In this blog, Philip Winter explores the history and development of conservation in South Sudan from 1970s. The blog discusses how the prolonged conflicts, as well as other factors such as illegal game hunting, have contributed to the reduction in wildlife populations, which a few national and international conservation organisations are trying to reverse. To protect and develop the wildlife resource potential, considering that South Sudan has the largest animal migration in Africa, the blog provides insights on how donors and aid agencies can support conservation work in a conflict sensitive manner. (Cover photo provided by Marcus Westberg)
Background
It is said that there are ten to twelve million people in South Sudan, together with thirty million head of domestic livestock – principally goats and cows. But recent aerial surveys of 125,000 sq.km of grassland and swamp on the east bank of the Nile show there to be more than five million antelopes moving through the landscape too. This makes South Sudan host to the largest land mammal migration on the planet, far outnumbering the wildebeest of the much better-known Serengeti migration in Tanzania and Kenya. The survival of these animals presents a huge opportunity and a rare piece of good news from South Sudan.
There has been limited investment in wildlife conservation and protected area management in South Sudan since the second civil war ended in 2005. The Ministry of Wildlife Conservation and Tourism (MWCT) maintains a large force of rangers but they have not had adequate resources and training to be effective on the scale required. Only two international conservation organisations returned to work in South Sudan after the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005: the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Fauna & Flora, who also introduced one international research institution, Bucknell University, to South Sudan. Subsequently, internal conflicts further inhibited investment in Protected Areas (PAs), although WCS and Fauna & Flora continued operations and support to the management of PAs.
Yet, in the 1970s, the wildlife of South Sudan was comparable to what was found in other parts of Africa, such as Tanzania, or Botswana – outside the towns and villages, wildlife was ubiquitous. People knew the animals that lived near them, they could track them and name the different species, they hunted them for food and wildlife was an unremarkable, if useful, feature of rural life, at least to those who lived with it.
In the period between the Anyanya and Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) wars (1972-83), the government added significantly to the modest conservation estate left by the Condominium administration (1899-1955). The result was that, on paper, South Sudan still hosts six national parks (NP) and twelve game reserves (GR) which together amount to approximately 13% of its surface area. But the widespread availability of firearms and the stresses of war meant that species such as the zebra appear to have been wiped out, while animals like elephants, buffaloes, waterbuck and hartebeest have been reduced to small, relic populations.
Leaving aside the fauna for a moment, the trees of South Sudan are a valuable natural resource too. There are forest reserves, the most important of which is the Imatong Mountains, at 302 km2, a significant area of surviving Afro-montane forest, which is notionally a reserve but in practice as yet unprotected. There are also huge areas of woodland in the “Green Belt” of the west bank, protection of which might be made contiguous with protected areas in the neighbouring Central African Republic (CAR) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). These woodlands of the west bank play an important role in feeding the many rivers and streams that come from the Nile-Congo divide and drain eventually into the Nile.
From a conservation perspective, there is considerable scope too to protect new areas, such as the uninhabited area between Boma and Badingilu, for example, or the Machar Marshes, which are a key part of the Nile watershed and are said also to host a population of white-eared kob seasonally. How to delineate the ecologically important areas which remain, and how to look after these ecosystems is a challenge. There are options: such areas do not all have to become national parks but could instead become game reserves or community conservancies, which typically seek to support both conservation and development objectives. In Kenya today, for example, there is now more land protected under the umbrella of “community conservancy” than there is in the parks and reserves protected by government agencies.
A Renewal of Interest in Conservation
In recognition of this potential, in the last ten years, Fauna & Flora has continued to develop its work in Western Equatoria in partnership with the MWCT and local communities, in and around two GRs and part of Southern NP. African Parks Network meanwhile has negotiated a Public Private Partnership with the government to manage the “Boma-Badingilu Landscape”. This means the area used by the four species of migratory antelope (white-eared kob, tiang, reedbuck and Mongalla gazelle). The analysis of how far these animals range and how they survive was supported by the collaring of more than a hundred animals and use of a technique called Systematic Reconnaissance Flights (SRF). The results are expected to be made public in April this year. New organisations too are beginning to work in S. Sudan. Enjojo has signed an agreement with the Government to support Lantoto NP and Kidepo GR, for example, while other international NGOs such as Frankfurt Zoological Society, which worked at Boma in the 1980s, have begun examining opportunities.
International organisations are not the only bodies to have seen the opportunities which wildlife conservation and PA management can offer. Several national conservation NGOs have been registered: S. Sudan Nature Conservation Organisation (based in Juba); Agency for Conservation and Development (ACD) (based in Old Fangak); White-eared Kob Heritage Society; Friends of Wildlife and Environment, and South Sudan Pastoralist Rehabilitation and Development Organization. There is also a substantial cadre of trained Southern Sudanese who have either been educated at the University of Juba’s natural resources management courses or who have graduated from Kenyan, Ugandan and Rwandan universities or from ranger training in Kenya.
Reconnaissance Flights
The political struggles of the new nation and the needs of the human populations have meant that most international support since 2011 has been dominated by humanitarian imperatives. More recently, Fauna & Flora and African Parks have started to engage with the UN and diplomatic community, in order to help them understand that there is more to South Sudan than humanitarian need, that the fauna and flora of the country remain exceptional and the extent of relatively undamaged habitat provides an opportunity they should consider, at a time when climate change and loss of biodiversity are recognized as urgent challenges world-wide. Of particular interest to the UN and diplomats has been the potential of conservation investments to support communities who live in and around PAs. This is because experience elsewhere shows that conservation can foster local stabilization and reduce conflict because it requires improved local communications and infrastructure investment. It can also be started in suitable areas even before security is wholly restored, as has happened in the DRC, at Garamba, for example.
So, in May 2022, a visit by a mixed team from UNMISS, the UN country team and the diplomatic community allowed potential donors to fly over some of the vast wilderness areas east of the Nile. Many of these areas are completely unprotected and largely uninhabited. (In places such as Boma they do offer seasonal grazing to transhumant pastoralists. This in turn requires conservationists to work with the pastoralists to understand their grazing patterns, work which has already begun with the Murle.)The diplomats and UN staff saw for themselves what most foreigners and few South Sudanese ever see – the migrations of millions of antelopes. Results from the recent collaring also suggest that these antelopes give humans a wide berth, where they can. Nonetheless, substantial numbers are killed for the bushmeat trade in areas where they can easily be shot and carried out on the now ubiquitous motorcycles. Since antelopes still form an important seasonal part of the diet of some groups of Anuak, Nuer, Dinka, Murle, Toposa, Pari and Larim, it would be unreasonable and unenforceable to try to stop hunting altogether, so some form of regulation will have to be put in place to avoid what happened to the springboks of South Africa and the bison of North America.
What is “Community Conservation”?
In the face of such challenges, community conservation is held to be an answer. Over the last forty years, it has taken many forms across the globe, but if it is to be effective, the cardinal principal is that no protected area can or will survive undamaged unless the people who live in or around that area, or who use it seasonally, are fully engaged in its protection and derive benefits of some sort from it. In Garamba National Park in the DRC, for example, one can list security, employment, income generation projects, health services and support to schools as key components of the investment in protection of the park. In Kenya, when the Northern Rangeland Trust was set up, the key demands of the pastoralist communities who joined it were initially for security, for support when their livestock was raided. Wildlife conservation and tourism later became part of the mix of activities, but security came first. And provision of security requires an understanding of the local dynamics of conflict so that measures can be devised to reduce it.
Early examples
Fauna & Flora has supported community wildlife ambassadors (CWAs) to work with government rangers in two GRs along the DRC-South Sudan border, Bangangai and Bire Kpatuos, since the people living closest to protected areas often have the most knowledge of the forest and environment. Engaging them ensures that they have a stake in their home areas which have been found to be amongst the richest in the region, in terms of biodiversity. Beyond the reserves there is an ongoing development of Community Conserved Areas (CCAs), for the protection of places outside of the formal PAs. This is led by communities in areas which still harbour forest elephants, chimpanzees, African golden cats, forest buffalo and rare antelopes such as bongo, water chevrotain, and yellow-backed duiker. In 2013, a new genus of bat called the badger bat was uncovered. The new genus of bat was named ‘Niumbaha’ which means rare or unusual in the local Azande language.
Further early examples include Agency for Conservation and Development (ACD), a youth-led Community Based Organization established in 2010 to spearhead peace building activities, advocate for human and wildlife rights, track, protect, and conserve endangered wildlife species, and the ecosystem at the Sudd Swamp. ACD’s mission is to ‘Work with community members by appointing Community Wildlife Ambassadors (CWAs) to keep conducting awareness and campaigns against poaching, bush burning, tree cutting, protection and conservation of the ecosystem.’
On the east bank of the Nile, African Parks Network (APN) is opening forward bases in Badingilu, Lafon, Boma and Otalo, to begin engagement with the communities who live in or around the national parks, to understand how they maintain themselves and involve them from the start in the new investment in national parks. Many more such bases will follow in the course of the next five years. In the years since the SPLA war, conflict between Murle, Nuer and Dinka has been constant. Raiding for cattle and children is a regular occurrence. In this context, the safeguarding of the natural resources base, the grass, timber and water upon which all pastoralists rely, has been neglected. Investments in park management have the potential to reduce local conflicts in that they will create new economic opportunities, put new resources into marginalized areas and improve communications. Thus, the Anuak and the Murle, who have a history of raiding each other, are now able to talk to each other over the new park radio network. Rangers from the different ethnic groups are being trained and will learn to work together. The potential for training women also as park rangers has been demonstrated elsewhere in Africa and should be promoted in South Sudan too, where a handful of women already participate in PA management. Cattle raids are not going to stop overnight but promoting and securing livestock markets and stock routes and monitoring movements through protected areas – as African Parks has been doing in the Central African Republic for example – will support more peaceful approaches to livestock rearing than reciprocal raiding.
Recommendations
Much of the humanitarian analysis I have seen shows very little awareness of the size and value of the protected areas of South Sudan, or even of their existence. Even the importance of antelopes for food security is lost in the generalized category “wild foods” in the FAO’s IPC classification. Yet wild foods such as fish, game meat, fruits and roots have proven to be essential parts of pastoralists’ diet in South Sudan particularly in times of conflict and stress. Given the as yet largely unacknowledged contribution to food securitySouth Sudan, I suggest the UN agencies, MWCT and NGOs working there could establish a forum in order to share information with the growing number of conservation organisations. The purpose of such a forum would be to keep the different actors up to date with developments, to increase collaboration between humanitarians and conservationists, to attract investment and to complement each other’s work. The most obvious areas for future collaboration would be sustainable livelihood development, health, education and veterinary services, areas in which conservation organisations would typically wish to bring in appropriate expertise rather than tackle such needs themselves.
In this regard, the UN and donor community has already established a Friends of Conservation grouping to facilitate relations with the Government and with potential donors. At the same time the international climate for investment in biodiversity conservation is improving. Currently, more than 190 countries have signed up to the goal of safeguarding 30% of the earth’s area by 2030, in order to protect biodiversity, mitigate global warming and absorb carbon emissions. This was agreed at the COP15 meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity, a convention to which South Sudan is a party. Funding is slowly becoming available to this end. If the Government of South Sudan were to act on this goal, there would have to be a more than doubling of the area of the PAs, from an estimated 13% of the land area (81,531 km. sq.) now, to 30% (193,000 km. sq.) by 2030. This would require a substantial commitment of resources over the next six years, much of which could come from development and humanitarian organisations as well as those working in conservation.
A Vision for the Future?
It is early days yet in the revival of conservation. For it to succeed, the humanitarian, development and conservation communities, whether in government or outside, have to talk to each other, to understand their various modes of operation and find ways in which to collaborate, each working to their own comparative advantage. We might then see South Sudan protecting more land and meeting the “30% by 2030” target. The parks and reserves would come to be supported by the people living around them because they do already or can potentially create tangible, visible and sustainable benefits for those communities. Given the vastness of the areas used by the migrations, South Sudan has an opportunity to become a continental leader in its response to the legacies of war, to climate change and to biodiversity loss. This could change the narrative that hunger and conflict are the major concerns in S. Sudan.
