Species under pressure
Among Africa's greatest natural treasures are its wildlife?resources, representing great diversity and importance to rural livelihoods, national economies, and cultural values. No better displayed for the world to see and marvel at is the wildlife found in Luangwa Valley, Zambia. It's sprawling wildlands, spanning over miles of fertile floodplains, forests and savannahs, is home to over large mammal species, including such charismatic species as elephants, lions and wild dogs.
It is also a landscape shared by humans, largely rural, subsistence-based communities, whose livelihoods are often characterized by a struggle to produce enough food and earn enough to money to clothe, feed and educate family members. Where wildlife resources overlap with people who face such struggles, potentially serious conflicts with wildlife may arise. Such conflicts can take the form of killing wild animals with wire snares to barter for grain, hunting with firearms to kill more selectively and efficiently for added income, or simply converting wildlife habitat into a competing land use.
These threats are real and become more serious each year as human numbers increase and spread into more remote areas of the Luangwa Valley. Untold number of lions and leopards are snared annuall
y. This often happens as they approach an animal already snared and in the process get entangled in a nearby snare. Hunters who have no other livelihood skills prefer to risk imprisonment than allowing their families go hungry, and often the skill is passed on from father to son. Above the valley on the plateau watersheds, farmers clear more and more land to pursue a livelihood based on cotton and tobacco farming, not knowing that the runoff downriver is silting up the Luangwa River and shrinking needed resting holes for Africa's largest remaining hippo population.
COMACO developed in response to these challenges and has begun to demonstrate innovative and potentially self-financing solutions to these problems, building a more hopeful future for Africa's wild animals. Wildlife Conservation Society closely monitors these results and provides an active dialogue with Luangwa Valley's stakeholders to promote stronger partnerships with COMACO's initiatives.
