reports indicate that animals like elephants,
gorillas, and chimpanzees are still in decline.
This does not work for conservation purposes.
It's hard to emphasize that enough.
There are dozens, hundreds of studies that show that
without the support of indigenous peoples and local communities,
excluding them simply results in bad conservation outcomes
as well as violating their human rights.
Now, when you don’t work together with the Baka,
and you don’t leave them freely in the forest,
conservationists will not have the objective
to know exactly what is going wrong in the forest.
WWF response is extremely disappointing.
WWF did not apologize or even take responsibility
for the failures to comply with its responsibility
to respect human rights.
They continue to point the finger at its government partners
and at the difficult conditions in the countries in which it operates.
But those can't be excuses.
While the WWF is a federalized organization
and some groups continue to do important work,
the WWF’s push to stay relevant may be further harming
its original mission of protecting endangered species
as well as leading to horrific human rights abuses and even murder.
I think WWF’s will to survive
is something that will definitely continue.
It's a big organization.
If they stopped tomorrow,
[it] would be really negative for people and for biodiversity.
It would be much better to be working much more collaboratively
and constructively with people who live with wildlife
and live in these areas
and have done sustainably for generations
rather than trying to impose an externally derived model
from experts who don’t actually live in those environments.