Reimagining protected and conserved areas in Africa: Perspectives from the first Africa Protected Areas Congress

Abstract

To protect nature, African parks must contribute to human well-being, overcome threats, and secure reliable funding sources. The first Africa Protected Areas Congress (APAC) held in Kigali, Rwanda from July 18 to 23, 2022 has reaffirmed the need to re-imagine the role of protected and conserved areas (PCAs) in safeguarding wildlife and biodiversity on the continent. Conservation strategies in Africa must be driven by the urgency to make PCAs people centered, advance integrated approaches to tackle drivers of biodiversity loss, and to promote sustainable and innovative financing for PCAs. This paper discusses how African countries can address these needs to harness the full potential of PCAs and ensure their long-term sustainability.Africa is a continent endowed with a rich biological heritage, which plays a vital role in the national economy of most of the continent's countries. Over the last three decades alone, African countries have made considerable efforts to safeguard this natural heritage, as reflected in their commitments toward protected and conserved areas (PCAs), the promotion of the sustainable use of resources, and investment in ecosystem restoration initiatives (Lindsey et al., 2020). At the same time, African countries are embracing the need to extend conservation actions across national boundaries by, for example, setting up transfrontier conservation areas (e.g., Stoldt et al., 2020) to establish wildlife corridors.PCAs remain at the heart of conservation efforts across the continent, with over 9000 designated sites or landscapes covering 19% of land and inland waters and 17% of Africa's marine area (www.protectedplanet.net, accessed January 2023). However, although some countries have set aside significantly higher proportions of their national land area for conservation, the overall coverage and standard of management of PCAs across Africa remainThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

African savanna raptors show evidence of widespread population collapse and a growing dependence on protected areas

“…Raptors of all sizes lead an increasingly perilous existence in African savannas, where food supplies and breeding sites have been drastically reduced and persecution by humans is now widespread 40 , 42 , 56 , 57 . While annual declines on unprotected land were thus often substantially higher than within the PAs we assessed, there is now widespread acknowledgement that many African PAs are also losing their ecological integrity 18 , 63 , 64 , thereby depriving threatened species of effective refugia. Indeed, the scale of this deterioration has been assessed in a recent study 19 , which showed that over 82% of land encompassed within 516 African conservation areas was considered to be failing or deteriorating.…”

“…Furthermore, our results underscore the need to substantially improve PA management throughout Africa, to meet the ‘green list standard’ set by the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas 79 . In this regard, a recent African-driven initiative—APACT—may prove pivotal in leveraging the finances needed to effectively manage new and existing conserved areas 63 .…”