Saving Selous
Saving Selous
WWF
Tansania, 2017
Selous Game Reserve, Tanzania’s largest protected area, is part of the Selous Niassa Wildlife Corridor, which is one of the largest trans-boundary dry forest eco-regions in Africa.
With a size larger than Malawi it constitutes one of the greatest concentrations of elephants in the world. But rampant ivory poaching has seen the population reduced by 90 per cent in fewer than 40 years. Moreover Wildlife corridors face various socio-economic activities which degrade their habitats. Some of this activities include uncontrolled wildfires, uncontrolled resource use and unregulated conversion of land for agricultural land exacerbated by high human population growth.
The implementation of Wildlife Managment Areas (WMA), where wildlife and local people cohabit, or the training of local people to Village Game Scouts (VGI), which enable communities in the WMAs to activly participate in conservation and utilization for sustainable development, are key measures on a local level.
Wildlife management and conservation can provide great opportunities for livelihoods improvement and food security, especially in remote rural areas. However with the migration and mobility of wildlife, wildlife management and conservation goes beyond national borders and has to be addressed at regional, continental or even global level.
