Extending the Namibian Protected Area Network to Safeguard Hotspots of Endemism and Diversity
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Biodiversity and Conservation 7, 531±547 (1998) Extending the Namibian protected area network to safeguard hotspots of endemism and diversity PHOEBE BARNARD*, CHRISTOPHER J. BROWN, ALICE M. JARVIS and ANTONY ROBERTSON Namibian National Biodiversity Programme, Directorate of Environmental Aairs, Ministry of Environment and Tourism, Private Bag 13306, Windhoek, Namibia LEON VAN ROOYEN Directorate of Resource Management, Ministry of Environment and Tourism, Private Bag 13306, Windhoek, Namibia Namibia's state protected area network (PAN) covers 13.8% of the country's land area, but is seriously inadequate as a basis for eective biodiversity conservation. The early parks system was not designed with biological diversity in mind, and re¯ects instead a history of ideological, economic and veterinary considerations. Currently, parks in the Namib Desert biome make up 69% of the PAN, while savanna and woodland biomes are somewhat underrepresented (7.5 and 8.4% of their re- spective land areas), and the Karoo biome is badly underrepresented (1.6%). Four of 14 desert vegetation types are comprehensively protected, with 67 to 94% representation in the PAN, yet six savanna types have 0 to 2% representation by area. Mountain Savanna, a vegetation type unique to Namibia, is wholly unprotected. The status of two marine reserves, which in theory protect only 0.01% of Namibia's marine environment, needs clari®cation and augmentation with new reserves. Nearly 85% of Namibia's land is zoned for agriculture, so eective biodiversity protection means working outside the PAN to improve the sustainability and diversity of farming practices. Wildlife conservancies on commercial and communal farmlands show excellent potential to mitigate the ecological skew in the state PAN, with the ecological management of large areas being decentralized to rural communities in habitats otherwise neglected for conservation. Two important endemism zones, the Kaoko escarpment and coastal plain and the Sperrgebiet succulent steppe, plus the species-rich Caprivi area, oer three valuable opportunities for regional consolidation of protected areas into transboundary `peace parks' or biosphere reserves. Keywords: protected area network; conservation history; endemism; conservancy; biosphere reserve. Introduction This paper has four aims. First, we sketch a brief history of the protected area network in Namibia, showing how it was shaped by sociopolitical factors which were unrelated to the conservation of biological diversity in a broad sense. Second, we compare the current state PAN to two broad levels of ecological classi®cation (biomes and vegetation types) to give a simple quantitative index of its adequacy in protecting Namibian biodiversity. Third, we look qualitatively at the emerging alternatives to formal protected areas (jointly managed conservancies on commercial and communal agricultural lands, private nature reserves and game farms) to assess the extent to which they can potentially balance the ecological skew in the state PAN. Finally, we identify priority areas and types of Namibian *To whom correspondence should be addressed. 0960-3115 Ó 1998 Chapman & Hall 532 Barnard et al. vegetation which need additional conservation attention to safeguard biodiversity. We see this paper as a platform on which to build an area-selection analysis in the future. Namibia's protected area network and its history At ®rst glance, Namibia has an impressively high percentage of its land area under state conservation protection, one of the highest of any country in Africa (World Resources Institute, 1996). Twenty-one parks and other protected areas under state control (Ap- pendix 1) account for 114 080 km2, or 13.8% of the land surface, with an increasing amount additionally protected by private reserves and jointly-managed wildlife cons- ervancies. Within Africa, only Botswana and Tanzania, also semi-arid to arid countries, have proportionately more land committed to conservation as judged by IUCN categories I-V (World Resources Institute, 1996). Marine habitats in Namibia are unprotected in practice, although in theory about 49 km (about 3%) of the subtidal near-shore marine environment and 0.01% of the overall marine environment is covered by two presently unenforced marine reserves. Three coastal and one inland wetland totalling 6296 km2 (<0.8% of Namibia's land area) are Ramsar sites of international importance. However, most other wetlands, including river systems, are unprotected or ineectively protected from degradation (Curtis et al., this issue). Unfortunately, the high percentage of land in the protected area network probably re¯ects less the values attached to conservation than the unsuitability of the land for agriculture, particularly in the ®rst half of this century. Historical processes shaping the PAN included veterinary control and, more profoundly, South Africa's experiments in apartheid social engineering (Schoeman, 1996). The history of conservation in Namibia prior to independence in 1990 re¯ects the bitter land con¯icts of the colonial era, which increasingly alienated rural people from their traditional land and biological resources. Both the German and South African colonial governments parcelled out the disease-free, fertile savannas to white livestock farmers, and marginal lands to black farmers and less in¯uential whites (Adams and Werner, 1990). Arid lands too marginal even for pasto- ralism were set aside for conservation or left as undesignated state land. Namibia's PAN was not designed with the primary aim of protecting biological diversity, other than large game mammals, or of safeguarding ecological functions (Brown, 1992, 1996). Conservation initiatives in Namibia have a surprisingly long history, however, given the country's traditional emphasis on resource-exploitation industries. Like many colonial frontier territories, Namibia (earlier Deutsch-SuÈdwestafrika and South West Africa) had a boom-and-bust history. Its mineral, marine, and terrestrial game resources were all subject to severe local depletion, especially in the 19th century. Hunting regulations were intro- duced under German colonial rule in 1892 to curb excessive hunting of game mammals. Reserves were ®rst discussed in 1902 as a means to stop trac of livestock and humans, especially hunters (Kutzner, 1995), and in 1907 the ®rst parks, then known as Game Reserves 1, 2 and 3, were proclaimed through expropriation of tribal lands (Schoeman, 1996). As well as protecting large mammals from overhunting, these reserves formed buer zones between the then-exclusively white commercial farmers in the central and southern regions and black subsistence farmers to the north (Schoeman, 1996). This helped to protect commercial farms from rinderpest and other diseases which had dev- astated livestock in the late 1890s (Schneider, 1994). The Namibian protected area network 533 The vast Game Reserve No. 2, now Etosha National Park, originally covered roughly 80 000 km2 (mapped by Berry, in press) and was the largest nature reserve in the world (Lovegrove, 1993). It included the endemics-rich escarpment and rugged coastal plain of Kaokoland, from the northern Kunene River border southwards more than 200 km to the Hoarusib River. This enormous park allowed the westward seasonal migration of ele- phants, lions and other mammals as far as the Atlantic Ocean. However, until World War II the Etosha section was administered largely for security and veterinary reasons by the military and police, and mammal populations were not well protected. In 1947 the Kaoko section of Game Reserve No. 2 was excised `for the sole use and occupation by natives', and over 3400 km2 were removed from the Etosha section for development as farms (de la Bat, 1982). This was partly reversed in a strategic move in 1958, when valuable arable land to the east of Etosha (Game Reserve No. 1) was exchanged for a large game-rich corridor to the southwest, linking Etosha again to the Atlantic (de la Bat, 1982). However, in the early sixties the Etosha National Park was dramatically diminished by the master plan of South African `grand apartheid,' the Odendaal Commission of Enquiry into South West Africa Aairs (Republic of South Africa, 1964). This extraordinary document laid out a detailed blueprint for development of South West Africa, promoting the ideology of `separate development' in ethnically partitioned `homelands' through a massive social engineering scheme. Despite strong protest and detailed negotiations, the Etosha National Park was reduced by 72% through recommendations of the Odendaal Commission to its present size of 22 912 km2 (Berry, in press) by the re-allocation of land to the communal homelands of Owambo, Kaokoland and Damaraland (de la Bat, 1982; Schoeman, 1996). In the political climate of the times, land lost to Etosha and allocated to tribal homelands was regarded as land eectively lost to conservation. The South African colonial era (1915 to early 1990) did, however, see the overall expansion and diversi®cation of the protected area network. A larger system of parks, game reserves and `recreation resorts' was established. There was little consistency in the use of these terms. Most areas were initiated primarily as recreation areas, and they displaced and excluded local people from most direct monetary or other bene®ts. The parks system was developed mainly in the period 1955±1980, starting with the establish- ment of an ocial `Game Conservation Section' and a South West Africa Parks Board (de la Bat, 1982;