Environment
Idealism Times Three
Dynamic Conservation Group Makes It Mark in Palau
Spend a few minutes with Jason Kuartei and Patricia Davis, and you’ll instantly feel the energy and enthusiasm the pair exudes. Together with Jahmila Kuartei, Jason’s sister, they founded Community Centered Conservation (or C3) in Palau in April of 2002. This small non-profit organization is already tackling some of Palau’s significant environmental issues, and it’s doing so by concentrating on individual people and projects, and staying grounded in community issues. C3 is wholly volunteer-driven. The co-founders work full time during the week, and devote themselves to C3’s conservation programs after work or on the weekends.
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Jason Kuartei and Davis decided to launch their own group because they saw firsthand the gaps in Palau’s conservation efforts. In his capacity as a marine conservation officer for Palau Conservation Society and in hers as the collections manager for the Coral Reef Research Foundation, they attended meetings where they came in contact with representatives from most of Palau’s environmentally-oriented organizations. “We could pinpoint the issues that other conservation agencies were not taking up,” Davis says. “And many of those issues really interested us.”
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They realized that Palau’s youth needed to be more engaged with and involved in conservation efforts. “Not enough Palauan young people are choosing to study science or marine biology,” Kuartei explained. He also fears that there is not enough communication between the scientific community and local people. Instead of these two groups sharing information and strengthening the knowledge base about Palau’s marine environment, locals and scientists often resent and mistrust each other. At the same time, there were specific projects that appealed to Davis and Kuartei, such as studying the habits of Palau’s most severely endangered marine mammal, the dugong.
With virtually no outside funding, and little else besides their energy, equipment loans from PCS and CRRF, and their knowledge (Davis and Jason Kuartei each has a masters degree in environmental science from James Cook University in Australia; Jahmila Kuartei’s background is in education), they rolled up their sleeves and got to work, establishing four initial goals: to map dugong feeding areas; limit the use of plastic bags on the island; involve Palauan students in conservation efforts; and foster information exchanges between local communities and scientists. The challenge is in weaving together these distinct objectives.
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Davis was especially interested in working to preserve Palau’s remaining dugong, whose numbers have been declining precipitously for years, despite sporadic conservation efforts. Davis has begun to map sea grass beds, which are the creatures’ primary feeding areas. These beds abut Palau’s coastline, and are adversely impacted by sedimentation and development. Mapping is important because it helps identify the beds on which the dugong feed. Once identified, these sites can then be included in marine protected areas, ensuring that Palau’s remaining dugong do not lose further habitat. To involve young members of the community, Davis and Kuartei brought along Palau Community College students on their weekend mapping projects (paying for the boat fuel themselves). “The hope is that if we get young people excited about dugong, they will go home and pass this enthusiasm on to older family members, some of whom might even be dugong hunters,” Davis says.
At the same time, Davis began teaching an elective course on research methods at PCC, in which she allowed her students to determine the areas they wished to research. The students opted to focus on mangroves and watershed issues—another coastal ecosystem under threat from development. After collecting data firsthand and from different agencies, the students made a 20-minute video on mangrove systems and the multiple threats to them. This video will be distributed to all Palauan schools and will likely be used by other conservation organizations in the near future as they go out into the field to forge a mangrove management plan.
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The students took up another topic later in the semester when they sought to determine public perception about the Compact Road (the half-completed 53-mile road through pristine forest land on Palau’s biggest island, Babeldaob). Davis hopes to extend the scope of the survey in the coming months.
C3’s other major ongoing project has been its Bag for Life program, which encourages Palauans to forego plastic shopping bags. C3 obtained local funds to print and distribute cloth shopping bags, and is hoping to expand its effort once it receives additional funds.
Like other fledgling non-profit organizations, C3 is chronically underfunded. However, the group doesn’t plan to grow too much. “We want to stay small and simple,” Jason Kuartei says.
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And Davis agrees. “We don’t want to become a political organization. What we want is to gather opinions about issues, from both the scientific and local communities, and then supply this information to all sides.” In truth, one of C3’s greatest strengths is its small size, which makes it nimble. Because it has so little overhead bureaucracy, the organization can choose its priorities and then take them up without much fuss or politics.
The trio behind C3 is young. At 26, Jason Kuartei is the oldest of the founders. They are utterly unpretentious and infectiously excited about the conservation work they do. It is easy to see how they are able to energize students into doing the hard (and often unglamorous) work Palau needs. They also bring a unique cross-cultural perspective to the organization. Davis is from the United Kingdom, and the Kuartei siblings are Palauans who went to the U.S. for college.
However, they don’t like to spend a lot of time talking about their degrees or their honors. Nor do they dwell on obstacles they face. Instead they would prefer to tell you about the dugong or their students or the next great idea they have.
