To find a solution in which that elephant, or lion or other wildlife, is always an asset, on either side of the boundary, is a task Professor Morgan Hauptfleisch, research director at the Namibia Nature Foundation (NNF) has set himself and his students.
To boost his mission, Hauptfleisch has been appointed People and Wildlife Research Chair at NNF, a five-year fellowship with R6 million funding from Oppenheimer Generations Research and Conservation “OGRC”.
His pioneering project will research how to remove boundaries between communities, landowners and parks, to allow animals their historic range and contribute to otherwise distressed community livelihoods.
He says that “ecosystems breathe” and animals need to be able to move with ecosystems as they expand in times of rain and contract in times of drought. “Obstacles like fences create conflict points,” he says. “The fellowship will look at the drivers of wildlife movement, and whether conservation and the bioeconomy can be enhanced by, for example, creating corridors of movement and compatible management practices.” The programme also aims to investigate social and physical barriers to ecological flows and wildlife movement within and across land uses with a view to establishing and enhancing wildlife corridors, and foster co-operative cross-boundary conservation among landowners and managers.
Hauptfleisch notes that a massive 44% of Namibia is protected under state, communal or private conservation initiatives, and that cattle farming and hunting and tourism fill out the map of this dry and expansive country. These various land uses are stitched together in a way that is a recipe for confrontation between humans and wildlife, underpinned by archaic legislation. In the interests of conservation, and people too, something’s got to give, especially as climate change is already reshaping the environment.
“Movement of wildlife is recognised as an important survival strategy in this arid landscape,” says Hauptfleisch, “and our initial research results have found that movement barriers within and between the land-uses present a challenge to wildlife survival and ecosystem productivity.”
The fate of an animal on the wrong side of a barrier is sealed by law. “In Namibia, any animal that threatens the life and the livelihood of people is allowed to be killed or removed,” says Hauptfleisch.
“But there’s a reason why the animal is moving, and what we’re trying to do is understand what these drivers of the movement are and what the effect of that movement of wildlife is on the communities that live within the conservancies or private farms.”
There are 86 communal conservancies in Namibia, covering 20.2% of the land. “On communal land where communities decide to form a conservancy with a constitution, and build a management plan, they get support from the Ministry of Environment, and they monitor their wildlife populations, which allows them to enter into joint ventures with tourism operators,” says Hauptfleisch. “The key thing is that subsistence farmers live among wildlife, struggling with elephants and lions, with their crops and livestock. But now they’re applying conservation principles as well, and this can be an addition to their livelihoods.
“Some enter into joint ventures in lodges, which provides an income. The conservancy decides what they want to do with it so they can spread that benefit amongst the people, which is not a lot, but it helps. They can also reinvest it in community campsites or in clinics, or schools.
“In this multiple land-use environment you have conservancies that are supported by NGOs in isolation. Parks are managed in isolation. Private game farms are managed in isolation. But the wildlife are not moving in isolation within areas. They’re moving between them.”
He notes that “one of our interesting findings is that the animals do not meander in search of new grazing. They occupy a small home range for months, then decide to move, and over a few days of purposeful movement they arrive at a new area (sometimes over 80km away) where they consistently get over 30% more biomass of feed. How do they know? And what is the biggest driver is what we want to find out.”
Then there’s the flipside. “What does this mean for the communities where they go? If you look at the neighbours of Etosha to the south, there are some communities and some private landowners who carry extreme costs when lions eat their livestock. They go out of business.”
However, Hauptfleisch does not see the issue in purely binary terms. Some landowners have shifted their land use as a result of this tension into more appropriate activities. He cites one operator “who went into trophy hunting first and then purely into high end tourism because of bordering a national park. And because they now have a compatible land use, there is an agreement between the park, informal at the moment, and this private operator that you can have wildlife moving back and forth.”
There are other drivers in changing land-use, however. “There’s another flip happening,” says Hauptfleisch, “and it’s being driven by two extreme droughts, in 2019 and this year, where very, very, staunch cattle farmers are realizing that you cannot make a living out of it anymore. There are a lot of farmers who want to sell their properties. And there are some landowners who are buying up farms around them who have hunting or tourism operations and already opening up some of that landscape. Small pockets of it, but what’s exciting is it’s flipping. If we can document this and look at the ecological drivers and people’s attitudes and their future thinking, then we’ve got an opportunity to see 500 000 hectares of commercial farmland that was always marginal, but with climate change becoming even more marginal, flip over to wildlife use. And because it borders on communal land, that creates an even more extensive open area.”
And that, he says, “creates more productivity of wildlife, and that translates into economic benefits”.
“This results in a new conservation approach where you look at multiple land uses within a system. We used to have the whole fortress conservation idea, in which we used fences and guns to keep people out and animals in an area. And that area, in our case, was Etosha National Park. But with climate change, that’s shifting.
“Those wildlife are moving beyond the parks into neighbouring areas, which is seen as a conflict, but we’re saying this can be an opportunity for benefits across land uses with multiple landscape level understanding and management. Because they manage the elephant in a certain way in the park, but as soon as it moves, how do you manage it? Do you manage it with a bullet? Can you, say, well, let’s manage this as a metapopulation, with wildlife corridor development perhaps, where the wildlife can then move in and out in this whole system?”
This more expansive approach has the potential to influence decisions to cull animals in extreme times. The Namibian government has recently approved plans to cull 640 animals in five national parks, and 83 elephants outside parks.
In a dry year, such as this one which comes on the back of several dry years, says Hauptfleisch, “within parks, conservancies, whatever it might be, you’re managing animals to a carrying capacity. The culling of the animals must however be based on sound scientific data and monitoring. And what we want to do, through this fellowship, is develop reliable science on which our decision making can be based.”
Moreover, insists Hauptfleisch, if there were a more extensive corridor network for animals the imperative to cull as a management tool would “absolutely” be reduced.
The ecology of Namibia “breathes” with the rains, says Hauptfleisch, “and the wildlife have to follow that breathing of the system. And if you allow the habitat to increase in this way, it promotes conservation objectives and it will lessen the need for culling.”
He notes that “elephants are already opening up the system to create corridors, and other wildlife are following. And you’ve got landowners who are quite happy for this to happen. You have livestock farmers who are happy to have elephants come through their properties because they have found a way to protect their water points, because elephants damage water points if they can’t get water.
“But you have others who just say, ‘we will electrify our area. We will shoot any elephant that comes into our property’. But, generally, in the areas that we’re looking at, there has been a shift towards including wildlife and tolerating wildlife more.”
He is enthusiastic not only about furthering conservation, but also the frontiers of science, including by enlisting para-scientists.
He notes that “researchers do work in the communities, and they’ll use a community member to help them. The researcher gets a benefit, but what do communities get? But there’s long term research which doesn’t get done because a researcher from, let’s say, Germany, can only come in and do a short-term study, and then they go off. It’s expensive to do field work. Whereas community members can be trained up on how to set up camera traps in a grid, or how to measure plant structure for looking at habitat availability. If there’s a small mammal study, they can be taught to trap, weigh, mark, recapture. And those skills can be sold to research in general because I know a lot of researchers would like to have a long-term monitoring programme. And these are the sorts of protocols and skills that community members can be given and, hopefully, that can develop into some sort of small business which derives its benefit from wildlife.”
The fellowship’s long-term investment in para-scientists will extend also to academic researchers.
Two PhD bursaries have been awarded, one to Monica Shikongo, at the Namibia University of Science and Technology, who was the first female park manager in Namibia, and who will study how to broaden the black rhino custodianship programme.
The second has been awarded to Gideon Haingura, who will study what drives megaherbivores like elephants to move, and to find ways to remove barriers to human-animal coexistence. He will study through the Protected Areas Research Group of the North West University in South Africa, a key partner in understanding policy impacts of wildlife movements across multiple land tenure systems.
Hauptfleisch holds adjunct status at both universities. He will give a presentation entitled “Elephant movements as driver of landscape level conservation” at the 13th Oppenheimer Research Conference which takes place in Midrand from October 9-11. The conference will be livestreamed.
Yves Vanderhaeghen writes for Jive Media Africa, science comm
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