Conversation with Mr Conservation

Ghana S Gurung had to walk 11 days from the tiny village of Dhee in Mustang to Pokhara to give his high school exam in 1983. He wanted fervently to be a medical doctor, and took biology in college in the hope of selection for a medical seat under the Mustang king’s quota.

While in Amrit Science College in Kathmandu, he was offered a scholarship to study Parks, Recreation and Tourism in New Zealand. He did not even know the meaning of the English word ‘recreation’, and failed a mandatory English test. 

Ever resourceful, Gurung convinced Edmund Hillary, New Zealand’s ambassador to Nepal at the time, that he would take English lessons when he got to Victoria University Wellington. He graduated from Lincoln University in Christchurch, and went on to do his PhD in natural science from University of Zürich, Switzerland.

“I was born for conservation,” says Gurung, who is now WWF Nepal Country Director and was recently honoured with the Lincoln University Alumni International Medal by his New Zealand alma mater.

He adds, “As a child I studied Buddhism which is all about doing good for people and nature. It taught me about sentient brings, about interconnectedness, interdependence between all living and non-living things.”

As a boy in Dhee, Gurung herded sheep and yaks and recalls that snow leopards were the main threat to the family livestock. “Snow leopards were then my biggest enemy,” he says, “now they are my best friends.”

Gurung has been hailed as a pioneer of snow leopard conservation in Nepal and globally. In 2022, he was named one of 12 most incredible conservation heroes in the world by World Atlas for his work. 

Today, snow leopard numbers are on the rise across the Nepal Himalaya, although the elusive endangered cats are threatened by the impact of climate breakdown. In fact, Gurung’s home village of Dhee has been nearly abandoned because springs in the area have gone dry due to chronic winter drought.

Growing up in Dhee, Gurung says he had a strong urge to excel in studies to dispel the entrenched notion that people from the mountains were not very smart. One of his biggest inspirations was his school teacher Man Bahadur Biswokarma of Marpha, who urged him to aim high and get a PhD someday. 

“I think I have made Man Bahadur Sir proud,” he says.

At WWF, Gurung was closely involved in the creation and handover of the Kangchenjunga Conservation Area, a 2,030 sq km zone in eastern Nepal patterned after similar nature reserves in Annapurna and Manaslu. 

The Maoist conflict was at its peak, yet Gurung managed to do the groundwork with local officials and mother’s groups for the Kangchenjunga Conservation Area under the ladership of the government. Many of Nepal’s top conservationists arrived in Ghunsa for the official handover in September 2006, including his mentors Harka Gurung, Chandra Gurung, Mingma Norbu Sherpa and Tirtha Man Maskey.

After the ceremony, Ghana was supposed to join them for the helicopter ride back to Kathmandu but had to stay behind in Taplejung to prepare a press statement. Soon after takeoff in pouring rain, the Mi17 helicopter hit a mountain at 4,000m, killing all 24 people on board. 

Ghana Gurung was involved in the search and rescue, and was determined with others to turn the tragedy into a long term effort to nurture a new generation of conservation leaders. Since then, the Mingma Norbu Sherpa Memorial Scholarships has been sending two Nepalis to Lincoln University in New Zealand every year , and WWF Nepal provides five memorial scholarships every year.  

At WWF Nepal, Gurung is a proponent of an integrated approach to development that involves local communities in conservation, not the fortress model of fencing off wilderness areas championed in the West. 

He says: “In Nepal, unless you protect people, they will not protect wildlife. All these years I thought we were working for nature. Now I realise we were working for people. Human beings are a part of the living world, and it has to be a symbiotic relationship.” 

Indeed, indigenous communities living near the conservation areas and in buffer zones have been crucial to Nepal’s successes in conservation including tripling the tiger population in 12 years, doubling forest cover in 30 years, recording 752 days of zero poaching of rhinos putting Nepal in the global conservation map. 

However, more tigers mean prey density is declining and the animals are entering human settlements in search of food and water, leading to increased human-wildlife contact.

“We are trying to convince people in the buffer zone about precautions they have to take near the park,” says Gurung, who has got WWF to help local people manage homestays for ecotourism benefits.

While Nepal’s success in tripling its tiger population has increased attacks on people, the media magnifies tiger attacks even though many more people in Nepal are killed every year by snake bites. Gurung says, “Animal will not change their behaviour as they are wild, whereas we humans need to change our behaviour to live and thrive with wildlife which is one of biggest tourism assets and economic pillars of Nepal”.

The increase in forest cover coupled with outmigration of local people has also meant that the undergrowth in buffer zones is now loaded with deadwood that is fuel for forest fires. Climate change-induced droughts have also meant that grasslands are tinder dry.

Ghana Gurung says the answer to Nepal’s new conservation challenges lies in protecting water sources in the catchment area, watersheds, wetlands, groundwater and controlling the river pollution.

“Being climate-smart automatically means water resilience,” says Gurung, noting how natural springs across Nepal are going dry while in the Tarai, over-extraction of groundwater has led to ponds inside national parks drying up. Prolonged heat waves are making the water crisis worse.

Unplanned infrastructure is also adding to the challenge, Gurung says, and one of WWF’s focus areas is in ensuring that protected areas are not disturbed by highways, transmission lines and irrigation canals bifurcating them. Climate smart and wildlife friendly infrastructure development is the way forward.

The climate crisis has caused Gurung’s community to abandon Dhee and Samjong villages in Upper Mustang, the village where he was born. He says, “Climate breakdown is already happening, we have spent enough time talking about how bad it is. It is time to start doing something about it ourselves with nature-based solutions to protect our water sources.”