d schools. As conservancies build corridors across the country, Namibia has protected almost 40 percent of its land and earned a reputation as a spectacular place to see rhino, cheetah, desert lions, and other wildlife.
KAZA hopes to capitalize on that model, using conservancies to reestablish wildlife corridors between existing parks and reserves. Of the five KAZA partners, only Angola, one of the poorest countries in the world, has no community-based program. Zimbabwe, grandfather of such management schemes in the 1980s, is also lagging in the final years of Robert Mugabe’s rule, blocked from receiving foreign funding. Botswana presents a mixed picture. Known for high-end ecotourism in the Okavango, it launched a network of trusts in 1993, eventually involving some 10 percent of the population, but its heavily-bureaucratized system has been less successful than Namibia’s.
More densely populated Zambia (with 14 million people, compared to Botswana and Namibia, with two million each) last year launched its first community conservancy, Simalaha, on its southern border with Namibia, right in the heart of KAZA. Funded by $2.8 million from the Swedish Postcode Lottery, Simalaha is designed to link Botswana’s Chobe and Zambia’s Kafue across a critical floodplain, providing safe passage for elephants between the two parks. Namibia and Zambia are already running joint anti-poaching patrols in the area.
Announcing plans to initiate a temporary sanctuary for wildlife, senior chief Inyambo Yeta, a traditional leader who sits on the board of the Peace Parks Foundation, spoke wistfully of the lost richness of local forests. “We want Simalaha to teem with wildlife once again,” he said.
KAZA program manager Victor Siamudaala has praised the “overwhelming” support from communities and governments. But, as Weaver emphasized, future success may be KAZA’s worst enemy, judging by the experiences of the conservancies. Escalating human-elephant conflict has become so prevalent
Recent surveys show a 90-percent decline in wildebeest and other wildlife in northern Botswana.
it has acquired its own acronym: “HEC.” In 2010, wild elephants rampaged through a southern Angolan settlement, trampling houses and farms and sending some 4,000 people over the border into Namibia, which had 11 people killed by elephants that same year. Throughout KAZA, farmers are learning to exploit every imaginable elephant deterrent, from vuvuzelas (plastic horns) to chile bombs, a mixture of dried elephant dung and peppers that is burned to create a stinging, smoke haze. Namibia has initiated payments for crop damage and funeral costs, while emphasizing that conflict cannot always be avoided.
Serious questions about KAZA’s viability remain. Mike Chase, an elephant ecologist who founded Elephants Without Borders
in 2004, has documented the species’ return to Angola and radio-collared a number of pachyderms, mapping elephant corridors throughout the region, as well as barriers — fences, roads, crops, settlements — that block them. His recent aerial survey showing that elephants have stabilized at around 128,000 in northern Botswana is considered the most accurate to date.
Chase was recently employed by the Botswana government to fly additional surveys over the country’s vast northern stretches, once a wildlife stronghold, to census other large mammals. “We were completely blown out of the water,” he says of tallying steep declines in wildlife outside of Chobe National Park. Results showed a 90-percent reduction in wildebeest — from more than 23,000 in 1999 to fewer than 2,000 in 2010 — and similar declines in warthog, zebra, kudu, lechwe, tsessebe, sable, and roan. Chase attributes the losses not only to a 20-year drought but also to increased human use, fencing, and grazing of cattle, used in Botswana to calculate “lobola,” or bride price. In Chobe itself, however, many species are increasing.
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