Friday 29 Mar 2024
By
main news image

A passion for the outdoors is what drove Dr Reza Azmi into the world of conservation. The founder of Wild Asia is all fired up in his crusade to preserve the environment and promote sustainable practices among corporations. He tells Jacqueline Toyad of his journey down unbeaten paths and his campaign to get things going green.


Life is about choices. Every day, we’re faced with choices and for most of our lives, we’re struggling constantly with whether we’ve made the right decisions — black shoes or brown, banana leaf lunch or simple sandwich, CSI or Desperate Housewives, right or wrong, bad or good … the list is endless.

And today, as environmental issues become more pressing, the list of day-to-day choices has grown. Car-pool or not? Plastic or green bag? Do I need to drive there or can I walk? Of course, there is the bigger choice you have to make in terms of going green: forget it and hope that government and corporations will figure it out, or take action yourself?

Dr Reza Azmi, founder and director of Wild Asia, has chosen to do the latter. The social enterprise he established in 2003 works to support the conservation of the environment and the communities dependent upon its natural resources. This is achieved by forging partnerships with individuals and businesses that are socially and environmentally responsible.

Its mission statement reads: “Our ultimate goal is to promote sustainable practices that will minimise adverse impacts on the environment, ensure that local communities are engaged and local cultures are respected.” Wild Asia is the result of an evolved process. Reza professes to never having ambitions of becoming an eco-warrior; he puts it down to a passion for the outdoors he’s had since childhood.

“If you can see where I’ve come from … getting outdoors was really all I wanted to do. I wanted the peace. I loved to watch birds, I loved being in the forest. When you spend enough time outdoors, and if you spend time looking around at it, you start seeing the pressure points that are taking away the things you enjoy. When you start addressing that, then you’re in the world of conservation,” he tells me.

We meet at Aunty Nat’s, a cute little bistro in Sri Hartamas, just around the corner from the Wild Asia office. This isn’t the first time I’ve met Reza — we’ve had several encounters in tête-à-tête sessions between Wild Asia and The Edge in his team’s efforts to engage the media.

One word you can use to describe him is enthusiastic. He’s affable and is easily excited when he sees opportunities in collaboration, in a way that makes you wish you could muster up half the energy he has to meet him where he is.

But these elements that make up his personality are suited to the task he has set himself upon. Who can’t but help open to the ideas he and his team generate when it is served with charm and a can-do spirit? And while he has a tendency to be verbose — “It’s a longwinded story-lah, so you’d better ask specific questions” — you can’t help but listen because when he makes a point, it’s a good one.

“I wanted a new model for Wild Asia. I wanted it to be something where I could engage businesses. I didn’t want to be dependent on donor money. It is probably one of the early social enterprise models where we use a company structure; the shareholders have agreed not to take profits out,” he shares.

“All our profits are poured into our programmes. Our programmes cover the natural corridor… plantations, tourism; the entire programme is funded by our money. Some of it is sponsored. But our income is derived by trade or advisory services. So people are paying us for training. People are paying us to act as advisers. And because we bring field experience, it makes it more meaningful for the companies. And for us, we want to see the company changing ... I think our collective background — from the social world, from the environment world, from our work with different non-governmental organisations (NGOs), the different NGO partners that we have — makes us much stronger at being the right partner to some of these corporations.”

Wild Asia has been more often than not mistaken for an NGO, much to Reza’s chagrin, but he says that people are now becoming more aware of the organisation.

“Initially, people were saying, ‘Wait, you’re charging us rates, so you’re not really an NGO’. We had to keep telling them, no, we’re not an NGO and we don’t want to be seen as an NGO. And we’re not bloggers, we don’t represent civil society. And we don’t take money from donation. That’s what differentiates us. But I feel that because our income is derived from impact, it’s a much better proposition to be working with us than with profit-driven consultants. And I think that’s the feeling we’re getting from the various people we’ve worked with,” he says.

“We’re not interested in philanthropy. This idea that people can create business structures that could have a positive impact …that’s how we started.”

• • •

Growing up, Reza was like any boy in his teens, struggling to find the right career path to take. “I had this childhood dream of being a diplomat, but I also wanted something that would take me outdoors,” he shares.

Reza describes his developmental years as pretty much uneventful — “Pretty much your typical middle-income upbringing” — growing up in Ampang and attending St John’s Institution up until the age of 14, when he was shipped off to the UK to finish his secondary and tertiary education. It was his time in the UK that he says played a role in leading him towards conservation.

“I did most of my schooling in England. I think I thrived in that environment, where you were encouraged to be an all-round student … ,” says Reza.

“I went on to study at [the University of] St Andrew’s and this really was a moulding point for me. I was taking biology and environmental sciences, all of which would be necessary to get into conservation 10 years ago. I was looking at the idea of how to merge my passion for the outdoors with some kind of profession. This notion of a professional beach bum was quite clear in my head, and that was leading me into biology and the whole botanical/biological world,” he says, admitting that his choice of major was based more on the fact that it afforded him access to the great outdoors than on saving the planet.

If anything, the tipping point for Reza would be when he returned to Malaysia after graduating in 1994 and meeting Isabelle Louis and Junaidi John Payne, two directors at World Wide Fund for Nature-Malaysia (WWF Malaysia).

Reza shares, “I was lucky to meet them. And it was rare for a fresh graduate to be given RM25,000 and then told, ‘Here, we’d like you to go down to Sabah to do some field work. Your closest supervisor in Kota Kinabalu would be John, and we’d like you to do something with the community’.”

And off young Reza went to Sabah’s Lower Kinabatangan River as WWF Malaysia’s senior scientific officer for its Forest Programme. He recalls, “To be thrown into the deep end and literally build a programme up from scratch was something that really excited me. I spent a lot of time going on forest trips and visiting the villages, which is where all the forest knowledge was. At the same time, it was also exposing me to fledgling eco-tourism opportunities.”

Long before “eco-tourism” became a buzzword, Reza was witnessing it in person. He watched as growing numbers of “white people” came to the villages, curious about the culture as well as the Borneo rainforest. What he didn’t see were benefits to the local community they were visiting.

“In many ways, that was very much a starting point for a digression in my life,” he laughs.

At the same time, Reza also observed the expansion of the plantation sector, where “more of forest remnants were going to plantations”.

“I started with one foot in the technical world: What is the forest? What is the ecology of the forest? Forget the people and forget the threats. But by joining WWF as a volunteer, I was brought into a world where I was forced to talk to people. I started getting really excited about movements of people, like finding an Iban guy in a village in Sabah and trying to understand why he’s there. I discovered it was because of logging — these guys came up here for jobs. They’ve moved and villages were created and then [they were] no longer there all because of this change in the economy.

“I was seeing things firsthand. I wasn’t reading a book and learning the history of Kinabatangan. I was deciphering all of this purely from interviews, getting to know the folk, and some of these were supported by the research I was doing at that time.”

Reza’s field experiences can be credited with helping shape Wild Asia’s successful primary projects — Sustainable Agriculture Initiative and Responsible Tourism Initiative.

“One of the things I learnt at WWF was the whole idea of setting up standards which the industry, NGOs and the people can have a say in, where you can end up with good responsible businesses that actually do make an impact on the ground,” says Reza.

The starting point for Reza and Wild Asia was forestry.

“We were visiting forest areas and we had to not just look at birds but also talk to contractors and workers. I started seeing how a business entity has many layers to it, and if the fundamental layer — the fellows in the field — don’t get it, it’s because they’re not supported by the boss, they’re not supported by the right sort of finances, and that’s where your problem lies,” he shares. “That was one way I was starting to bridge theory and field experiences.

“Now we’re getting into the Wild Asia end of things. There are a lot of things we want businesses to do and I see that there is a big communication divide. And I do see that it fundamentally falls down to individuals in the organisation. Now the real nut to crack is how to motivate these different levels — be they decision-makers, owners, management staff or the guys on the ground who are doing the actual work.”

• • •

As much as Reza does credit his experiences with WWF Malaysia for enabling him to carry out his current work, he admits that there was a time when he felt disillusioned during his stint with the organisation.

“My biggest frustration was I hated writing proposals. And I hated the fact that we were so donor-dependent and how you were sometimes crafting projects you did not have the capacity to do, but you were doing it because there was a donor who has RM100,000 to give. And then you were locked in this cycle of writing up a proposal, reporting on the proposal and doing all these things, and not actually getting to solving the problem ... because you’re spending all your time doing other things,” he shares.

“So that was very much my frustration. And I mentioned the whole forestry thing — I was stuck in that whole donor cycle. I was fairly senior at that point. But then there were some glimpses: I was given an opportunity to go to the field and work with some actual loggers … So I think that experience and my frustration naturally led me to think, ‘Well, it’s time to find something new’,” he shares.

“Finding something new was easy. Before I left, I started a website called Wild Borneo in 1998. I was dabbling in the Internet. And Wild Borneo was purely a personal project. I was writing about little villages in Sabah, places I’d visited in Borneo and elsewhere. But really, with nothing clear in my head apart from ‘I know I need to share this information because this information doesn’t exist anywhere’.

His Wild Borneo website drew the attention of like-minded travellers everywhere who began contributing articles from various parts of Asia.

“By the time I left in 2003, Wild Borneo had 49 contributors. I had quite a sizeable number of articles. So it made sense to transform Wild Borneo into Wild Asia. And I spent the last two months learning a new skill — programming — and working very hard at getting a new site up called Wildasia.net.”

One of Wild Asia’s earliest breakthroughs is its River of Life project at Sime Darby’s Tanah Merah estate in Negri Sembilan. At that time, Reza was on the board of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and he was asked by Sime Darby to look at a patch of the estate where some rare birds had been spotted. Rounding up “our best team”, Reza and mates spent some time on the estate. What they found was an amazing stretch of land comprising a hill, mangrove swamps and a river, Sungai Janjing. They also came across civet cats, owls, cobras, pythons as well as 150 species of birds, including a rare waterbird.

“So what we presented after five days was a series of pictures we took of the birds, animals and of the patches where we saw conservation value … we also had the idea that maybe we need to connect these patches,” recalls Reza.

Instead of writing up a 50-page report, Reza and his team submitted the findings of their biodiversity survey and a plan of action in 25 visual slides to the plantation manager. It was this manager who handed over the presentation to the head office for perusal by management.

Reza says, “Eventually it went up to the chairman of the board and to some senior people in the industry. Suddenly, they all saw that this was something really exciting.”

And thus, the River of Life, the first project of what is now the Natural Corridor Initiative, was born.

“We honestly didn’t do much apart from helping to make sense of what they had, and we gave them material which they could use to excite people. That was the starting point for all our work on the natural corridor. That same experience — how do we switch from the lowest level to management level — is something we’ve taken on with every project we do,” says Reza, adding that there are currently only two training modules endorsed by the RSPO and Wild Asia’s is one of them.

“Because we’ve brought in role-playing and participatory approaches, pictures and workshops into our training, the response has been good. When you break down education and make it more participatory … you actually get their attention.

“What’s great is that people are motivated to go on this journey and we’re finding companies that genuinely want to change.”

For Reza, it is important to establish if a company is sincere about its corporate social responsibility programmes. It is a matter of commitment or compliance in his eyes. Through experience, Reza has seen projects fade into obscurity or abandoned because a company has milked enough publicity out of it. He prefers to work with parties who are truly committed to making a change, not just in the impact they make on the ground, but in the way they run their businesses in the future. It all boils down to motivation.

“Sometimes, you need to be able to suss out a boss or the board if that’s where they’re really going to go — that’s the company I want to work for. If it’s just for compliance, just for PR, then I’m really in the wrong place. I really don’t have that much time [to put in so much effort with someone who’s not doing for the long run]. We’re trying to be very strategic about this,” he shares. “It is exciting because if companies do move in this direction, you’re actually going to end up with a better company management-wise, as well as realigning the core values towards sustainability.

“Our model is very simple. We do little, we do it well and build a brand … that’s essentially it. If you look at the number of projects we’ve done, it’s actually not a lot. We’ve seen every single project as an opportunity to learn about why businesses don’t do certain things, why do some bosses don’t understand, why do the workers not get it … When we do what we do, we’re not looking at it from the perspective of ‘it’s our job’, you know? We’re always trying to learn.”

Basically, Wild Asia works not to preach and dictate. Rather, its projects begin with a step towards understanding the system within the company first, understanding its constraints and then coming up with a customised solution that would benefit the planet, the people and, of course, the profit margins (which CEO can be convinced to embrace change if you can’t talk to him about bottom lines?).

“All we want is a commitment,” says Reza, “because we’re going to figure it out along the way. It’s got to work both ways. One thing I’m struggling with is how we can work with corporations to fund and support our core programme without us having to sell our soul or advertise … I haven’t quite figured out how to do it.”

So far, word of mouth and social networks seem to work for the Wild Asia crew and Reza even managed to get work through family ties as well.

“Both my brothers are corporates. I’m the youngest. The middle one is less corporate but the eldest one is super corporate, a senior partner at PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers). So he lives in a completely different world from me. I always thought that my world and my brother’s would never meet. But as soon as I started doing this, our worlds did meet and he was genuinely interested in our perspective and so we ran a training programme for PwC,” he reveals.

“I guess my brothers were just watching me, with my fingers in all these different pies, and thought they should learn to understand a little bit of if. That was an interesting experience for me. Corporate is, I guess, where the wealth is. But how Wild Asia helps you is this: It’s about how to make money and still feel proud that you’ve created value not just for your bank account but also for the places you operate. I don’t care who you are but I’m quite sure that at least that must motivate you, unless you’re generally bad … then I can’t help you, lah,” he laughs.

 

Wild Asia’s portfolio

Responsible Tourism Initiative
Wild Asia’s Responsible Tourism Initiative was conceptualised in 2003 to promote best practices of sustainable tourism in Asia. The goal is to demonstrate that there are clear financial incentives for doing the right thing. The reward for tourism operators is simple: Wild Asia offers unique marketing opportunities to reach out to a growing global market for responsible tourism. The reward for travellers — ecologically and socially sound tourism — is just as important, because they make choices with their conscience and their budget alike. The programme is coordinated by Wild Asia and is supported by regional and local strategic partners.

Part of this initiative is the annual Responsible Tourism Awards, which acknowledge operators who are making a difference through their responsible tourism efforts. There are also responsible tourism reviews or assessments based on an eco-checklist developed by Wild Asia to help guide them as well as training and education modules.

Sustainable Agriculture
Initiative
The Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) was first established in 2003 and has evolved to be one of the more credible approaches in defining sustainability in the oil palm plantation sector. One of the key guiding documents is the Principles & Criteria for RSPO, which outlines the framework for defining sustainability and a certification system was introduced in 2007.

Wild Asia believes that adherence to RSPO provides a holistic system to assist companies in complying with laws and regulations, develop better industrial relations between management and workers, improve environmental performances which can result in reduced expenditure on fossil fuels and chemicals, as well as providing a strong platform for promoting real corporate responsibility.

The Sustainable Agriculture Initiative is one of Wild Asia’s core programmes that aim to promote a deeper understanding of sustainability values and to assist corporations in their efforts towards sustainable agriculture. Conceptualised in 2005, the goal of the programme is to promote better management practices in agriculture, minimise adverse impacts on the environment, ensure local communities are engaged and local cultures are respected, as well as protecting native biodiversity.
Natural Corridor Initiative (NCI)

Beyond the endangered wild species, many thousands of species survive outside of protected areas. The quality of our environment, be it in urban or rural areas, is dependent on these species. That is why the NCI was established — to promote the development of natural corridors within our landscapes, giving wildlife room to live amidst development. Natural corridors may be in the form of existing natural vegetation, enriched areas with selective plant species or may be reclaimed by natural regeneration. This programme was first conceived in 2004 and is targeted mainly at private landowners — oil palm, rubber or tea plantation owners. It was founded on the belief that the impact of development and agriculture expansion can be minimised if there is awareness and if plans are put into place early in the development cycle. The programme works to encourage biodiversity on these estates by minimising the impact of development and agriculture expansion through awareness and appropriate conservation plans.

Within this initiative is the Plant-A-Tree (PAT) for the Planet, a campaign Wild Asia uses as a channel to educate the public on the need/significance of planting trees (carbon offsetting, regeneration of forest, preservation of biodiversity in our country). There are three main tree-planting events tied up with Earth Day (April 22), World Environment Day (June 5) and Malaysian Environment Week  (Aug 11), where corporations which have pledged a certain amount of trees as well as individuals who have purchased trees will have their trees planted.


Sustainable Island
Programme (SIP)

The SIP was launched in March 2008, under the banner of the International Year of the Reef 2008. A partnership between Wild Asia and Reef Check Malaysia, which both share a similar vision for the islands, this initiative comprises assessing the stresses faced by the reefs and coming up with a sound reef conservation management plan. This inevitably requires monitoring the condition of the marine ecosystem by surveying more dive sites and correlating it with what is happening on the islands itself. This programme is sponsored by Sime Darby Plantation.

If you’re interested in enlisting the advisory services of Wild Asia or want more information, log on to www.wildasia.net.


This article appeared in Options, the lifestyle pullout of The Edge Malaysia, Issue 756, May 25 - 31, 2009.

      Print
      Text Size
      Share