Malagasy conservationist scoops ‘Nobel Prize for Animal Conservation’

Malagasy conservationist Lily-Arison René de Roland has won the world’s most prestigious international conservation award: we congratulate him and hope he, and we, can register many more successes in our work to protect and expand the Malagasy rainforests, help the flora and fauna within them to thrive, and help Malagasy people lift themselves from hunger and poverty.

A Malagasy scientist has won the ‘Nobel Prize for Animal Conservation’ following years of discovery, protecting Madagascar’s wildlife and natural spaces, and training young Malagasy people to potect the island’s flora and fauna.

Lily-Arison René de Roland won the Indianapolis Prize, US$250,000, an international award given each year to a person or people who have made ‘extraordinary contributions to conservation efforts’.

René de Roland has so far dedicated 33 years of his life to conservation in Madagascar, having joined the Peregrine Foundation – dedicated to studying and protecting the Peregrine Falcon – as an undergraduate in 1992.

Since then, his achievements include in 2006 rediscovering the Madagascar Pochard, a duck thought to have become extinct in the 1990s, contributing to the discovery of two lemur species which had never before been described, and in 2022 leading a team which rediscovered the Dusky Tetraka, a small songbird which had not been seen in the wild since 1998.

He has helped create four national protected areas in Madagascar totalling more than 1,500 square miles in area, and including rainforests and dry forests, wetlands, mangroves and savannas.

And he has mentored more than 100 Malagasy students and currently oversees a team of 48 Malagasy conservationists.

His award reflects a number of issues extremely close to Money for Madagascar, including that Madagascar contains five per cent of all the plant and animal species on Earth, and four in every five of those is found only there.

But there are more than 600 endangered species of flora and fauna in Madagascar, and more than 3,900 are threatened (the ‘level’ above threatened is endangered. The ‘level’ above endangered is extinct).

And more than 80 per cent of the Malagasy wilderness has already been destroyed, while at current rates of deforestation what remains of the country’s rainforest will be completely gone in just 40 years.

Like René de Roland, who has also worked to develop a ‘community-based model’ focussed on ‘the drivers’ of what he calls ‘human-wildlife conflicts’, we know that part of the crisis of malagasy wildlife and wilderness is driven by human desperation.

Madagascar is the world’s fourth-poorest state. Almost two million (1.94m) Malagasy people are experiencing ‘severe food shortage’, the worst state of hunger below famine. Many more experence daily hunger, and 50 per cent of Malagasy children suffer stunting caused by malnutrition.

Malagasy people feel an understandable and just urge to increase their incomes and access to food, and this has led to the removal of forests to attempt to free more land for farming.

We are working in Madagascar with Malagasy communities facing these challenges, working with them to identify their needs and hopes, and providing them with the skills, training and equipment, as well as finance models, they need to improve incomes and escape hunger, while expanding and protecting the Malagasy wilderness and the marvels it contains.

You can find out more about this vital work, here, and its excellent outcomes so far, here.

In 2023, René de Roland told The Explorer’s Club: ‘I aspire to conserve Madagascar’s biodiversity, develop the next generation of conservationists, and improve the lives of my fellow citizens. I do what I do out of pride in my country’s biodiversity and love for its wonderful people.’

This is, in part, what drives us too.

We congratulate Lily-Arison René de Roland and hope that he – and we – can celebrate many victories for Malagasy people, Malagasy wildlife and wilderness, and the world as a whole, in the weeks, months, and years to come.

As always, you can help.

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