On International Jaguars Day on 29th November, we follow how the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is working with Panama to promote jaguar conservation and curb human-jaguar conflict.
Erasmo De León is a man of many talents and vocations. In his varied career, he has taught school children, run a community-based tourism business and been a cattle rancher. But it was the lush rainforest in his native Panama, and its most fabled resident, the jaguar, that really captured his imagination.
De León first crossed paths with jaguars at his family ranch in Agua Buena de Chucunaque, which is located close to Darien National Park, the largest in Panama and second largest protected forest in Central America. In the region, jaguars have been known to prey on livestock. Over 40 per cent of the big cats’ habitat in Panama has been lost due to increased urbanisation, infrastructure projects, agriculture and cattle ranching. This loss has put an increased strain on the species and those that live and work alongside their habitat. Desperate to protect their livestock, cattle ranchers have been killing jaguars in retaliation. 96% of the 339 jaguar deaths reported by Yaguara Panama Foundation from 1989 to 2019 in the country were due to killing by humans after livestock death, with an average of 20-44 jaguar deaths per year.
The jaguar is currently classified as endangered in Panamanian legislation, listed as 'Near Threatened’ on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List and has recently also been included in the Convention of Migratory Species (CITES) Appendices as a species that is endangered, and may become threatened if trade is not controlled. The IUCN estimates that in the last 21 years jaguar numbers have decreased between 20 to 25 per cent.
De Leon has taken bold steps to reverse this decline. He was the first cattle rancher in Panama to adopt anti-predation measures to avoid human-jaguar conflict. Anti-predation measures help protect cattle from jaguars; they can include electric fences, enhanced jaguar monitoring with camera traps and GPS technology, strategic pasture placement and modifying livestock rotation patterns.
“These measures not only helped avoid livestock predation, but they also helped us become more efficient, improve herd health, understand the dynamics of our ecosystem, and, above all, to think of sustainable management as a way of subsistence for our families,” said De Leon.
Scaling up
Given the positive results of the pilot, UNEP, Panama’s Ministry of Environment, the Yaguara Panama Foundation and partners are officially launching a jaguar conservation project in December 2021, with support from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), which aims to scale up the anti-predation measures to five other cattle ranches covering a total of 717 ha, while deepening the work on De Léon’s property.
Panama’s Minister of Environment, Milciades Concepción, said: “This is our biggest jaguar conservation effort. We need to establish a track record of cost-effective, conflict-reducing measures that enable peaceful coexistence between jaguars and humans and fully take local communities on board while, at the same time, allowing us to implement our biodiversity and climate priorities.”
Doreen Robinson, Head of Biodiversity and Land at UNEP, continues: “The evidence clearly demonstrates that addressing human-wildlife conflict can generate income and enhance livelihoods while contributing to conservation. We need to bring positive experiences to scale and shed light on the great contributions coexistence strategies can have to the Sustainable Development Goals at large”
Locally-led solutions
The hope is for De Leon’s pioneering spirit to catch on. Until they found him, the Yaguará Panama Foundation, had been scouring the country to find a ranch-owner to pilot anti-predation measures, but none had come forward.
“While there is an acknowledgement that human-jaguar conflict is an increasingly serious problem, persuading cattle ranchers to manage their properties in a different way to avoid conflict is challenging” said Ricardo Moreno, a biologist and Yaguara Panama Foundation’s CEO.
Moreno emphasizes that local communities must drive conservation efforts.
“We need to raise awareness on the importance of jaguar conservation and work with local communities to ensure that the most powerful feline in the Americas continues to take refuge in Panama” he says.
His stance is echoed in a recent UNEP-WWF report, which found that conflict-related killing affects more than 75 per cent of the world’s wild cat species, and that when communities are empowered, trained and well-equipped to address human-wildlife conflict, the benefits of holistic coexistence efforts far outweigh the costs.
Panama: the bridge for jaguar conservation
The distribution of the jaguar extends across 18 range countries from Mexico to Argentina, where Panama plays a unique role.
“Panama is the critical land mass connecting the Northern and Southern Hemispheres; it acts as the crucial land bridge that maintains connectivity between large jaguar populations across the American continent,” says Shirley Binder, Director of Biodiversity and Protected Areas at the Ministry of Environment.
The new project will also amplify jaguar conservation efforts in the country by focusing on jaguar monitoring and information management systems over the next 4 years. Panama is scheduled to conduct its first-ever jaguar census in the Darien National Park, the Chagres National Park, and the Nargana Wildlife Protected Area.
The project also seeks to support Panama’s landscape restoration commitments. Activities will include spatial planning to channel resources from environmental offsetting commitments by private companies to promote jaguar-centric restoration and connectivity through multi-species corridors. These efforts align with the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and support the Alliance for 1 Million Hectares, a public-private effort led by the Panamanian Ministry of Environment that seeks to put 1 million hectares under restoration in Panama by 2035.
