Zimbabwe game park to receive $15 mn from new wildlife fund
Harare (AFP) – One of Zimbabwe’s biggest wildlife reserves is to receive US$1 million annually from a brand-new fund to help sustain its operations and fight poaching, German conservationists said on Wednesday.
The money, which will extend for at least 15 years, will help pay for ranger patrols, equipment maintenance and other everyday needs, the park’s partner, the Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS), told AFP by email.
Zimbabwe’s second largest reserve, the Gonarezhou National Park covers 5,000 square kilometres (2,000 square miles) in the country’s remote southeast.
The money will come from the Legacy Landscapes Fund (LLF), a brand-new international initiative that provides funds to help wildlife havens in poor countries.
“The idea of the Legacy Landscapes Fund is to provide a reliable funding for basic operations in a protected area,” said the FZS’s head of communications, Dagmar Andres-Bruemmer.
National parks that depend on tourism income have suffered during the coronavirus pandemic, she noted.
“In some parks in Africa, even basic work such as ranger patrols could not be done due to budget cuts. So poaching picked up significantly.”
Participants include the French and German governments, Germany’s KfW Development Bank, France’s Agence Francaise de Developpement (AFD), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
“Protected and wild areas remain the mainstay of biodiversity conservation and our best tool at mitigating climate change across the globe,” said Hugo Van der Westhuizen, director of Gonarezhou Conservation Trust.
“Managing these areas effectively requires long-term commitment in funding.”