Dr Dick Watling believes that for conservation programmes to be successful, they must “place resource owners and their needs and aspirations at their centre and train people to implement them.”
Dr Watling makes his home in Fiji, but his contribution to conservation goes far beyond the borders of this small, environmentally aware Pacific Island nation.
His conviction that the best results would be obtained from those on the ground and that conservation should be locally based was a point proved when he created NatureFiji-MareqetiViti in 2006. Dr Watling served as Managing Director until January 2013 and currently is the Executive Trustee.
NatureFiji is the most active terrestrial biodiversity conservation organisation in Fiji. It is operated entirely by local staff and compliments the country’s major international conservation NGO agencies through its activities.
Dr Watling uses the acronym BINGOS (Big International Non-Government Organizations) and said that while he is grateful for the funding, he believes that their best contribution to Fiji is their continued work with local operators like NatureFiji, who live Fiji’s conservation on a daily basis.
Today, Nunia Moko, Director of NatureFiji-MareqetiViti, says that Dr Watling should be recognised as “a national treasure” for his more than 50 years of leadership and shared knowledge in Fiji and the wider Pacific region.
She said that his contribution “reads like a conservation handbook – wildlife, protected area management, forest and mangrove ecology, invasive species management, environmental education, EIA, as well as environmental governance.”
As well as founding NatureFiji-MareqetiViti, Watling launched Environmental Consultants Fiji Ltd., the Pacific’s first Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) consultancy. It has had a significant influence in ensuring that major developments in the country are environmentally sustainable.
He has produced illustrated nature books for children, and guides and scholarly works on Pacific Islands’ birds, palms and other flora and fauna.
Dr Watling’s work has been recognised in the international arena, most notably with the award of the 2020 Honorary Membership by IUCN at its ICUN Congress, an honour shared in that year by only three other conservationists globally, including Dr Jane Goodall, noted for her work with chimpanzees.
SPREP (Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme) has honoured him with the Pacific Islands Environment Leadership Award (PIELA) Lifetime Achievement Award. Not surprisingly, Watling was even more proud of NatureFiji-MareqetiViti receiving the PIELA Community Leadership in Environmental Sustainability & Conservation Award from SPREP, also in 2020.
Fiji Petrel rediscovered
In Dr Watling’s long list of accomplishments, none has received more attention than his rediscovery of the Fiji Petrel. Its last official sighting had been in 1855 when a specimen was brought onboard the HMS Herald, which passed the specimen onto the British Museum. Here, the Fiji Petrel was declared as a new species, but thereafter thought as extinct.
One hundred and twenty-nine years later, Dr Watling stood in the dark on a hilltop on the Fiji island of Gau, holding a spotlight.
This was his fifth trip to Gau, where islanders had reported sighting a bird with all the markings of the Fiji Petrel. The Fiji Petrel is pelagic, always at sea, only visiting land to lay their eggs. They are also sensitive to light. The spotlight worked.
Out of the dark, diving towards earth, flew the Fiji Petrel. It skimmed past Dr Watling’s head and fell at his feet. Since that night in 1984, only 17 of the Fiji Petrel have been recorded, having crashed into roofs or having been grounded in villages on Gau. Its chance for survival is in peril.
NatureFiji has declared the Fiji Petrel its “species guardian” and introduced measures to protect it on land. While this has achieved limited success, it remains one of the world’s rarest birds.
But to ensure that its continued existence was documented, Dr Watling organised international photographers to capture the elusive birds on film, flying well off shore from Gau. More directly, he arranged for trained ‘bird dogs’ to be brought in from New Zealand to locate Fiji Petrel nesting burrows, sadly without success.
Twenty years later, he was on the committee that selected the Fiji Petrel to feature on the country’s $20 note.
Early Life
Dick Watling was born in Kampala, Uganda, but the family soon moved to Kenya into a life of discovery, as it was inside the country’s national parks that Dick Watling set the course for his career.
He was sent to public school in England at seven years of age, and at 17, during a ‘a gap year’, spent 18 months as an apprentice assistant at Tanzania’s Serengeti Research Station, where he received his grounding as a fledgling biologist working with what he says were some of the “best ecologists in the world.”
While at school, Dr Watling lost both of his parents but was fortunate to be mentored by a close family friend, tobacco farmer Murray Charters, who worked in Africa and then in Fiji in the early 1960s, where they invited the young Watling to spend his school holidays. Charters and his wife were enthusiastic wildlife observers and became Dr Watling’s adopted parents.
Dr Watling began his formal education towards his career as a conservationist, with three years at the University of Bristol, where he received his B.Sc (Hons) in Zoology in 1973, and then at Cambridge, where in 1977, he received his PhD for his research in Fiji on the applied ecology of the Bulbul, an invasive bird brought to Fiji, from India, before 1903. The research was conducted while working with the Ministry of Agriculture.
With his PhD completed, he returned to Fiji and set about authoring his first book, Birds of Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, working with illustrator Chloe Talbot-Kelly.
Dr Watling was key in the development of sites in Fiji that reflected natural beauty and are of historical importance. The Bouma waterfall in Taveuni, Abaca-Koroyanitu Heritage Park and the Tavuni Hill Fort in Sigatoka; all are sites that have not only conserved forests but have become tourist attractions and a source of income for landowners.
Indonesian Experience
In 1979, Dr Watling was approached by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Indonesia, initially to study two endemic species in Sulawesi, but the project significantly broadened to assist in setting up two national parks, work that covered a four-year period.
Dr Watling credits this experience with providing his solid grounding as a tropical forest biodiversity specialist, a title he accepts as defining his work as a conservationist.
In Sulawesi, he lived in and helped develop the successful Lore Kalamanta National Park that, with his encouragement, had its name changed to the Lore Lindu NP.
An important aspect of Dr Watling’s work in Indonesia was to encourage its Government and the World Wildlife Fund to share National Park development plans and their proposed boundaries with the local communities. In 1980, the WWF Indonesia Programme made a policy change to ensure that local communities’ voices were included in its development plans.
Returning to Fiji
After Indonesia, Dr Watling returned to Fiji in 1982 and joined his erstwhile guardian, Murray Charters, in the business they called Aqua Foods Fiji, to commercially raise Tilapia fish in two ponds at Vuda Point. This proved to be uneconomical, so with partners, they expanded the site into Vuda Marina; it has now become a landmark in the west of Viti Levu, Fiji’s main island.
During this period, Watling began his consulting career and registered Environment Consultants Fiji Ltd. Two initial consultancies included assisting with an EIA of the Tropic Wood Mill and the start of the pine industry. Another was a development plan for the conservation and recreational development of Vaturu Dam, something which never saw the light of day.
Nearly all of his early consulting work was with multilateral organisations in South East Asia and Pacific Islands.
As a tropical forest biodiversity specialist, Dr Watling worked with the Indonesian transmigration programme of moving people to its outer islands. It was a period of change, with detailed initial selection of receiving sites and with greater appreciation of biodiversity losses and local community impacts.
His efforts helped change a forced migration methodology to a sponsored voluntary movement of internal migrants who were keen to access areas of farmland. Again, his belief that communities should be consulted was of paramount importance to this process.
Later he worked in Malaysia, helping the Department of Environment draw up their EIA Guidelines and at the same time, he established an environmental section for a large engineering firm, which currently operates as ‘Environment Asia’.
A major project in 1992-1993 was to head the IUCN team, which prepared the Fiji: State of the Environment Report and its follow-up, the National Environment Strategy for Fiji. These proved the forerunners for Fiji’s Department of Environment and was essentially a baseline action plan that addressed the country’s environmental concerns.
Throughout this period, Fiji’s mangroves have been a subject of great interest. In 1985-1986, following an outcry against mangrove losses in a World Bank project, Dr Watling produced the initial Mangrove Management Plan for Fiji. He was commissioned to prepare a new plan in 2013 for the Department of Lands. However very little had changed in mangrove management and the 2013 plan was not endorsed by government. He has recently followed this up by preparing updated Mangrove Planting Guidelines for Fiji.
The Way Forward
Dr Watling says that NatureFiji-MareqetiViti has brought him back to conservation and redirected his energies away from consultancies. When he received his international award from IUCN, his letter of thanks to the executive included strong recommendations that provided a clear road map for the future success of conservation programmes.
“We need to move away from a project-by-project approach – identify the areas of high biodiversity that need conserving, identify the appropriate structures that involve resource owners fully in their management that can support conservation priorities, and design appropriate financing mechanisms that support these structures through long-term finance from multiple sources and partnerships, and we need new and additional sources of finance, including through partnerships with the private sector.
“We need to grow a young and knowledgeable conservation constituency, schooled with field and marine experience rather than social media hype. Our current young conservationists strive to impact but are mostly inhibited by their small number and lack of opportunities to progress,” said Dr Watling.
With a lifetime that has been devoted to outcome-oriented applied conservation biology, all of Watling’s initiatives, whether mangrove, forest or bird conservation, protected areas establishment and management, tourism resort planning, invasive species management or environmental education, are being maintained and continued to be spearheaded by NatureFiji-MareqetiViti and a cadre of young professionals who will ensure that Dr Watling’s legacy endures.
