The hunting debate rages without awareness of the impending loss of many of Africa’s incredibly valuable concessions. Conserve Global is looking beyond the rhetoric to focus on the importance of securing healthy ecosystems as a foundational requirement for Africa’s future.
Habitat protection goes hand-in-hand with poverty alleviation in Africa. By setting up conservation landscapes as an economically competitive form of land use that directly benefits rural communities, we simultaneously secure protected areas and improve the well-being of the most vulnerable rural populations.
18 African countries have signed the High Ambition Coalition’s vision of 30% protected areas by 2030. Humanity is compelled to re-engineer its relationship with nature and a massive opportunity exists to work with rural communities to establish new conservancies that simultaneously grow the protected area estate and unlock value for people through effective conservation management.
With state protected land already under pressure, the surest way to safeguard important landscapes and expand Africa’s conservation footprint is by working with communities as nature’s ultimate beneficiaries and custodians.
Food and water security are very real issues for millions of people on the continent, but habitat destruction is not the answer. It may deliver short-term gains but will ultimately condemn millions of people to long-term poverty and misery. It is an unassailable truth that long-term human well-being requires intact and functioning ecosystems that underpin food and water security and all other essential ecosystem services.