Rosy periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus) - Madagascar plant from which cancer cures are derived.

Across the globe, ecosystems, plants and animals are rapidly disappearing.  As these wild lands, waters and species are destroyed, vast libraries of organic compounds potentially useful to medicine are also lost forever.

Almost all survivors of cancer and other serious illnesses have natural compounds from rainforest plants and other wild species to thank for their recovery.  As a member of the Alliance for Global Conservation, CI is dedicated to spreading the word about the immeasurable benefits that biodiversity provides for human health–for both today and tomorrow’s medical breakthroughs.

Check out the Alliance for Global Conservation website to learn more about the role of species in medicine and read personal testaments from cancer survivors.

Add your voice, and support international efforts to protect global ecosystems.

In a recent BBC News article, scientists found that bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus)—the back-flipping, front row-splashing, always-smirking denizen of many aquariums around the world—may hold potential insights to finding cures for type 2 diabetes which affects millions of people worldwide.

Now think about this for a minute: dolphins are big and photogenic and pretty well-studied, yet we’ve only just discovered this particular potential contribution to human health. Now imagine all the plants and creatures that scientists rarely see, are harder to study or that scientists don’t even know about, and the mind begins to boggle at what else may be lying out there, waiting to be discovered.

Conrad Savy is  a Conservation Science Advisor for CI.

At that time, the only way to get to Monrovia was with the UN peacekeeping mission or on one of the Nigerian carriers, all of which overbook and work on a first-come, first-serve basis. After two days of trying to catch a flight from Cote d’Ivoire, where I had been meeting with partners, my new friends and I realized we were not going to get a flight in time. So we loaded up a truck and started on a 21 hour journey from Abidjan to Monrovia.

Two images are etched in my memory from that trip. The first was just 20 minutes after we drove across the log bridge and border posts crossing into Liberia. We drove by a UN personnel carrier stopped in the middle of the road. There was a bullet hole through the windshield right about where the driver’s eye level would have been. Welcome to Liberia!

The other image was when we got to Monrovia. Just about every building we passed was completely burned out, a dark shell of concrete. And there were kids, so many kids filling these buildings and streets with nowhere and no one to go to. I had worked in Africa for a decade, but this was the first time I really had a hard time finding the positive in a situation. No one should have to suffer through this.

Then I began to get to know our Liberian partners and staff, and learn about what they were doing. Forests had helped finance the conflict, but these people were engaged in a revolutionary plan to help Liberia gain greater control of those forests and use them for human well being. When we had crossed the border and my passport was stamped, the border guard scolded me. “What Liberia needs is for people to quit coming and taking all of our resources, leaving nothing here!” I learned how CI country director Alex Peal and his team were working closely with local leaders to help them develop their own organizations, providing them with the funding they needed to improve their communities. I saw women putting new coats of mud over the bullet holes on walls, painting welcome greetings for new shops and restaurants. Liberia was moving forward, and its people wanted partners to assist.

“I can smile, having seen how far Liberia has already come. It is easy for me to be optimistic about the future.”

Four years and five trips later, Liberia and CI are still moving forward. There are no longer UN checkpoints every 10 minutes or so; security is increasingly handled locally; programs for education, business development and women’s empowerment are moving forward. The president is convincing investors to join in on Liberia’s development.
Sanctions on timber were lifted, thanks to the adoption of the regulations and plans that CI helped author. Partners we used to fund are getting the grants that we used to apply for. The burned-out buildings have mostly been renovated and now house new businesses. The streets are no longer filled with orphaned kids, but busy people working to earn a livelihood.

The entire development community here is turning over. Now government partners of Liberia are developing programs focused on five to ten years as opposed to three to five.

Many of the new faces coming in express their reservations about how far Liberia has to go. Yet I can smile, having seen how far Liberia has already come. It is easy for me to be optimistic about the future. Certainly serious challenges remain, but Liberia has already moved further than I would have thought possible four years ago. I feel lucky to be opening a new office and revising the next steps on a path defined years ago – to conserve Liberia’s natural heritage as a fundamental principle of development. It is indeed an exciting time to be in Liberia.

Eric Coppenger is the Director of Resource Strategy in the Africa and Madagascar Field Division of Conservation International.

No one is immune to the issues facing freshwater ecosystems. However, it is becoming clear that small indigenous communities in isolated areas are among the first to feel the impacts of these threats.

Members of the Kamayurá tribe in the Amazon are slowly going hungry as deforestation and climate change make their homeland hotter and drier, shrinking water supplies and reducing fish stocks. On another continent, in the “cradle of civilization” between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, drought, pollution and lashes between Iraq, Syria and Turkey are taking a toll on the livelihoods of local Marsh Arabs. They are now are being forced to import fish from Iran, an unsettling turn of events for a culture which has relied on fishing for millennia.

As in the past, modern societies faced with catastrophic changes in their environment must either adapt or relocate. While relocation is without a doubt far less tragic than death, it is a difficult choice for many due to high costs and the fact that as the global population grows, there are fewer and fewer places to go.

Also, in assimilating with other communities, cultures risk losing their unique languages, art, traditions and overall worldview – regional knowledge which has been molded by the communities’ past. If lost, the lack of this knowledge could make finding regional environmental solutions even more of a challenge.

CI is working with indigenous communities and organizations all over the world to incorporate their cultural heritage and unique perspectives into regional conservation practices. Through this work, community members have a bigger chance of mitigating and adapting to change rather than disappearing along with their homelands.

As a new staff member at CI, I’m excited to be learning more about all the ways the scientific community is exploring the links between healthy natural systems and healthy people. Just this week, I came across an interesting article about a new study connecting pre-natal air pollution exposure and IQ.

The study, conducted by the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health (CCCEH), had 249 New York City women (most of them from low-income neighborhoods) wear air quality monitors for two days in the later months of their pregnancies. When their children were IQ-tested at the age of five, it was found that the children who had been exposed to the most prenatal pollution scored an average of four points lower than the rest.

Although I wasn’t totally shocked by this discovery, it’s scary to think that these results came out of a developed country, from a city that has significantly reduced its air pollution in recent years. Around the world, millions of people (particularly in Asia) live in dirty, overcrowded cities where conditions are much worse.

I spent 12 hours in Beijing on a layover a few years ago, and I remember looking out the hotel window from the 28th floor in amazement at the smog obscuring the tops of surrounding skyscrapers. On the streets below, people hurried by, some with surgical masks hiding their faces. If air pollution has a visible connection to human health in relatively “clean” cities, what must it look like in places like this?

It makes me think about CI’s “Lost There, Felt Here” campaign. The CCCEH study is yet another example of the unbreakable connection between human and ecosystem health. Bad air in one place can impact each of our lives somewhere else, even if we aren’t aware of it.

Although these study results are disturbing, it brings me hope to think that if CI’s new mission is realized, we will gain even more benefits than we can currently appreciate.