VIETNAM
Community farming of geckos could well benefit the Vietnamese economy and environment. Or so believes Bob Murphy, a herpetologist at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada, who recently paid a second visit to Vietnam to catalogue the new species of lizards. Murphy has undertaken a us $15,600 mission to protect the species which is used extensively in traditional medicine in Asia. "I wanted to try and figure out a way to prevent the constant pulling out of animals from the wild," says Murphy.
Murphy is convinced that captive breeding is the answer to this decimation of the gecko population. The lizards breed well in captivity and cat insects that can be captured with nets in any field. According to some estimates, a dozen animals would have some 40 offspring a year. To start the project, Murphy plans to raise cash to transport a few experts with interpreters to the villages, to buy farm equipment and for wages to support villagers until the first crop of geckus is ready.
Related Content
- Visioning to implementation: national transport decarbonization policies that match climate targets in China, India, and Vietnam
- National Plastic Action Partnerships (NPAP): a multistakeholder approach to addressing plastic pollution in Developing Countries
- Air pollution and the world of work in southeast Asia: findings from regional case studies
- Mapping local plastic recycling supply chains: insights from selected cities in India
- Development finance in the land sector: tracking progress towards Paris alignment
- Making the leap: the need for Just Energy Transition Partnerships to support leapfrogging fossil gas to a clean renewable energy future