The goals for global conservation as defined in The IUCN/WWF World Conservation Strategy are:
Africa's human population is now over half-a-billion people, having doubled since 1970. At current rates of increase of 2.5 to 3.5% it will redouble every 20-30 years. What hope is there that any considerable portion of the continent's matchless fauna and flora can survive in this rising sea of humanity? That is the central question this course will attempt to answer.
After completing a country-by-country survey of sub-Saharan Africa (Antelopes: Global Survey and Regional Action Plans, Parts 1-3), the chances of Africa's 75 species of bovids surviving for the next 100 years were assessed by the compiler/editor of the Antelope Specialist Group survey.
Extensive loss of biodiversity will have occurred because of unabated human population growth, massive over-exploitation and widespread loss of natural resources, and destruction of most existing protected areas to meet the immediate survival needs of people. Under this scenario, the only antelopes not at risk of extinction are a few highly adaptable species, which can survive in human-dominated landscapes.
Human population growth will decline, and substantial improvements in both economic development and conservation of natural resources will result in higher standards of living for rural and urban people. This scenario supposes much more effective protection and management of wildlife than occurs in most countries at present. Local people will capture the benefits of (and hence increase their support for) wildlife conservation, and the survival of most antelope species will be assured.
Reality is likely to be somewhere between these two extremes. Regardless, it is clear that Africa will change dramatically in the next century. By 2100, almost all countries of sub-Saharan Africa are likely to have human population densities sufficiently high to place most antelopes-and other large mammals-at risk in the absence of an adequate network of well-protected and managed conservation and/or wildlife utilization areas.
As population density increases from more than 15 to 55/km2, the percentage of antelope species at risk increases from a background level of 20-30% to over 90%. In several countries with population densities of 55/km2, a significant proportion of their antelope fauna is already extinct: 41% in Burundi, 40% in Gambia. But in countries where the current level of protection and management is medium to high, the percentage of species at risk increases much more slowly with human density, reaching a maximum of c. 40 to 60%. Thus, Malawi has over 90 people/km2 and most large mammals are confined to protected islands of natural habitat in agricultural landscapes. Yet only 40% of the antelopes are at risk as long as current levels of protection and management are maintained.
Tanzania has more to offer and more to lose than almost any other African country:
Despite its great potential and good intentions, Tanzania faces the same problems that confront wildlife and other natural-resource conservation in the rest of Africa. Firsthand knowledge of the country, its landscapes, wildlife, people, and the ways environmental conservation is managed, deepens understanding of the challenges confronting Tanzania, the rest of Africa, and most of the world in meeting the goals of the World Conservation Strategy.
Underlying virtually all the problems confronting Tanzania and other developing countries are poverty and a burgeoning population:
I. Gaps in Protected Area (PA) network
Past conservation efforts protected large game concentrations or individual species rather than areas with great biological diversity representative of major habitats.
Opportunities to extend network are dwindling as population increases and habitats become increasingly fragmented.
Poor land use practices accelerate habitat destruction, through soil erosion, over-grazing, uncontrolled burning, deforestation.
Egregious example: deforestation on Kilimanjaro in a Forest Reserve: clearing montane forest for maize fields and coffee plantations; replacement of indigenous forest by pine plantations.
II. Lack of public support
Tanzania inherited the colonial conservation model: protected areas established by the central government and managed through legal regimes, excluding local people from land they formerly controlled.
Hunting and other traditional subsistence activities made illegal, punishable by fines and imprisonment.
State owns all wildlife, giving no incentive for rural communities to accept responsibility for wildlife on their land.
Neighbors of parks and reserves receive little or no share of revenues generated by tourism, hunting, other commercial activities.
Abutters of protected areas subjected to crop, livestock, and property destruction, and sometimes death by marauding wild animals. Rarely compensated for losses.
III. Pressures on existing protected areas
Escalating conflicts between people and wildlife as competition for land, water, and grazing increases.
Expanding settlement and cultivation eliminating buffer zones, wildlife corridors and migration routes, shrinking protected areas and turning them into isolated islands
Examples: Wildlife corridor between Manyara and Tarangire NPs, vital for migratory wildlife of eastern Masailand and the wildebeest migration route from Ngorongoro Crater to Serengeti Plains.
IV. Organizational problems
The lack of a coordinated or systematic approach to conservation of biological diversity.
Responsibility for natural resources is shared by five parastatals and one government department, each with different agenda, regulations, overlapping jurisdictions, and often incompatible goals.
Site visits: To gain understanding of the different agencies and their problems, students will visit national parks, game reserves, a wildlife management area, a forest reserve, a game-cropping operation, a hunting concession, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, the Serengeti Wildlife Research Centre, and the College of African Wildlife Management.
Personnel in wildlife sector poorly paid and equipped. Low prestige discourages best and brightest young people from seeking careers in wildlife conservation.
Inability to protect wildlife even in national parks and game reserves.
V. Poaching and other illegal activities (sometimes involving law enforcement personnel)
Black rhinoceros was virtually exterminated between mid-1970s and 80s.
Examples: All but a dozen of an estimated 700 rhinos were poached in Serengeti NP from 1975-80. A remnant population of 15 rhinos survives in Ngorongoro Crater, where there used to be over 100. (One of them was shot October 1999.)
Tanzania's elephant population was reduced by 80% in the 1980s; an estimated 52,400 survived in 1991. The worst slaughter occurred in the Selous, where 80,000 elephants were poached between 1977 and 1989.
Commercial poaching for meat.
Example: Serengeti NP. Class will look for poaching activities (snares, pits) in Western Corridor, and accompany anti-poaching field operation.
Illegal grazing, logging, cultivation, and settlement. This is a particular problem in Game Controlled Areas, which provide no control over settlement.
Examples: Northern Highlands Reserve Forest (Ngorongoro Conservation Area); research project on biodiversity in forest fragments in Pare Mountains.
PROMISING DEVELOPMENTS
Conservationists agree that the only realistic hope of maintaining (and even extending) protected areas is to win public support for conserving the country's natural heritage. How can it be done?
1. Privatization: giving ownership of wildlife to landowners.
Examples: Giving landowners ownership of their wildlife led to widespread reintroduction of game animals on ranches and farms of Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa. Monetary rewards of game cropping, trophy hunting, wildlife auctions have made game species a valuable resource.
2.
CAMPFIRE program (Communal Area Management Plan for Indigenous Resources), pioneered in Zimbabwe, offers similar incentives on communally owned lands. The main objective: to initiate a program for the long-term conservation of natural resources in communal areas, including forestry, grazing, water, and wildlife.
Tanzanian example: Integrated Conservation and Development Projects, designed to provide benefits to neighbors of protected areas. The Serengeti Regional Conservation Strategy will be critically studied.
3. How to turn poachers into game guards: "sell" protected areas as breeding sanctuaries, providing a surplus to be utilized in communal buffer zones kept undeveloped for the purpose.L
"Bushmeat" is main source of protein in most Central and West African countries, presently exploited at unsustainable rate.
Also the main source of meat for a million people living between Serengeti NP and Lake Victoria. Present poaching offtake of wildebeest estimated at 200,000.
4. Effectiveness of the international ban on ivory trade in stopping most elephant poaching.
5. Coexistence of wildlife and people.
Example: Masai and wildlife in Ngorongoro Conservation Area.
David Western (Director, Kenya Wildlife Service) points out that most wildlife still exists outside parks and argues that far more biodiversity can be preserved by finding ways for people and wildlife to coexist than by setting aside isolated areas reserved exclusively for plants and animals.
6. Mixed cattle and game farming. (Highly developed in countries where wildlife privatized. Largely untried elsewhere in Africa.)
7. Hunting concessions: major generators of foreign exchange, effective in anti-poaching, and in keeping natural areas from development.
Example: Selous Game Reserve, which is kept financially solvent by concession leases, hunting licenses and trophy fees.
8. Revenue sharing with neighbors.
Example: the Selous Reserve, where efforts to win over abutters, through revenue sharing and outreach programs, have greatly reduced poaching.
9. Recommendations of Wildlife Sector Review Task Force completed in 1995 demonstrate awareness of Tanzania's conservation problems:
- Replace multiple wildlife agencies with unified parastatal Wildlife Service (as in Kenya).
- Develop a comprehensive ecosystem conservation master plan.
Example: Combine parks with adjacent game reserves and game management areas into larger ecological units; for instance, combine all parts of the Serengeti ecosystem into a single unit, including not only Ngorongoro Conservation Area, several game reserves and game-controlled areas, but also Kenya's Masai-Mara Reserve (transnational cooperation in ecosystem conservation is another important, largely neglected need).
- The need to integrate research and management.
Lack of cooperation between National Parks and the Serengeti Wildlife Research Institute, which has been independently responsible for all wildlife research in the country, has been a long-standing problem.
- Actively promote community-based conservation projects, recognizing that conservation goals have to be reconciled with individual aspirations of the people concerned by integration, negotiation, and participation. Examples noted above.
10. Growing recognition in the developed world that Tanzania and other African countries cannot accomplish conservation goals without sustained, substantial help.
Conservation costs money as lost opportunity: preempts cultivation of crops, raising of livestock, harvest of wildlife meat, skin, ivory, etc.
In situ conservation of habitats is far more cost-effective and important than ex situ captive breeding of endangered spp. Investment in infrastructure is only part of needed assistance.
11. "Debt for nature swaps" offer hope of acquiring more land for conservation.