Global Environment Outlook 3 (GEO 3)

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BIODIVERSITY

Protected areas The main response to loss of natural habitat has been the establishment and extension of protected areas. Overall, approximately 7 per cent of the land area of Africa has been designated as protected. In total, Africa contains 1 254 protected areas (UNEP-WCMC 2001b), including 198 marine protected areas, 50 biosphere reserves, 80 Wetlands of International Importance and 34 World Heritage sites (UNDP, UNEP, World Bank and WRI 2000). Protected area coverage differs markedly within Africa; for example, a substantially higher proportion of the land area is designated as protected in Southern Africa than in other sub-regions (see graphic). Lack of financial support and weak law enforcement are common problems in African protected areas, resulting in encroachment by human activities and settlements. However, sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 18 per cent of the global mean investment in protected areas (James 1996). Protected areas are being increasingly managed for multiple uses, including tourism and sport hunting. Some 52 African countries are party to the Convention on Biological Diversity, 48 countries are party to CITES, and 22 are party to CMS. This is reflected at the national level in the development of national action plans and strategies for the environment, biodiversity and conservation. Financial assistance from a range of bilateral and multilateral donors offers opportunities to address the key issues relating to biodiversity and to promote sub-regional cooperation in conservation. Several transfrontier reserves are being established in Southern and Eastern Africa. During the colonial era, conservation policies were often based on protectionism that ignored the needs of African people, by imposing hunting restrictions and excluding people from reserves. Protected areas fell under this category and have been described as ‘fortress conservation’ (Adams and Hulme 2001). Policies on wildlife conservation have since changed with communities living adjacent to national parks being considered as partners; a key trend during the past three decades has been the increasing involvement of local people in conservation initiatives. Community-based conservation (CBC) programmes seek to achieve this by allowing people living near protected areas to participate in land management decisions, giving people rights to wildlife resources

and ensuring that local people derive economic benefit from wildlife conservation (Hackel 1999). Some, however, argue that community conservation is no panacea (Adams and Hulme 2001). It has been argued that CBC projects are not primarily established to achieve biodiversity conservation goals but are usually based on the sustainable harvest of living organisms.

Protected areas: Africa

Total Africa 210.76 million ha (7.11%) 1 254 sites

673 sites

Southern Africa 97.97 million ha (14.41%)

208 sites

70 sites

Western Africa 29.38 million ha (4.85%)

126 sites

Northern Africa 7.31 million ha (1.22%) 56 sites Western Indian Ocean region 1.27 million ha (2.16%) 121 sites

Eastern Africa 41.74 million ha (8.44%)

Central Africa 33.09 million ha (6.31%)

Note: number of protected areas includes those in IUCN categories I-VI Source: compiled from UNEP-WCMC 2001b

Impacts of wild harvest In much of sub-Saharan Africa, the harvest of wildlife for food has a major impact on the populations of many species. Wild food may play an important role in food security for rural people and is also, increasingly, a commercial commodity that is traded nationally and regionally. In many urban areas, meat from wild animals commands a significantly higher price than that from domestic animals, helping to stimulate large- scale harvest. Large quantities of meat are involved: in the Central Africa moist forests alone as much as 1 million tonnes of wildlife (primarily antelope, wild pigs and primates) are killed for food each year. A great deal of the wildlife harvest in Africa is believed to be currently unsustainable and has been implicated in the declines and local extinctions of a range of animal species (Barnett 2000, Oates 1999, Wilkie and Carpenter 1999). A number of wild plant species are affected by harvest for medicinal purposes. Rural and urban populations all over Africa depend largely on medicinal plants, often collected in the wild, for their health