African Wildlife Conservation – Testimony before the US Department of the Interior’s International Wildlife Conservation Council meeting to protect African wildlife on March 14, 2019 in Dallas, Texas. Statement prepared by Catherine Semcer and submitted by Hannah Downey.
The Center for Property and Environmental Research () is the home of free-market environmental protection. Founded in 1980, the privately funded research institute is committed to harnessing the power of markets and property rights to provide solutions to conservation problems. Headquartered in Bozeman, Montana, the company draws on the experience, knowledge and expertise of research fellows and senior research fellows at 19 academic and other institutions on two continents. External scientists are supported through fellowships and colloquium programs involving research in various disciplines, as well as a series of regular workshops to bring together wildlife conservation professionals, business leaders and scientists to engage in open and thoughtful discussions about wildlife conservation concerns. land and water.
African Wildlife Conservation
We respectfully submit this statement to the Department of the Interior and the International Wildlife Conservation Council (IWCC) for consideration.
Financial Contributions: A Lifeline For African Wildlife Conservation
To continue to support African partners in achieving shared goals of wildlife and habitat conservation, US policies and programs must keep pace with a changing economic and political environment. Failure to adapt conservation policy to these new realities risks conservationists being unable to ensure the environmental quality needed to ensure the sustainability of economic development in African countries and the success of broader US goals in the region.
Conservationists should pay more attention to the changing economic climate in sub-Saharan Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa is home to six of the ten fastest growing economies in the world and the overall regional economy is growing rapidly. This trend is expected to continue as the African Continental Free Trade Area becomes a reality. Economic growth is already influencing African partners’ decision-making regarding wildlife conservation. As the continent’s political, political and social environment changes, the conditions under which established conservation systems have developed are disappearing.
Africa’s recent economic growth is due in no small part to increased Chinese investment in the continent. These investments are often characterized by a lack of consideration of the environmental impacts of Chinese-backed projects. Chinese nationals working in Africa have repeatedly been implicated in the illegal trade in African wildlife, which is seen as a regional security threat by the United States and its African allies.
Environmental degradation, including the depletion or loss of habitats and wildlife populations, threatens Africa’s future and sustainable economic growth and development. With the right policy and program adjustments, the United States can help our African partners navigate these times of change and advance our shared goals of a green, free, and prosperous Africa.
Environmental Policy Expert: Africa’s Protected Areas Critical For Development
Conservationists should be more concerned about the changing political environment surrounding US involvement in Africa. Adoption of the Prosper Africa strategy has created an environment in which the right policy and program adjustments can be made. These legislative and policy improvements better align U.S. engagement in Africa with the shared values of free markets, free enterprise, and self-reliance. They represent the United States as a strong partner that can contribute to African economies that enable them to grow and prosper in empowered, sustainable, transparent and responsible ways.
This reorientation is critical not to neglect environmental concerns. This concern is a core feature and differentiator of existing US engagement with African partners, and has largely been internalized by the American private sector. Articulating this concern through U.S. policy, for example through active support of African hunting programs, will advance U.S. and African strategic goals by increasing the ability of African nations to maintain the high environmental quality necessary for prosperity and stability.
Finally, conservationists must recognize that internal departmental policies, programs, and attitudes are out of step with these changes. Existing departmental and agency policies, programs and attitudes towards Africa are largely products of the post-colonial era and are generally based on command and control approaches to conservation. In many cases the status quo may not be sufficient to enable effective engagement in the new realities or to provide conservation action to improve, advance, and sustain the shared goals of the United States and its African partners.
The status quo must change to work with existing trends and better utilize the potential of markets, property rights, and public-private partnerships to conserve ecosystems and natural resources whose health and sustainable practices help lay the foundation for peace and prosperity in the region.
Wildlife Conservation Safari
Africa’s international big game hunting industry represents a turning point in achieving shared wildlife conservation goals and international policy objectives through a market-based approach. With more than 70 participants in the global big game hunting market, the United States has significant leverage to positively impact the future of this industry in Africa. However, to take advantage of these opportunities, the Department of the Interior and other government agencies must learn from the mistakes of the past and adapt current policy positions to better match the value of international hunting and the market-based approach to conservation it represents. This increases the chance of avoiding unintended consequences and improving US relations with its African partners. The perception that international wildlife crime dominates Africa’s conservation crisis is largely due to the traditional media’s intense focus on elephant and rhino poaching. But despite such fierce publicity and well-intentioned outcry from the global community, Africa’s poaching problem pales in comparison to habitat loss, which is destroying many other animal species at a much faster rate.
This situation is particularly delicate because some conservationists and researchers believe that increased habitat destruction is largely due to punitive policies that have made wildlife worthless to landowners. by tourists, and such restrictions ironically make humans the enemy of nature.
Africa’s system of national parks and game reserves is largely modeled on the American approach: fortress-like ecosystems that people can visit but not inhabit, allowing animals to live in virtually “pristine” environments.
However, the difference between US parks and protected areas in Africa is that parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite remain largely intact, the American economy is stronger and rural residents are making fewer land-use demands, something park rangers, conservationists and policymakers in Africa are grappling with. Tidal waves of the rural poor looking for pastures to make a living (Pearce 2010).
African Potentials’ For Wildlife Conservation And Natural Resource Management
At the same time, much of Africa’s wildlife still lives outside official protected areas. For example, elephants are travelers. If they are kept in closed areas, the environmental damage they cause can have devastating consequences for biodiversity conservation, a problem already in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. But once they leave a park, they often run into farmers raiding crops.
As the human population grows in sub-Saharan Africa, human-wildlife conflict and habitat loss will inevitably increase. Photo by Michael Schwartz.
As the number of people in Africa continues to grow, the industrial agriculture, extractive industries and infrastructure that accompany this population growth are key drivers of habitat loss – and magnets that attract even more disadvantaged people. Nowhere is this more evident than in the changing nature of pastoral society.
“In Kenya, the entire pastoral system is undergoing a rapid evolution from extensive intensive production to more passive agriculture, driven by pastoral population growth and expanding markets for livestock and agricultural products,” Kenyan wildlife economist Dr. Mike Norton. Griffiths wrote in an email.
Does Prohibiting Local Access To Nature Hurt African Wildlife Conservation?
The increasing number of human communities living in close proximity to wildlife, imposing additional pressure on islands surrounded by a sea of people, puts additional pressure on both protected areas and existing parks such as Tanzania’s Serengeti or Masai Mara National. Reserve in neighboring Kenya.
For conservationists, the key to understanding the rising wildlife kill rate is acknowledging the root cause of habitat loss—namely, prohibitive regulations that allow law-abiding local populations (many of whom live in poverty) to be restricted. Any benefits that natural resources can provide them.
Transferring control of natural resources directly to African governments tends to deprive law-abiding landowners of any incentive to use their properties as nature reserves, further fueling the inevitable decline of wildlife as people are forced to implement alternative legal uses of natural resources. Ecosystems in which they live.
In addition, these more vulnerable wilderness areas are usually marginal areas that, despite their diverse biodiversity, cannot generate enough tourism income to sustain themselves, as in protected areas such as Kenya’s two Tsavo Parks or the Okavango Delta. Botswana.
Harnessing Technological Advances To Improve Conservation Management In Africa
Norton-Griffiths believes that “pastoralists in Kenya prefer a livestock-wildlife mix to a livestock mix if both are equally profitable.”
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