d 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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Chase is still optimistic about KAZA, pointing out that “ten years ago, you couldn’t get the governments to sit around a table together.” David Cumming, a transfrontier expert in Harare, Zimbabwe, is less sure. His 2011 review of “constraints” faced by peace parks is sobering, noting that KAZA’s planning documents focus heavily on development and fail to set clear objectives regarding conservation. Financing is inadequate, with even established national parks “grossly underfunded.”
He asks a critical question: Can the creation of larger landscapes devoted simultaneously to development and conservation — not strictly protected as parks — reverse wildlife declines while benefiting communities? Unless people get “real benefits,” Cumming told me, “connectivity is probably not going to be maintained.”
It remains to be seen whether conservation corridors roughed out on maps will materialize. Elephants cannot wait forever, fenced in by wire, crops, and settlements. Nor can local people, who are, as Cumming dryly calls them, “the de facto
Correction. May 16, 2012: The original version of this story incorrectly stated that Namibia’s 71 conservancies earned $700,000 last year. The article should have stated that Namibian conservancies earned roughly $6 million in 2010.
POSTED ON 14 May 2012 IN
Biodiversity Climate Oceans Policy & Politics Africa