To ban or not to ban, that’s the question

Wildlife conservation hasn’t escaped the impact of Covid-19, largely due to the fact that tourism funding, which supports the conservation of wide swaths of Africa and about 23 million livelihoods, has all but dried up.

Wildlife-based tourism in Africa is worth approximately $71 billion (about R1.2 trillion) annually. Much of this funds the management of protected areas. For example, the protection of just one white rhinoceros at Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy costs about $10 000 each year.

Since the start of the pandemic there’s been a cut to funds for antipoaching and surveillance in most African reserves. Trophy hunting is a key source of this funding. It contributes an estimated $200 million to economies across the continent annually.

Trophy hunting takes place across much of sub-Saharan Africa with South Africa, Namibia and Tanzania holding the lion’s share of the market. The debate over its utility as a source of conservation revenue takes on a new urgency in the light of Covid-19.

The industry is facing increasing pressure because it continues to be perceived to be grotesque and morally reprehensible.

The viral images and stories of Cecil the lion (killed in 2015) have laid the foundation for a flurry of calls by nongovernmental organisations and animal rights groups to increase bans on the import of hunting trophies. Some have called for outright bans on hunting.

In places like Zambia and Botswana, these calls have resulted in temporary hunting bans. But proponents of blanket bans often fail to consider the broader socioeconomic consequences.

Our research sought to understand how a ban on trophy hunting would affect landowners with hunting businesses in SA.

The majority (91%) of landowners we interviewed believed that the economic viability of their private land and the biodiversity on it would be lost following a hunting ban.

Landowners would move to either scale up ecotourism on their land, or change their land use from hunting to domestic livestock farming.

We interviewed private landowners in SA who run trophy hunting operations in the Eastern and Western Cape.

Our study found that only a third of the landowners said they would scale up or adopt ecotourism in the face of a hunting ban.

The remaining two-thirds believed such a transition to be financially unfeasible.

Of the landowners that didn’t believe ecotourism was a viable alternative, half said they would transition back to livestock farming and remove wildlife.

The other half felt that they would have no viable alternative.

There is also the danger that unintended consequences may cause a decline in wildlife populations by lowering number of farmers who are running wildlife ranches, who play a large role in species conversation.

Biggs, senior research fellow social-ecological systems and resilience, Griffith University

Braczkowski, research associate, Griffith University

De Vos, senior lecturer, Rhodes University

Clements, researcher, Stellenbosch University

– The Conversation

There have been calls for outright bans on hunting