Africa treaty creates world’s largest conservation area

FIVE Southern African nations have agreed to form the world’s largest international conservation area in an effort to protect nearly half of the continent’s elephants and a vast range of animals, birds and plants, many endangered by poaching and human encroachment.

At a ceremony in Namibia yesterday, government ministers from Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe put their seals on a cross-border treaty set to combine 36 nature preserves and surrounding areas.

The World Wildlife Fund said the countries will co-operate on measures to allow animals to roam freely across their borders over 170,000 square miles, almost the size of Sweden.

The Kavango Zambezi area includes the Victoria Falls World Heritage site in Zimbabwe and Botswana’s famed swampland of the Okavango Delta.

Conservationists say historical migration routes of animals have been curtailed by national borders and man-made conflict. The decades-long civil war in Angola saw elephant herds, notoriously skittish to gunfire, fleeing far from their habitats.

Botswana is dismantling a fence on its border with Namibia after steps were taken to curb the spread of animal diseases.

According to the treaty put into effect yesterday, the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, known as Kaza, is home to about 45 per cent of Africa’s elephants. Along with other game animals, it has a rare heritage of at least 600 species of birds and 3,000 species of plant.

Previous attempts to set up cross-border conservancies in Africa have failed largely because impoverished communities were not engaged to help before governments signed up, said Chris Weaver, WWF’s regional director in Namibia. “This is very different. It has a very strong community focus,” he said.

Communities are getting jobs and revenue from tourism in return for their role in protecting the environment, he added.

The German KFW development bank put $40 million into getting the Kaza conservancy up and running, Mr Weaver said.

Last year, he said, Namibians earned $700,000 from their own conservation-related activities. The money went toward further training, transportation, water supplies and improvements for schools and clinics.

Mr Weaver said in recent history wildlife and nature preserves belonged to state governments. That had encouraged poachers to steal animals from the state, a distant and alien owner.

Now Kaza offered tangible benefits across the board to communities and member countries.

DEADLY GAME

Soldiers in Cameroon are losing the battle to save the last elephants in a remote frontier park from marauding horsemen believed to be invading from Sudan, the World Wildlife Fund has said.

Cameroon sent up to 150 soldiers into the Bouba N’Djida National Park on 1 March. The fund said at least half of the park’s 400 elephants have been killed.

Wildlife activists believe tusks are smuggled to China and Thailand to make ivory ornaments.