Empowering Lives, Building Resilience
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Kamchatka brown bears fetching wild salmon at Kurilskoye Lake in South Kamchatka State Sanctuary.
Russia: Better Conservation for the Environment and the Economy The Kamchatka peninsula juts from the far east of Russia, splitting the Okhotsk Sea from the Pacific Ocean. Wild and remote, it is recognized by UNESCO’s World Heritage List, and ranked by the World Wildlife Fund as one of the world’s most important ecological regions. A place of steaming geysers and simmering volcanoes, snow-capped mountains and rocky beaches, Kamchatka is home to a wide variety of plants and animals—many unique to the area. The rare Steller’s sea eagle soars through its skies, while the only population of sea otters in the Western Pacific shelters along its coast. One-third of all Pacific salmon spawn in Kamchatka’s rivers. The region is sparsely populated—only about 340,000 people live there. In the 1990s, hard economic times arrived. The collapse of the Soviet economic system stripped the region of subsidies and services. People left for the Russian mainland or turned to illegal poaching to scrape by. Soon, human pressures became an environmental threat as unprecedented numbers of brown bears, snow sheep, reindeer, marine mammals and salmon began disappearing. The threat went mostly undeterred until national and regional government partners launched an international conservation programme in 2002, assisted by UNDP, with support from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the Canadian Government and the Moore Foundation. The programme had two goals: to better protect the environment, and to ensure that people could earn decent incomes so they no longer needed to harm the environment to survive.