Botswana Wildlife Research Symposium – By Dr Emily Bennitt

Permanent secretary of the Ministry of Environment Wildlife & Tourism, Mr Neil Fitt, opens the symposium.

During the first week of February, the entire Elephants for Africa team attended the Botswana Wildlife Research Symposium, held in Maun. Our founder and director, Dr Kate Evans, was the chair for the session on human-wildlife conflict, and carried out her role admirably. The symposium was an excellent opportunity to catch up with all the other researchers working in Botswana, and to meet some of the people that had previously only been associated with e-mail addresses.

One of the most important take-home messages of the symposium was the need for researchers to spend more time thinking about the communities that are living alongside Botswana’s wildlife. There was a big focus on human-wildlife conflict, but wildlife researchers often get consumed by their passion for nature and the environment, sometimes forgetting the humans that are a huge part of that environment. Another strong talking point was the dramatic declines in herbivore species in northern Botswana. While there is a lot of media attention on rhino and elephant poaching, and deservedly so, bushmeat poaching is also having a huge impact on previously thriving herbivore populations, particularly in northern Botswana.
The third important topic was the hunting ban that has just been enacted in Botswana. This is intended as an environmentally-conscious policy, but the communities that were previously reliant on income from the trophy hunting industry are now left without any financial strategies. The concern is that these communities will cease to see the value in conserving their natural resources and may turn to poaching to meet their monetary requirements. Establishing artificial waterholes in some of the ex-hunting concessions may attract more wildlife, rendering them viable for photographic safaris, but we are as yet unsure of the effect on extant migrations of large herbivores. The solution will not be straightforward, but the Department of Wildlife and National Parks, communities and researchers will all be working towards finding an acceptable compromise that enables us to preserve livelihoods and wildlife.

Team members at the Botswana Wildlife Research Symposium