Who will conserve conservation in Africa?

For decades the perceived wisdom around preserving much of Africa’s wilderness areas has been simple: set aside large swathes of land for conservation, and charge well-heeled international travellers — mostly from Europe, the US and Asia — a hefty fee to enjoy them in relative seclusion. Local travellers? Largely an afterthought to fill up the quiet months.

And for decades, it worked. Wildlife was left to roam and multiply largely undisturbed. Lodge operators profited and expanded. Governments earned concession fees. Local communities enjoyed a boom in employment in corners of the continent often forgotten by the formal economy. According to figures from the World Travel & Tourism Council, wildlife tourism on the continent is worth $71bn a year. No small change.

Then in 2020 it all fell apart as Covid-19 closed the tap on international tourists. From Namibia to Rwanda, Botswana to SA, lodges — and the landscape — were left empty. Lodge staff lost their jobs. Poaching began to rise. Conservation initiatives came to a halt.

So the question now facing Africa’s conservation bodies and ecotourism operators is as simple as that past wisdom: who will pay for conservation?

“What Covid-19 has shown is that we need a backup plan. But what is plan B?” asks Colin Bell, co-founder of Natural Selection Safaris, who also cofounded Wilderness Safaris in 1983. “We simply can’t only rely on the deep pockets from the good years to pay for the bad years.”

Though conservation is often seen as a public good, governments can’t be relied on to fund the protection of wild spaces.

Take SA National Parks for example. Though it manages 4 million hectares of land across 19 national parks and conservation is its primary mandate, it generates roughly 80% of its revenue from the volatile tourism industry.

For cash-strapped governments looking to fund conservation and create employment, “tourism was long seen as the panacea that would solve all their problems”, says Sue Snyman, research director for the School of Wildlife Conservation at the African Leadership University (ALU). “This pandemic has highlighted the vulnerability. As with anything, you need to diversify.”

That vulnerability is easy to see in Southern Africa’s conservation industry.

Sanbona Wildlife Reserve, in the Western Cape, is owned by Switzerland-based Caleo Foundation, conserving 58,000ha of sensitive arid Karoo landscape.

Its conservation model of rehabilitating old farmland is an expensive one, and before Covid-19 international visitors made up the vast majority of guests. While the owner’s deep pockets have cushioned some of the fallout, a long-term strategy is sorely needed.

Nils Odendaal, CEO of the 200,000ha NamibRand Nature Reserve in Namibia, says: “With Covid, tourism has stopped and income has vanished — 98% of our regular income has disappeared.”

It’s one of many reserves that have seen revenue dry up overnight and have turned to foreign benefactors. Grants from a foreign-based landowner have helped keep operations going, and it’s to overseas donors that Odendaal is looking to ensure long-term sustainability.

“We are working with donors to acquire more land for the reserve,” says Odendaal. “But to cover future expenses we’re asking owners to pay 120% of the purchase price, with the extra 20% to establish an endowment fund to pay for ongoing costs. It’s a long-term strategy to cushion us against future catastrophes, as tourism as a source of income has proved to be very volatile.”

For many ecotourism businesses with land under conservation, the good years — and heavy cost cutting — have got them through the past six months, along with some good old-fashioned innovation.

For luxury safari operator andBeyond, a healthy balance sheet has cushioned the impact of Covid-19, but when lodges shuttered it quickly looked to virtual experiences as an alternative means of monetising the safari experience. These have included daily safari drives, presentations by conservation experts and culinary masterclasses by lodge chefs. Fees from these virtual experiences have raised $13,000, with additional voluntary donations from attendees.

Home-grown help

Building a strong domestic market, thereby reducing reliance on international travel, is one way to protect tourism-funded conservation from future shocks.

“We are marketing aggressively in the local market, and we’ve had a great response,” says Joe Cloete, general manager of Shamwari Game Reserve in the Eastern Cape, which has used expansion funding to keep the doors open. “But it’s at vastly reduced rates, which adds a whole new dynamic to the cost structure.”

It’s an issue raised across the industry: with heavily discounted residents’ rates, often the numbers simply don’t add up.

Nicole Robinson, chief marketing officer at andBeyond, says: “We’re interested to see the demand from the local market, but we’re not sure how long that will last. We might have to relook at our commercial model for that market. Really, we need that high-yielding international revenue for the model to make sense.”

In East Africa, leading safari operator Asilia Africa has also turned to the local market to fill rooms, but with similar challenges.

Though historically less than 5% of the market, “in July and August domestic visitors have made up 95% of guests”, says Gerard Beaton, director of operations for Asilia Africa. “But even though we’re running good occupancies, we’re still losing money. Our cost of business is incredibly high, so if you’re doing a cold business case, at these rates it’s not financially viable.”

If domestic markets alone can’t sustain the tourism-focused conservation model, what are the options?

Income resilience lies in diversity, says Snyman, who is compiling a report on the wildlife economy across five African countries.

“Tourism still needs to be a focus, but there are so many options that create revenue and jobs. Though the revenues are not going to be as high as tourism, they’re less vulnerable to shocks.

“Hunting is an option. As much as it has negative perceptions, some areas are never going to have photographic tourism, and hunting may be the only choice.”

It’s a contentious debate, though, and hunting still relies on a functioning travel industry.

Another option many reserves are exploring is carbon trading, with conservancies paid for selling carbon credits and to conserve wild spaces as carbon sinks. With Scandinavian funding, the Central African Forest Initiative recently signed a deal that will pay Gabon $150m to preserve its virgin rainforests.

It’s the difference between the economic and financial value of wilderness areas.

“The economic value of these large protected areas is enormous,” says Peter Fearnhead, CEO and co-founder of African Parks, which, through public-private partnerships, manages 18 national parks in 11 African countries.

“If you look at the benefits of climate stabilisation, provisioning of water, carbon sequestration, protection of biodiversity. Protected areas that act as nurseries for fish species and pollinators. They have an incredibly important economic role. The challenge is to monetise that. How does one turn the economic value of these areas into currency? Because currency is what pays for the Land Cruiser, the scouts, the community initiatives.”

In northern Mozambique’s sprawling Gorongosa National Park, the long-term goal is for tourism to contribute just 10% of the park’s running costs.

“Our model contemplates 40% of our revenue coming from agroforestry,” says Gregory Carr, president of the Gorongosa Restoration Project, a 20-year public-private partnership between the government and the Carr Foundation. “Agroforestry, when done correctly, achieves conservation goals and also helps lift local people out of poverty.”

Aside from a financial contribution, agroforestry also creates a sense of ownership among surrounding communities.

“It’s so important that people are involved in the management of the protected area, they must be educated on the value of the area, and there must be enterprise,” says Fearnhead. “The more people who have a direct economic stake through a protected area, the more have their livelihood aligned with the future of the park.”

A good example comes from the eastern reaches of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where Virunga National Park — under the umbrella of the public-private Virunga Alliance — recently opened an on-site chocolate factory.

“The factory is producing the first-ever DRC-made chocolate and opening up new economic opportunities,” says Bastian Alard, head of the agriculture department at Virunga National Park. “The factory directly employs eight people, most of whom are widows of fallen rangers ... the aim is for the chocolate to be exported to Europe and the US in time for Christmas.”

While coffee beans and chocolate factories are a welcome diversification, they’re unlikely to ever provide the millions of dollars required to conserve vast areas of Africa. In many areas it’s philanthropy that pays the lion’s share of the bills.

In Gorongosa’s model, half the budget is drawn from donors, a funding source that Carr — a tech entrepreneur and philanthropist himself — believes is sustainable over the long term.

“National parks provide economic externalities to the world: biodiversity reservoir, carbon sinks, cleaning water and cleaning air and, for many, spiritual values,” says Carr. “They should be subsidised as a ‘public good’ and there is no reason to expect conservation areas to pay for themselves 100%.”

Natural Selection’s Bell agrees. “Africa does a lot of the cleaning up for the rest of the planet. At some stage the polluters of the planet need to compensate Africa for processing its carbon pollution. That could be one sustainable form of finance into the future, because the ramifications of losing these wild places is so serious for the entire planet.”

Perhaps what is required is a recalibration of how wilderness areas are perceived.

These aren’t merely recreational areas for the wealthy, but a crucial cog in the economy and society of a country. An ecological heritage to be valued, managed and funded as a national asset, not a drain on resources.

“When poverty levels are so high, we don’t have the luxury of being conservationists for conservation’s sake. We need to be able to show African communities how conservation is one of the greatest pillars of economic growth that we have on the continent,” says Fred Swaniker, founder of the African Leadership Group, which includes the ALU’s School of Wildlife Conservation.

“We need to look at how we can create a nature-based economy in Africa ... how can we leverage our huge forests, reserves and oceans to really build a carbon economy where we are actually receiving income for communities because we are protecting our forests and our oceans and therefore giving communities a stake in nature.”

Fearnhead adds: “Conservation is not tourism. Conservation needs to happen at a scale that tourism will never be able to deliver. If the only conservation areas that are ever going to survive into the future are the microtourism enterprises, then we have completely failed.”

This article first appeared in the Financial Mail.