Rajesh Kiran Bhattarai walks at least six hours from his village in Khewang, in Nepal’s Taplejung district, just to reach the heart of the forest he looks after. He is a Forest Guardian, one of a team of local people paid to watch over the habitat of the red panda. He has done the job since 2020. His pay supports his family, and his work helps keep a shy, endangered animal in the trees above his home.

He is a good place to start for a beat Jungleweek will return to often: locally led ecological restoration. That means repair work designed, carried out and kept going by the communities who live in a landscape, not delivered to them from outside.

A network of community forests

Red Panda Network (RPN) was founded by Brian Williams in 2007. It began in eastern Nepal, in Panchthar, Ilam and Taplejung, the corridor where it is establishing what it calls the PIT Red Panda Protected Forest. It describes its approach as “integrated” and “landscape-level”, and as “built on the support and participation of local communities.”

Nepal’s community forests make that possible. These are blocks of forest managed by Community Forest User Groups, the people who depend on them. RPN says it now works with community partners in 13 of the 23 districts where red pandas live, and with more than 75 of these user groups as they move to sustainable forest management. It extended its programmes to seven districts in western Nepal: Dolpa, Jajarkot, Jumla, Kalikot, Rolpa, Rukum East and Rukum West. In 2022 it added Solukhumbu, Bhojpur and Khotang in the east. By RPN’s count, its programmes now cover more than a million acres of forest and half of Nepal’s red panda range.

Its list of activities reads like a manual for community restoration: research and monitoring, education, habitat protection, habitat restoration, anti-poaching, sustainable livelihoods and policy work. The organisation states its mission in one line: the conservation of wild red pandas “through the education and empowerment of local communities.”

Who the guardians are

The guardian profiles on RPN’s site show what “locally led” means in practice. Each one names a person and the community forest they look after.

Bimala Moktan watches over Jaljale Community Forest in Panchthar and has been a guardian since 2015. RPN says she has been part of its national Forest Guardian team since 2018, “leading the way as an inspiration for local women.” Kalpana Rokaya, in Dolpa district, was one of the first women hired as a Forest Guardian in western Nepal. Shanti Budha, also in Dolpa, belongs to a local mothers’ group and runs awareness campaigns as well as monitoring and anti-poaching work. In Kalikot, Shanti Malla puts it most plainly: “We protect forests and wildlife for our children.”

The work is skilled. Ngima Dawa Sherpa of Padma Sambhaw Community Forest in Ilam has taken part in camera trapping, a GPS satellite-collar study as a red panda tracker, and a tree-planting project called Plant A Red Panda Home. Arpan Rai in Santapur is described as skilled with GPS and camera traps. Surya Bhattarai in Taplejung has been trained in forest fire management. Others collect red panda droppings for genetic studies. The people who know these forests best are producing the science that guides how the forests are managed.

Frogs in the tea country

Across the subcontinent, in the high plantation country around Munnar in Kerala, a different kind of restoration is under way. It looks after something far smaller.

The Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) runs an Amphibian Recovery Project in the Munnar landscape. According to WTI, the landscape holds 15 Endangered and 10 Vulnerable frog species. The project’s goal is “to halt and reverse the decline of these species” through research, habitat protection and restoration, disease monitoring, partnerships and training.

What stands out is who the partners are. Much of Munnar’s frog habitat sits inside working estates. WTI says Windermere Estate and Blackberry Hills Estate work with it to protect and restore amphibian breeding habitat on their land. A formal agreement with Kanan Devan Hills Plantations (KDHP), the largest private landholder in the region, has opened 16,857 hectares to amphibian conservation. A separate agreement with the Kerala Forest and Wildlife Department’s Munnar Wildlife Division takes the work into six protected areas.

Since 2023 the team has surveyed all seven KDHP tea estates in the landscape, and Windermere’s cardamom plantation, to map where threatened frogs breed. Its target species include the Resplendent Grass Frog, the Kadalar Swamp Tree Frog and the Shola Night Frog, all listed as Endangered, as well as the Vulnerable Anamalai Gliding Frog. The threats it found are roadkill, invasive species and degraded habitat. In response, the team is experimenting with new breeding habitats, clearing invasive plants and restoring degraded breeding sites such as swamps. Working with the LACONES-CCMB laboratory in Hyderabad, it also monitors for the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, which has driven frog extinctions in many parts of the world.

Restoration here is a shared job. Planters, foresters, laboratory scientists and field teams each look after a piece of the same wet, misty landscape.

Why locally led matters

These two very different projects have something in common. In each, the people with the most at stake are part of the work: the guardian hiking six hours to his forest, the estate setting aside a swamp, the field team that knows which pool the grass frogs call from. Restoration that relies on them, and pays them, is more likely to last.

Jungleweek will keep following groups like these: grassroots NGOs, community forests, and the local partners connected to the places and journeys we cover. If you know a locally led restoration project we should visit, tell us.

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