Results

WCS views COMACO as a truly innovative and pioneering approach to managing wildlands and conserving wildlife resources around Zambia's national parks and national forests. As an approach to conservation, it builds increased protection for larger landscapes that extend well beyond the boundaries of these protected areas by relying on producers to adopt land use practices designed to safeguard the surrounding ecosystem. Because of its scale and inherent complexity, it is important to monitor COMACO's results to validate the model itself and to improve its overall performance with increased understanding of how its key relationships work and relate to COMACO-based interventions. In many ways, COMACO has truly become one of the largest-scale experiments addressing the potential links and synergies between rural development and natural resource conservation in Africa today.

As a science-based institution committed to studying and developing improved ways to manage wildlands and conserve wildlife resources, WCS invests significant resources to monitor and analyse COMACO's results. It also seeks third-party partnerships to increase the level of objectivity for this analysis. Cornell University represents one example of an academic institution working closely with WCS to provide academic oversight on the analysis of COMACO's results and to contribute additional scientific collaboration in such fields as agronomy, earth sciences, economics, social sciences and animal health sciences. Additional academic partners include Virginia Tech University (watershed modeling) and Berkeley University (economic analysis).

This site provides a snapshot of some of the analyses being carried out to assess COMACO's progress and level of achievements in bridging rural income and food security with conservation. Results are updated periodically as surveys and research teams complete their studies. Summaries of these results can be viewed by selecting the particular topic listed in the Results Categories box to the left.