AFRICAN GAME parks have lost on average a staggering 59 per cent of their big game mammals to hunting and farming between 1970 and 2005, a new continent-wide study has found.
The research carried out by wildlife specialists from the London Zoological Society and UN environment programme (UNEP) on 68 key species in 78 protected wildlife reserves paints a bleak picture for the future of Africa’s big mammals like the lion, zebra and giraffe.
The elephant and the rhino were not included in the study.
Despite African wildlife earning local economies tens of millions of euro each year from tourists keen to catch a glimpse of the animals in their natural habitat, massive human population increases across the continent over the 25-year period has led to rampant wildlife poaching and the conversion of bush land into fields for farming, according to the report released last week.
Hardest hit is west Africa, where a large mammal decline of 85 per cent was recorded in the 11 parks surveyed. In east Africa animal species across the 43 protected areas in the region, including the well-known Masai Mara in Kenya and the Serengeti in Tanzania, have more than halved. Over half the data recorded came from aerial surveys, the most accurate way to monitor animal populations.
“These results illustrate that African PAs [protected areas] have generally failed to mitigate human-induced threats to African large mammal populations,” stated the report published in the journal Biological Conservation.
The only area that did not experience a massive decline was Southern Africa, where the 35 protected reserves surveyed have shown a large mammal increase of 25 per cent. This reversal of fortune offers hope to conservationists who have attributed the population growth at the wildlife parks to an increase in conservation funding and anti-poaching staff.
Conservationists believe that poaching outside game reserves is far higher than is being recorded in them. Consequently, scientists involved in the study warned against reading their results as an indication the reserves completely failed to fulfil their mandate of protecting the animals.
“One important implication of this is that while we say overall there have been large population declines inside protected areas, we are not able to say that protected areas are having no effect in mitigating the effects of human activities on biodiversity, because the rates of decline could be more extreme outside,” the report said.