LION CONSERVATION & COVID19

World Lion Day is a day to celebrate lions and to raise awareness of the conservation challenges facing one of nature’s most feared and loved predators. Today, the COVID19 pandemic has added additional negative pressure on their protection and conservation, devastating funding needed to keep them and their protected areas safe.

Learn more about African lions and the extra challenges they face due to the COVID19 pandemic in our latest story for #WorldLionDay2020.

Male lion portrait by Shannon Wild

Lions are the majestic kings of the African savannah. They are the apex predator of the habitats in which they range, regulating prey populations, disease and keeping ecosystems in balance.

For every lion in the wild, there are 14 African elephants. Yet their plight does not command the same level of attention and headlines. While trophy hunting of lions is rightly debated and Cecil the lion is mourned, wild African lions are slipping away quietly in many range countries due to habitat-loss, human-wildlife conflict and loss of prey-base (where due to bushmeat poaching, they do not have enough animals to eat),

Today, lions are extinct in 26 African countries with the best estimates of conservationists and surveys telling us that fewer than 20,000 wild lions remain today across all of Africa.  

Yet the story and status for lions differs greatly across Africa. While in North and West Africa between 1992 - 2014, lion populations fell by over 60%, their populations rose approximately 11% in countries where their protected areas were well funded and managed (Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe).

Not only are lion populations increasing in well-managed reserves and range countries, they are also being re-wilded in countries and parks where they had formerly been poached out. These large translocations of lions (also elephants, rhinos and other large animals) are proof that if parks that are adequately financed and managed, lions and other wildlife desperately seeking space, can be returned. African Parks is an incredible example - they have successfully reintroduced lions to Akagera, Majete and Liwonde after they were poached out.

Male lion after a kill, Klaserie South Africa by Shannon Wild.

Wild Tomorrow Fund’s Africa ecologists Clinton Wright and Axel Hunnicutt were part of African Park’s project that translocated seven lions from South Africa to Rwanda's Akagera National Park in 2015, restoring wild lions there for the first time in over 15 years. Akagera’s lion numbers doubled in a single year. At last count, the lion population has now tripled. It’s a story that shows how lion recovery is possible within well-funded and managed parks, together with support and commitments from governments and communities.

These projects are not cheap, nor is the ongoing operation and upkeep of vast wild spaces. To put it simply, lions need well-financed wildlife reserves. And that is why COVID19 is such a threat.

Adding to our ‘usual’ human pressures, we now have the spillover of COVID19, a virus that emerged from our destructive treatment of nature and wildlife, which now threatens not only human health, but decades of conservation progress for all wildlife including lions.

COVID19 is now an emerging financial threat for lions and all African wildlife. It is not the virus itself that puts wildlife directly at risk (although this is the case for critically endangered mountain gorillas and chimps who are prone to the same respiratory illnesses as humans). It is the loss of tourism revenue and philanthropic and government support that is the biggest fear for wildlife reserves and national parks across Africa today.

Before the pandemic, wildlife conservation was already vastly underfunded. A 2018 study by Panthera, the WCS, Kenya Wildlife Services and others, found that nearly all protected areas with lions are inadequately funded and calculated a deficit of $0.9 to $2.1 billion (Lindsey et al. 2017). That was before COVID hit and brought wildlife tourism to its knees and severely cut government budgets, while also deflecting donor funding to immediate urgent human causes. At the same time, the economic shock and loss of jobs has sent an influx of people from cities back into rural areas, increasing threats to wildlife. Of particular concern is the potential increase in poaching of wildlife for bushmeat. 

Wildlife-based tourism generates over US$29 billion annually across Africa, employing 3.6 million people. (Trophy hunting, a subset of the tourism industry, generates a mere ~US$217 million annually ie less than 1%).

Anti-poaching rangers on patrol at Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife’s Tembe Elephant Park, South Africa. Photo credit: Clinton Wright.

According to a recent paper, “Conserving Africa’s wildlife and wildlands through the COVID-19 crisis and beyond” (Lindsey et al 2020), COVID19 has decimated tourism revenue. 90% of African tour operators have experienced >75% declines in bookings. Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Managment Authority projects a ~US$3.8 million (almost 50%) shortfall in the second quarter of 2020 due to reduced tourism-related spending. South African National Parks (SAN Parks) revenue was 84% dependent on tourism in 2018. The regional wildlife authority for KwaZulu-Natal South Africa, Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife, is reportedly in financial peril at risk of default and asking for government bailout. Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Sierra Leone has closed to tourists due to COVID lockdown and the threat of spreading the virus to the chimps - a resulting 50% loss of operating budget. Similar stories of busted conservation budgets echo across wildlife conservation projects in Africa and beyond.

There is also a very real anticipation that external donor funding will be reduced. “Beyond tourism revenue losses, we expect reduced donor funding for African conservation over the next 1–2 years and possibly longer due to flagging economies and shifting priorities” said the authors of the study. “During the previous global financial crisis, total charitable giving in the United States dropped by 7% in 2008 and 6.2% in 2009, and conservation endowments declined in value by 40%”.

We at Wild Tomorrow Fund do not pretend we have the solutions to such huge conservation funding deficits. But we do hope that there is increased recognition and funding during this crisis for the protection of Africa’s magnificent biodiversity - its lions, elephants, rhinos, pangolins, dung beetles, vultures and more- for these are global assets, treasures of our planet. African governments do not have the financial ability to do this alone. We’d love to see a ‘bail out for nature’ similar in scale to the bailouts for big companies and industries.

While the challenge is huge and the economic pain in our communities is great, we ask you to keep donating to the wildlife conservation causes you care about in Africa, including Wild Tomorrow Fund. We also hope that we can all return as soon as it is safe, as guests and volunteers, to support African wildlife tourism and the important conservation funding it brings.

Lion cub with an impala leg. Photo by Shannon Wild.

References

Bauer, H., Packer, C., Funston, P.F., Henschel, P. & Nowell, K. 2016. Panthera leo (errata version published in 2017). The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2016: e.T15951A115130419. http://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2016-3.RLTS.T15951A107265605.en. 

Lindsey, P., Allan, J., Brehony, P. et al. Conserving Africa’s wildlife and wildlands through the COVID-19 crisis and beyond. Nat Ecol Evol (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-1275-6

Lindsey, Peter A., Balme, Guy B.A., Funston, P.J., Henschel, P.H., and Hunter, L. 2015. Life after Cecil: channelling global outrage into funding for conservation in Africa. Conservation Letters Volume 9, Issue 4. https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12224

31 March 2020. Africa's mountain gorillas also at risk from coronavirus. www.nbcnews.com/news/world/africa-s-mountain-gorillas-also-risk-coronavirus-n1168661

4 July 2020. The Independent on Saturday. Wildlife in peril in KZN with Ezemvelo in critical financial state. www.iol.co.za/ios/news/wildlife-in-peril-in-kzn-with-ezemvelo-in-critical-financial-state-50388221