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DAY 2 - WORKING SESSIONS- 6TH NOVEMBER 2001

Today the Congress programme included a main plenary session addressing the issues of wilderness and wildlife in Africa. more...

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DAY 2 - WORKING SESSIONS

Dr Ian Douglas-Hamilton (Save the Elephants, kenya) and Laurie Marker and Matti from Cheetah Conservation Fund, Namibia)

Today the Congress programme included a main plenary session addressing the issues of wilderness and wildlife in Africa. Iain Douglas-Hamilton, of the Save the Elephant Foundation, chaired this session and summarised the changes in the plight of the African elephants before and since the 1989 Ivory Trade Ban. Currently the elephant range is only 10% of its historical maximum but an unexpected fact is that in many parts of this range there is overpopulation. This is caused by fragmentation of suitable habitat and causes elephants to be confined within parks and game reserves, from which they are unable to spread out.

A pioneering approach has been adopted by Save the Elephants to investigate the problems of fragmentation by using Global Positioning Systems and satellite links to track elephants on the ground. This technique has revealed that between feeding and watering areas, which may be protected, elephants use relatively small corridors through which to relocate. It was also shown by animated cartography, that elephants move very quickly when they decide to relocate which suggests that perhaps they identify some danger. Douglas-Hamilton's presentation highlighted the importance of the establishment of large protected areas for mammals like elephants. He concurred with the value of trans-frontier conservation areas, such as the linking of the Kruger National Park, in South Africa, with protected areas in Zimbabwe and Mozambique.

Secondly, we heard a presentation by Laurie Marker and Matti Ngikhembua of the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia. Unusually, for one of the big five African mammals, it does not use habitat within protected areas and has a large home range. In 2001 there were less than 15,000 cheetahs in the wild in Africa and less than 100 in a small isolated area in Iran. This example highlights the importance of cheetah conservation. Both speakers stressed the importance of integrating cheetah conservation with basic human needs. In Namibia this issue has been confronted through the creation of conservancies, in a similar vein as the programme by Khoadi-Hoas, which was discussed yesterday. Conservancies permit the free movement of animals and the problem of limiting the size of the home range is therefore skirted, provided the conservancy is surrounded by suitable habitat. The maintenance of large carnivores indicates the health of the ecosystem and the cheetahs, it was argued by Laurie Marker, are and ideal species to use in this 'keystone' role.

Maurice Mackenzie (KZN Parliament, South Africa)

Prof. Wouter van Hoven, from the Centre for Wildlife Management at the University of Pretoria, introduced us to the programme to repopulate war-torn Angola with animals. Such a programme has been facilitated by the creation of the Kissama Foundation to relocate animals. Elephants have been returned to Kissama National Park where the indigenous population, originally numbering over 40,000, has been decimated. Funded by the Humane Society of the USA, with elephants donated by Botswana, Kissama received its first elephants in 2000. Money donated by the GEF, announced on the first day of the Wilderness Summit, will facilitate the continuation of this programme. The importance of integrating the local community with this programme has been recognised. Kissama uses ex-soldiers from Angola to provide security for the National Park and there are initiatives underway to reacquaint local people, particularly children, with the wildlife.

It would seem that the importance of South Africa to the global conservation movement has been recognised by more than the World Wilderness Congress. Dr. Walter Lusigi, from the Global Environment Fund, discussed some further details of 5th World Congress on Protected Areas to be held in Durban in 2003. Originally, entitled the Parks Congress, the organisation has realised that this did not encompass the variety of protected area (PA's) designations that occur world-wide. Lusigi felt that a major theme for the Protected Areas Congress was the need for the development of a new paradigm in the thought processes behind protected areas. He argued that PA's need to encompass the management of not only ecological services but restore habitat, respond to climate change, promote sustainable development and sit within the context of the environment as a whole. We were also given more details of the World Summit on Sustainable Development to be held in Johannesburg in 2001 by Dr. Crispian Olver, Director General of the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism in South Africa. This conference is the 10-year review of the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Since Rio it has become apparent that global inequality continues unabated and programmes of sustainable development have not gone anywhere near far enough to correct this. It is one of the objectives of the Johannesburg meeting to develop a global partnership plan to assist in inter-governmental programmes for sustainable development. The key focus for Jo'burg 2001 is to address People, Planet and Prosperity.

Finally, mid-morning, as a group, we were fortunate to meet with Dr. Ian Player, founder of the Wilderness Trust in the UK, which facilitated our attendance at the Congress. This was an opportunity not only for us to introduce ourselves to him but also for him to persuade us that we should continue to work in the field of conservation and perhaps wilderness. Dr. Player's message was that we should convey the value of wilderness to people at home and that we should be promoting the idea of wilderness protection in Britain, in the Scottish Highlands and beyond. We supported this idea and hope that when we return to the UK we will be able to meet up and plan how best we might achieve this.

By
Crewenna Dymond
PhD Student, Biodiversity and wilderness, School of Geography, University of Leeds, UK

TUESDAY, 6 NOVEMBER 

07:30 Registration opens at Boardwalk Tsitsikamma Conference Centre

08:30 -- 9:45 Wilderness and Wildlife 
Chair - Dr Iain Douglas-Hamilton - Status of Elephants and their Wildland Range in Africa

Ms Laurie Marker and Mr Matti Ngikhembua - (Cheetah Conservation Fund, Namibia) - 
Wildlife, Wilderness and People - Can We Share? 
Prof. Wouter van Hoven - (Centre for Wildlife Management - University of Pretoria) and Mr Augosto Gois - (Kissama Foundation, Angola) 
Restoring a Wilderness in Partnership with the People of Angola 

9:45 - 10:15
Dr Crispian Olver (Director-General, Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, SA)
World Summit of Sustainable Development, Johannesburg, 2001
Dr Walter Lusigi (GEF, The World Bank)
The Vth World Parks Congress, Durban, 2003

10:00 - 10:15 Eastern Cape Provincial Show Case 

10:15 - 10:45 Refreshments

10:45 - 12:30 Wilderness -- Working With Local Communities 
Chair - 

Mr José Alves and Miss Shannon Kordom (RARE Center - Namaqualand) Local Empowerment through a Nature Guide Training Programme 
Mr Howard Frederick and Ms Ivy Mwai - (Wildlife Awareness Foundation, Kenya) 
Conservation Perspectives in East Africa
Dr Richard Jeo - (Round River Conservation Studies, USA, Canada)
The Taku River Tlingit - Wilderness and Community
Mr Maurice Mackenzie (MPL, KwaZulu-Natal) iNkosi Mazibuko
Mzinyathi Community Conservation Area 

12:30 - 2:00 Lunch 
Poster sessions

1:30 - 4:45 Technical Sessions:
Science and Stewardship to Protect and Sustain Wilderness Values (Dr Alan Watson, Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute)
Wilderness of the Mind and Spirit (Mr Bill Petrie)
Earth Jurisprudence (The Gaia Foundation)

2:00 - 4:00 Afternoon Workshop:
From Confrontation to Cooperation: Business Contributions to Nature Conservation and Wilderness Protection (Global Nature Fund, Germany) 

2:00 - 4:00 Film Festival - screening of short-listed films

4:30 - 6:00 Indaba - Open Council Dr John Hendee, Ms Marilyn Riley

7:30 Africa on the Beach - Food and entertainment, hosted by the Mayor of Port Elizabeth