The Conservation Unit plays one of the most critical roles in the stewardship of Vanuatu’s forests; ensuring that Vanuatu’s forests remain the rich source of bio-diversity that the Ni-Vanuatu people have always known and have incorporated into their customs and culture.
The responsibility preserving Vanuatu’s national heritage falls on the Conservation Unit. The unit realizes that nearly all Ni-Vanuatu feel a close identification with the land, especially their custom or traditional home lands. This realization leads to great responsibility and the Conservation Unit takes this responsibility seriously. The major activities of for the Conservation Unit are: Conservation awareness, conservation area establishment, maintaining the National Herbarium, establishment of the National Botanic Garden, Rehabilitation of coastal areas, providing assistance to scientific researchers and to liaise with NGOs and government departments.
The Government has recognized the importance of conservation in Vanuatu which provides the resources based needed by the people. We need to develop a sustainable management to ensure our natural resources are not depleted but somehow manage in sustainable way so that our next generations can benefit from them. Conservation which plays a vital role in maintaining ecological progress and also enhancing production capacity of the ecosystem should be considered very effectively in order to maintain the cycle of living within the ecosystem. Why conserve our biodiversity? Not just because of its patient, but because it matters to humans.
We must do what we can to protect life on our world because humans are concerned, humans are part of biodiversity, humans are deleting untold numbers of species, and humans can do something about it, humans affect and are affected by the living world around them. Humans are the engineers of climate change, habitat fragmentation, pollution, over-harvesting, over-exploitation, invasive species, and all the other woes that we inflict on our living planet. And yet we can survive on this planet because of other species that share it with us. Therefore we need to conserve some of our resources so that our future generations may benefit. The ecological arguments for conserving biodiversity are therefore based on the premise that we need to preserve biodiversity in order to maintain our own life support systems.