African Wildlife & Environment Issue 85

FAUNA, FLORA & WILDLIFE

people to find ways to live with carnivores and other wildlife. It’s not an easy path. That she and Namibia’s community-based conservation support team, comprising NGOs, government, the University of Namibia, donors and private sector, who work with 15 registered community conservancies, plus a residents’ association in a national park, have been largely successful, can be demonstrated by camera traps and a variety of annual game counts and surveys. “In the 16 years I have worked here carnivores have increased, elephant populations are stable and numbers of other game, the herbivores, have gone through the roof. Just as important, the range and distribution of many species has increased. Almost all these species are trophy hunted,” she says. The increases can be attributed to community support for conservation – thanks in no small part to the income from trophy hunting in conservancies. All of the communal conservancies and the residents’ association in Zambezi have hunting contracts.

Speaking from her base camp on the banks of the Kwando River, Lise points out that some Zambezi conservancies have no tourism because they do not have a river frontage. Therefore, hunting is their main source of income. She scoffs at claims that trophy hunting is responsible for the decline of wildlife in Africa. “What wildlife needs is space and connectivity. This is what conservancies bring – wildlife corridors. Hunting keeps the corridors open.” The area where Lise lives, known as the Kwando zone, is one of the most important for wildlife connectivity in the central KAZA region as it connects four countries – Angola, Botswana, Namibia and Zambia – enabling elephants, buffalo and the large carnivores to move freely. KAZA is the largest trans-frontier conservation landscape in the world, and at 106 million acres, the second largest conservation area - an area roughly the size of France. The national parks in Namibia’s Zambezi Region – Mudumu and Nkasa Lupala – are “tiny but critical stepping stones, through areas where

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