Unable to See the Wood for the Trees
I recently attended a fantastic networking event at the embassy of Nepal in London, where I was invited to give a talk about the work of The Glacier Trust and its partners EcoHimal and HICODEF. The event was organized by BRANNGO – Britain and Nepal NGO Network, whose main purpose is to bring NGO’s together who are working specifically in Nepal so we can share learning, resources and information. The conversations were deeply fascinating and illuminating and I left with the sense that the biggest challenge for all of us was being able to see the bigger picture when there were so many variants of challenges.
Director of TGT Ruby Glasspool giving a talk at BRANNGO
There were over 20 different NGO’s present, all of whom were focused on improving the lives of people living in Nepal in one way or another. Despite all working in the same country, we each shared quite different challenges. We each brought handfuls of metaphorical trees to the conversations, to the point where the woods became quite dense! And some even brought literal trees through impressive reforestation projects.
In the spirit of shared learning, I thought it would be interesting to share those different challenges and perspectives in a blog post. We’ll head into the woods and examine some of the trees, then pull back on some perspectives that might help us to see the whole woods.
The Nepali government are currently planning to build a 4th international airport. The 720,000 square metre airport will handle 60 million passengers a year. As part of the build, they are cutting down 763,480 mature trees. As is usually the case, the ‘answer’ seems to be to replant as much, or more trees elsewhere. However this isn’t really the best solution. It will take decades for sapling’s to become mature co2 capturing trees. When it comes to climate change – we don’t have decades!
Further to this, there is absolutely no guarantee that these saplings will not themselves be cut down for some future project – they are not protected. And so we repeat a vicious cycle of planting and cutting down, never really increasing the overall tree cover by much. Mr Virendra Sharma MP, Chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Nepal responded to a flurry of challenging questions on this topic by saying that ‘we cannot tell the government what to do, they just have to make their own decisions.’
Plans for Nijgadh Airport
Following on from this it was highlighted that tourists pay significantly higher airfares on the same flights as locals. Lisa Choegyal, an influential sustainable tourism professional in Nepal seemed to agree with this principle. Many other NGO representatives disagreed and felt that it was sending out the wrong message. It also makes it extraordinarily more expensive for NGO staff to get around the country.
It was highlighted that Nepal will graduate from its least developed country status in 2026, but is overall, balancing precariously on the threshold and could tip backwards into an LDC at any time. Nepal becoming officially a developing country of course has a long list of its own challenges. From a Glacier Trust perspective, this status isn’t truly representative of ALL communities in Nepal. Certainly the remote communities we work with do not fit easily into a developed country status, and once again these groups are marginalised, left out and not included in national level statistics.
And finally, we learnt that the UK government are drastically reducing their aid spend in Nepal from 80 million GBP last year, to 48 million this year. That’s a significant drop, and one that will have a ripple effect on the country. We heard from Ms Camilla Sugden of the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, who announced that one of the FCDO’s goals is to improve local services for ALL civilians. Once again, we know this does not include the thousands of remote, marginalised communities that we work with. They are never included.
So how do we see the woods through all these trees? Getting the bigger picture right is complex, and fraught with ever-changing challenges. As NGO’s based outside of Nepal, we each have different perspectives and views on these challenges. We can learn from each other, but ultimately the message that’s loud and clear here is that the only way to implement truly effective aid projects in Nepal is to have the communities themselves influence the plans. No project will be effective if it bypasses the needs, views and knowledge of the community members we serve.
We need to hear their views and feelings on the airport, the airfares, how best funding aid can be spent, and how we can begin to include marginalised communities in the bigger plans for Nepal. There are simply too many trees – we need to work with and consult the people who are already living amongst the trees to help us see the woods!