Members states of the world’s largest transnational conservation initiative meet to review progress and strategise way forward
Photo credit: Cyril Zenda
More than 400 delegates are gathered in Livingstone, a Zambian resort town on the northern side of the Victoria Falls, for the inaugural Kavango-Zambezi (KAZA) Trans-Frontier Conservation Area (TFCA) summit where the five southern African countries that make up this conservation initiative are reviewing its progress and charting its future.
Delegates from Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe, the five countries that make up the KAZA-TFCA conservation region, joined wildlife, conservation and tourism experts for the five-day (May 27-31) event that started with the technical teams detailing the health of this vast rangeland most populated by wildlife in the world.
The KAZA region, a 520,000-square kilometre wetland paradise straddling these five southern African nations that have common international borders along the Okavango and Zambezi river basins, is home to a high concentration of wildlife species, including the largest elephant population. The KAZA states signed a Memorandum of Understanding in 2006 resulting in the KAZA Treaty of 2011 followed by its immediate implementation. The KAZA-FTCA area is a partnership centred around “a common vision to conserve biodiversity at scale through promoting integrated transboundary management and to market the landscape biodiversity using nature-based tourism as the engine for rural economic growth and development.”
The meeting of the technical teams will be followed by ministerial meetings culminating in the meeting of the presidents of the five countries who are expected to re-affirm their commitment to the initiative. The summit is running under the theme: “Leveraging KAZA’s natural capital and cultural heritage resources as catalysts for inclusive socio-economic development of the eco-region.”
Renewed commitment sought
Zambia’s Tourism minister Rodney Sikumba said the summit’s primary objective is to assess the progress made in establishing and developing the KAZA-TFCA since its inception.
“The key objective is to review and track the progress of the Memorandum of Understanding done in 2016 and the implementation of the KAZA Treaty done in 2011,” he said.
Sikumba added that the summit also seeks to get renewed commitment from the current leaders of the member countries. “What we intend to see out of the summit is to hear, at high level, the political commitment to the regional cooperation and integration in the further development of the KAZA now.”
The director for Wildlife and Forestry Management in Zimbabwe’s ministry of Environment, Climate and Wildlife, Tanyaradzwa Mundoga said the aim of the meeting is to make KAZA the best managed conservation area in the world.
“We discussed how we are implementing KAZA and managing the wildlife resource to ensure that communities benefit,” Mundoga told the media after the first day of the summit. “We are expecting that our heads of state will reaffirm their commitment so that KAZA becomes a success and maintains its position as the best managed conservation area, not just in Africa, but in the whole world.”
About 70 per cent of KAZA land is under conversation made up of 103 wildlife management areas and 85 forest reserves. Within it are also three World Heritage sites namely the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi river which makes the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe and the Okavango Delta and the Tsodilo Hills both in Botswana.
The summit comes in the aftermath of a 2022 first ever combined KAZA elephant census which found that the pachyderms’ populations in the area are stable. The aerial census results, published last year, put the combined elephant population in the conservation area at nearly 230,000. KAZA elephant aerial survey coordinator, Darren Potgieter, is participating at the summit where he is expected to contribute in the panel discussion on technical aspects of wildlife conservation.
Dominant issues
The summit, which was originally scheduled to take place in 2020, was mooted when the leaders of Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Zambia met in March 2019 for the Kasane Elephant Summit in Botswana to deliberate on their common problem of the growing burden of elephant overpopulation, was however postponed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
As a result, the topic of elephant numbers is expected to dominate the meeting. Particularly emotive are two issues: the move by many Western countries to enact laws that ban the importation of wildlife hunting trophies into their territories as well as the continued refusal by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to allow these southern African countries to trade in elephant products.
Also expected to take centre-stage at the summit is the effect of climate change on the region’s conservation initiative. The region is currently experiencing its most severe drought in three decades following poor rains that scientists have attributed to the El Nino phenomenon.
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