About Us
The Creative Conservation Alliance (CCA) is a government registered non-profit organization, dedicated to ecological and cultural preservation within Bangladesh’s last remaining wild places. Through our grassroots efforts we empower local people to become stakeholders in their own landscapes.
Our organization’s work in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) for the last six years has documented the persistence of at least 30 globally-threatened species, including two ASAP species: Chinese pangolin and Arakan forest turtle.
What We Do
Years of subsistence hunting, commercial poaching, and habitat destruction through logging and traditional slash and burn agricultural practices has led to drastic species population reductions. Hunting is the most immediate threat, and without intervention, the extirpation of Chinese pangolin in the region and Arakan forest turtle from one of their two range countries is inevitable.
To prevent this, our project empowers traditional indigenous hunters into parabiologists and employs them to conduct forest patrols and species monitoring surveys. These parabiologists also act as local ambassadors for wildlife conservation in the area, continuing to sensitize local communities to the importance of species conservation. Our project takes a holistic landscape-based approach, helping the local communities to reduce dependency on forest resources through sustainable agroforestry and livelihood support. This not only ensures the protection of these critically endangered ASAP species, but also helps to conserve both the habitat and over 28 other globally-threatened species occurring in same area.
With the support of Rufford Small Grants we are also conducting country-wide surveys utilizing Mro traditional ecological knowledge to determine where Chinese pangolins still occur in Bangladesh as well as their conservation status and current threats.
Where We Work
Our work focuses primarily in the forests of southeast Bangladesh within the remote CHT, bordering India and Myanmar. Herein remains the last intact tropical mixed-evergreen forest of Bangladesh primarily confined to the Sangu-Matamuhuri Reserve Forest. It is our mission to protect these forests and the astounding biodiversity within, before the destructive practices of wanton land development erase what's left - forever.
Photo Credits
Featured image: Scott Trageser/NatureStills LLC