Abstract

Our organizations hosted a highly interactive forum at which invited Southern and East African and other experts shared their vision for conservation and development success at the wildlife/livestock interface with IUCN World Parks Congress attendees and invited representatives from bilateral and multilateral development agencies and other interested parties. African governmental and nongovernmental experts from Botswana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe participated.^a Our goal was to foster a sharing of ideas among African practitioners and development professionals that will lead to concrete and creative initiatives that address conservation and development challenges related to health at the livestock/wildlife/human interface. The focus was, appropriately, on ongoing efforts and future needs in and around the region’s flagship protected areas and conservancies and their buffer zones—the places where tensions and challenges at the livestock/wildlife interface are often greatest.

Discussions and planning focused on several themes of critical importance to the future of animal agriculture, wildlife, and, of course, people: competition over grazing and water resources, disease mitigation, local and global food security, zoonoses, and other potential sources of conflict related to the overall challenges of land-use planning and the pervasive reality of resource constraints. We have since been working to develop the most promising collaborative concepts that emerged from this forum into a suite of projects, grounded in real landscapes but cognizant of the critical need for policy reform, and based on the solid professional partnerships we believe are emanating from the AHEAD (Animal Health for the Environment and Development) enabling environment.

As we look around the world, impacts from interactions between livestock and wildlife (and habitat) are often profound. The issues at this interface represent an unfortunately all-too-often neglected sector of critical importance to the long-term ecological and sociopolitical security of protected areas and grazing lands worldwide. With its initial focus on Southern and East Africa and its diverse land-use mosaic, we believe the AHEAD initiative can help facilitate collaborative work with and among African partners to continue to bring sound science to bear on natural resource management decisions that directly affect the livelihoods and cultures of Africa’s people, including those decisions that impact the future of Africa’s protected areas and wildlife resources. As socioeconomic progress demands sustained improvements in health for humans, their domestic animals, and the environment, we recognize the need to utilize a “one health” perspective—an approach that was the foundation of our discussions at the World Parks Congress, and that has guided the follow-on work since.

Since the September 2003 program launch, AHEAD has helped catalyze the development of several innovative regional projects that focus on the health/conservation nexus. In addition, the importance of these issues was formally recognized by the IUCN World Parks Congress when it officially included “Disease and Protected Area Management” as a key emerging issue in its “Emerging Issues” documentation: (http://www.iucn.org/themes/wcpa/wpc2003/english/outputs/durban/eissues.htm) (VIN editor: Link not accessible 2/3/21), which is the first time ecosystem health issues have been addressed like this in the Congress’ 40-year history. The text from the “Disease and Protected Area Management” section is below.

Disease and Protected Area Management

• The health of wildlife, domestic animals and people are inextricably linked.
• Small improvements in the health of domestic and wild animals and thus their productivity can lead to dramatic improvements in human livelihoods and thus the reduction of poverty.
• Alien invasive pathogens should be addressed with vigor equal to that devoted to addressing more ‘visible’ alien invasive species.
• The role of disease in protected areas and the land-use matrix within which they are embedded must be recognized and addressed within the context of protected area and landscape-level planning and management.
• Animal and human health-based indicators may reveal perturbations to natural systems not detectable by more commonly employed methodologies, thus improving the quantitative evaluation of trends in a protected area’s health and resilience.

Endnotes

a. The WCSAHEAD website is at www.wcs-ahead.org and includes the complete agenda from the World Parks Congress (Durban) AHEAD launch, abstracts of presentations, the presentation slidesets themselves, biographical sketches and contact details for most of the invitees, as well as a range of downloadable video and audio clips from the forum.