Follow the conversations and collaborations that happened in Hyderabad, India
Ignace Schops
| Country: | Belgium |
| Region: | Europe |
| Field Of Work: | Environment |
| Subsectors: | Conservation/Preservation, Natural Resource Management |
| Target Populations: | Businesses, Communities |
| Organization: | World Conservation Union |
| Year Elected: | 2008 |
Hundreds of nature reserves in densely populated areas across Europe are falling into public neglect and are threatened because of the limited resources engaged in their promotion and maintenance. Ignace Schops has realized their untapped potential and has found a way to dramatically enhance both the environmental and economic value of these areas through concerted development. In the province of Limburg, Belgium, he has piloted the first citizen movement in Europe to claim the custody of a 6,000 hectare natural reserve into a national park, leading to the compatible development of a 20,000 hectare area. In doing so, he has mobilized a new generation of entrepreneurs to create calibrated investments that foster business opportunities while supporting local ecological quality. Ignace is now using this park to anchor an economic development model adaptable to small and large nature spots and reserves in densely populated regions across Europe.
The New Idea
Ignace has anticipated and seen the rise of a movement of citizens
shifting their focus away from consumption and materialism and looking
for a renewed relationship to nature. He has been organizing these
concerned citizens around various nature reserves and preserved regions
by giving them a direct access to beautiful natural areas in their
vicinity and multiplying entry points into nature, adapted to all
socio-economic and age groups, through the creation of biking networks
and the engagement of local, regional and international conservation
organizations. Over the years, he has connected hundreds of thousands
of citizens with nature, in Flanders and beyond.
With the support of these citizens, Ignace has found bringing together
businessmen and conservationists around the protection of nature
reserves in densely populated areas to be a great opportunity. Indeed,
unlike the usual divergent ways of nature conservationists and the
business sector, Ignace is providing a new local development approach:
He is showing to businessmen the value of nature in the eyes of
consumers and encouraging entrepreneurs to invest and leverage nature
reserves to foster proximity tourism and economic development, with a
focus on authenticity. He is hence avoiding big resorts and packaged
vacation experiences that typically destroy beautiful landscapes and
have a high ecological footprint. Simultaneously, he is demonstrating
to conservationists that working with businesses can create economic
and social value, but also and foremost can generate a stream of
resources to reinforce nature conservation if they agree to bring down
the fences they typically build around nature reserves.
In order to facilitate and deepen the cooperation between all these
stakeholders, Ignace is forming new kinds of public/private
partnerships around the combined economic and ecological development of
natural areas. Representing the united voice of citizens and local
governments, he is leveraging public and EU funds to bring
conservationists and entrepreneurs around the same negotiating table,
which allows him to tap into budgets not earmarked for environmental
preservation and to combine these new investment streams with funds
from a broad range of private sources. He thus sustains these
public/private partnerships and reinforces them through payback systems
for long-term investments in the maintenance, improvement and further
preservation of these areas. To facilitate and accelerate the
replication of his model across Europe, he is constantly developing new
financial tools and mechanisms.
The Problem
The potential of proximity nature tourism in Europe is very strong and
yet untapped. The European Tourism Forum in Budapest in 2004 has
underlined dramatic new trends in tourists’ aspirations which
have changed and should deeply transform the sector’s reality
in the years to come. The rise in the number of retirees, the new
aspirations and limited budgets of families, and the increasing costs
of airline transportation explain a rising demand for proximity tourism
and more authentic experiences in relationship to nature. According to
a 2007 survey in Europe, more than 70 percent of European tourists are
looking for a renewed connection to nature during their holidays.
However, more than half of them fear that they cannot find the type of
experience they are looking for nearby, and favor further destinations.
This constitutes a missed development opportunity in Europe. Many
densely populated, transitioning areas are struggling to convert their
coal mining and heavy industries into healthier local economies. Years
of industrial focus explain overlooking nature and biodiversity as
potential sources of growth through tourism. These regions are
particularly numerous in Belgium in the province of Limburg and the
south of Wallonia; in the U.K. (Wales, Scotland, and Northeastern
England) and the North and Northeast of France. For example, the
province of Limburg in Belgium is only 80 kilometers away from
Brussels, Belgium’s capital and most densely populated
region. Formerly one of the coal-mining capitals of Europe, it has been
struggling since the closing of its last mine in the early 1990s, and
unemployment levels are 7 percent, among the highest in
Flanders. Yet, the region is rich in natural resources, with
more than half its surface covered by natural landscapes, and includes
more than 20 regional nature reserves., Nature tourism is
underdeveloped. Only 1.2 percent of the regional income comes from
tourism, and most of it is concentrated in cities.
Governments have a key role to play in capturing these trends and
capitalizing on their potential benefits. As underlined in Nicholas
Stern’s Report for the World Bank and U.K. government
published in October 2006, it is crucial for modern economies to invest
now in nature preservation to limit the costs incurred by global
warming and trigger new forms of development. Stern particularly
remarked on the role played by tax incentives and public subsidies in
Western Europe and Northern America, which have typically been
encouraging industrialization at the expense of nature preservation
since the end of World War II and the necessity to change this paradigm
in the 21st century.
The Strategy
In March 2006, Ignace Schops inaugurated Hoge Kempen in Maasland, the
first national park in Belgium and provided undeniable demonstration
that a new form of ecological development was possible. When the World
Conservation Union (IUCN) validated the creation of the park, it found
most striking Ignace’s ability to mobilize a broad citizen
movement “to create the first national park from a bottom-up
approach”, as opposed to a governmental initiative. Indeed,
Ignace has been working over the years to make nature more accessible
without fences or fees, and to capture the interest of a new urban
culture of young adults and retirees aspiring to a renewed connection
to nature, focusing initially on Flanders and the Province of Limburg.
He multiplied bridges between people and nature, for example by
creating the largest bicycle network from private initiative in Europe
which attracted over 100,000 tourists a year in the area as early as
1996. Since the opening of the National Park, more than 700,000
tourists have been stepping through the gates of the park, and many
more have discovered nature reserves nearby. More than half of them
were living in neighboring cities. To strengthen the links between
people and nature, Ignace created a brand for Hoge Kempen, embodied by
nine stones positioned in the shape of a footprint. With it, he
certifies the quality of the nature experience in the Park, starting
with the gateways into the park and the partnering businesses investing
in nature custody. He is taking every opportunity to educate the public
about its environmental footprint and responsibility and engages them
as much as possible outside of the boundaries of the park to lessen the
burden on local ecosystems. What Ignace has achieved in Hoge Kempen is
merely the cornerstone of his strategy, demonstrating an insight he is
also leveraging in several smaller nature reserves in Flanders, and the
shape he is giving to new projects. He is leveraging nature
conservation and business networks to test his approach in Wales and
the North of France, and developing funding schemes to facilitate
private-public partnerships for the spread of his model.
Indeed, in choosing and making nature areas in Kempen and beyond,
accessible, Ignace is sending an open invitation to conservationists
and businessmen to sit around the same table to work on the healthy
economic and ecologic development of regions that combine nature and
high population densities. Because of the massive number of citizens he
has mobilized, Ignace was able to convince local entrepreneurs to
ignore the roads and industrial districts that were polarizing
investments and to look at preserved areas and beautiful landscapes as
a business opportunity for the tourism industry in which to invest.
This led to the creation of over 100 businesses and hundreds of jobs
around Hoge Kempen as well as smaller nature reserves in Belgium.
Simultaneously, hand in hand with conservation leagues, he is
coordinating and monitoring very strict preservation rules that allow
for tourism but guarantee the maintained and even enhanced ecological
quality of the region, thanks to the financial support of local
businesses through the development of tourist payback systems and a
tourism tax. These unique partnerships between the conservation and
business sector have led to Ignace being awarded the Goldman
Environmental Prize in 2008. This in turn opened the doors of many
international conservation and business networks, which Ignace wants to
leverage for the fast spread of his economic/ecological development
model.
Because he has created the first coalition of citizens, businesses and
conservationists and given them a united voice, Ignace has managed to
bring on board local and national governments, but also the European
Union. He is catalyzing their support to invest in preserved areas,
tapping into budgets earmarked to economic development, industrial
reconversion, business creation and tourism rather than the typically
limited conservation budgets. Since most of this financial support
requires matching funds, it has been encouraging local businesses to
invest further in the area. For example in Hoge Kempen, this has
allowed for an investment of €10M in the environmental
rehabilitation of the area, with an added €30 to €50M
of public and private investment in economic development. This is
already yielding a turnover of over €24M a year for the
tourism industry, with seven times as many visitors over the past two
years. These results provide a strong incentive for governments across
Europe and for the EU to support Ignace’s new endeavors,
especially since new EU regulations make ecological conservation a
compulsory element of every economic investment. To expand his model
beyond the boundaries of the EU and in areas where the government would
not have the necessary budget, Ignace is also working on the
development of new financial instruments and tools, especially an
investment fund.
The Person
A nature lover at heart, Ignace Schops engaged early in nature and
conservation movements as President and later Vice-President of
Natuurpunt, Flanders’ Conservation Union. Breaking away from
his fellow conservationists, he worked over the years to make nature
more accessible to all, both in his voluntary nature conservation
activities and his position as a social worker. In 1994 and 1995, he
embarked on the creation of a vast bicycle network, the largest of
private initiative in Europe. It showed him that his insight was
correct: people in modern societies aspire to establish a strong
connection with nature and to have authentic experiences. Over its
first few years, the bicycle network was used by 100,000 tourists every
year. The scale of this impact on the local economy and landscape
allowed him to mobilize citizens, local entrepreneurs and local
governments to create a “Masterplan” for concerted
improvement through a combination of economic and ecological
development.
The milestones of his Masterplan have allowed him to create a strong
coalition between all local stakeholders, develop his tools and
concepts, and progressively understand their full potential. He
multiplied experiments across Flanders, and in 2003, convinced the
Belgian government to provide matching funding to focus the industrial
reconversion of the area on environmental preservation, at a level of
over €28M, allowing for the opening of a national park in Hoge
Kempen in March 2006 in the presence of Stavros Dimas, EU’s
commissioner for the Environment. Since then, he has been developing
financial tools to guarantee the sustained interest and further
preservation of development of the park and other natural areas in
Flanders, including payback systems and tax incentives.
Ignace’s work has been exciting IUCN and progressive
conservationists worldwide, because it is demonstrating that
environmental preservation can be compatible with economic development
and offers a new dimension for future investments and innovative
conservation processes in Europe and beyond. This recognition has
reached its full scope in March 2008 when Ignace won the Goldman
Environmental Prize, which opened the eyes and the doors of business
and conservation networks. Ignace is thrilled to tap into this new
interest to spread his model and is already working closely with
organizations in France and the U.K. He is also exploring alternative
paths independent from public funding with the possible creation of the
fund to which he was the first contributor in giving a third of his
Goldman Prize money to kick start a project in Latvia.
