Managing tropical ecosystems

Description

Managing tropical ecosystems involves implementing coordinated actions to conserve biodiversity, restore degraded habitats, and ensure sustainable resource use. This strategy addresses threats such as deforestation, habitat fragmentation, and unsustainable exploitation by promoting protected areas, community-based management, and ecological monitoring. Practical measures include enforcing regulations, supporting reforestation, and integrating local knowledge to maintain ecosystem services, enhance resilience to climate change, and secure livelihoods dependent on healthy tropical environments.

Implementation

In the humid tropics, traditional agriculture is based on natural resource management, and agricultural ideology reflects a concern for managing natural processes. Natural processes are valuable resources. Natural resource management is not an activity separable from how people make a living. While natural resource management is generally taken to mean the focused management of particular naturally occurring useful items such as wild game, water, soil, minerals, and timber producing trees, tropical peoples focus on processes not items; items are seen to be the result of processes. Agricultural structures, agricultural 'scripts', and the agricultural knowledge of individuals reflect an ideological stance that natural processes are agricultural resources.