Kunene Regional Conservation Strategy

Intro
The Namibian government has proposed a new national park in the Kunene Region, an area that represents one of the last true wildernesses remaining in southern Africa. The Kunene Regional Conservation Strategy is a long-term conservation strategy for the development and implementation of informed land management plans for the proposed People's Park and its surrounding communal conservancies.

Background
The stated purposes of the proposed new park are to conserve this vast wilderness and its wildlife, while also serving to link the Skeleton Coast and Etosha National Parks, thereby facilitating wildlife migrations and creating one of the largest conservation area complexes in the world. 

State lands that will eventually form the proposed park comprise a large area, but do not currently effectively connect the Skeleton Coast with Etosha. Surrounding communal conservancy private lands - which make up the vast majority of the area - must also support the protective area system if the park is to be ecologically viable and serve as a functionally effective corridor. The following conservancies are particularly important: Torra, Sesfontein, Anabeb, Purros, Ehirovipuka, and Omatendeka. 

The Project Details

Overall project objectives include the following:
Securing improved land use certainty for conservation and regional connectivity through the completion and implementation of the Contractual Agreement, leading to the establishment of the Kunene People Park.
Ensuring land use within and in areas adjacent to the People Park complements regional conservation aims through the completion, harmonisation and implementation of Park, concession and conservancy management plans and conservation agreements.
Improving the capacity and capability of regional stakeholders for conservation planning and management.

Current achievements
A Kunene Regional Ecological Analysis (KREA) has been completed to provide a science-based decision-making tool to assist the land management planning activities. By assimilating all base data on landscape, species, resource and human use variables, the KREA quantifies and maps ecological and social use values in order to identify priority core and connectivity areas that meet specified representation goals.

Objectives for 2009 include the following:
Complete first draft of conservancy land management plans with the community conservancies of Torra, Sesfontein, Anabeb, Purros, Ehirovipuka, and Omatendeka.
Obtain necessary approvals/permissions from Ministry of Environment and Tourism (MET) and the Kunene Regional Government for all KREA-based land management plans (key meetings are being organised in the first half of 2009 in order to develop a framework to facilitate this process). 

Under the Kunene Regional Conservation Strategy, development of conservancy land management plans will be achieved by working with the conservancy management committee members and Traditional Authorities in each conservancy resulting in draft management plans for each conservancy.