The Decline of Lions: It’s a Question of Cost

As if illegal mining, logging and poaching weren’t bad enough, Africa’s national parks face another dire threat: They are vastly underfunded.

According to the most comprehensive analysis of conservation funding to date, 90 percent of nearly 300 protected areas on the continent face funding shortfalls. Together, the deficits total at least $1 billion.

Failing to address this deficit will result in severe and ongoing declines of such iconic species as lions, researchers warned Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Some parks will likely disappear altogether.

“The assumption is that parks are just fine because they’re designated as protected,” said Jennifer Miller, senior scientist at Defenders of Wildlife, a conservation group, and co-author of the report. “But in many cases, they don’t have the resources to do conservation. They are just paper parks.”

That the parks are operating on a shoestring comes as no surprise to those working to preserve Africa’s wilderness, said Peter Fearnhead, chief executive officer and co-founder of African Parks, a nonprofit organization that manages 15 protected areas on the continent.

“What’s very helpful about this paper is that it actually puts a number to the problem,” said Fearnhead, who was not involved in the study.

In the new analysis, the authors used wild lions as a proxy for how Africa’s national parks are faring. Because of their place at the top of the food chain, lions are considered an umbrella species — a bellwether of an ecosystem’s health.

“If lions are doing well, everything else — with the exception of rhinos — is also doing well,” said Peter Lindsey, director of the lion recovery fund at the Wildlife Conservation Network and co-author of the new paper. (Rhinoceroses are an exception because of poaching to meet the extreme demand for rhino horn.)

Throughout much of Africa, lions are not doing well. Their numbers have dropped 43 percent during the past two decades to as few as 20,000 in the wild. They now occupy just 8 percent of their historic habitat.

A growing proportion of their range is found in national parks and reserves. But according to Lindsey and Miller’s research — which they undertook while working at Panthera, a group dedicated to conserving wild cats — most protected areas are not realizing their potential as safe havens for lions.

More than two-thirds of the state-owned parks hold lion populations that are less than half what they could be, based on the prey those habitats could support, the researchers said. If properly managed, those parks could quadruple the population of wild lions in Africa.

To estimate the amount of funding needed to boost populations by at least 50 percent, the researchers relied on three financial models. Then, following a review of state wildlife and donor funding, as well as interviews with park managers and officials, the team totaled the dollars available for protected areas in the 23 countries included in their study.

They found that 88 to 94 percent of parks operate on budgets that are less than 20 percent of that required to perform effective conservation. Parks need to invest $377 to $783 per square mile, the researchers concluded. On average, parks spend just $77 per square mile.

The grand total to renew Africa’s parks: $1.2 billion to $2.4 billion each year. If the funding deficits are not addressed, lions and other wildlife in affected areas will likely experience catastrophic declines, the authors warn. Protected areas that are not adequately managed inevitably succumb to poaching, illegal livestock incursions, land grabs and illegal mining and logging.

“It’s a tragedy of the commons situation,” Lindsey said. “If there’s open access to wildlife, you’d better poach or someone else will.”

Wildlife is already quickly declining across many parks in Africa, and “there’s no reason that won’t continue unless the situation changes,” said Tim Tear, executive director of the Africa program at Wildlife Conservation Society, who was not involved in the study.

“If we want to see many of Africa’s iconic species now and into the future, then this paper calls out pretty starkly that we’re going to have to change the way we continue to invest.”

Should business continue as usual, people also stand to lose, Lindsey said.

Healthy ecosystems provide many benefits, from watershed protection to carbon storage. In many places in Africa, parks also contribute to job creation, economic growth and rural development through tourism — a $34 billion industry on the continent, the majority of which is tied to wildlife.

Some countries already reap many of these benefits. Recognizing that they derive a significant portion of their national incomes from nature-related tourism, South Africa and Kenya invest more heavily than most other countries in protected areas, and relatively few of their parks face deficits. Other nations, on the other hand, such as Mozambique, have many lions and stunning landscapes, but have yet to profit from those assets because their tourism industries are underdeveloped.

“That’s an important piece of the puzzle,” Tear said. “If we don’t invest more in the near future, then African countries may lose the opportunity to benefit from these species in years to come.”

Lindsey added that the benefits for nations that do invest are only set to grow. Tourism is rising globally, and as more natural areas are lost to development, the few places that retain wilderness and wildlife will increase exponentially in value.

“Central Park was worth nothing when all of Manhattan was forest, but now it’s an absolutely priceless asset,” Lindsey said. “That’s an extreme analogy, but in some places in Africa, there is already a hard edge around parks.”

African countries, however, should not bear sole responsibility for preserving the continent’s nature, the researchers write. Many nations have set aside a significantly greater proportion of land for conservation than the global average, yet are not compensated for the costs of bypassing development.

“The global community needs to recognize that there’s an imbalance here, and everyone needs to do their part to help fix it,” Tear said. “We should not view protecting iconic species in Africa as someone else’s responsibility.”

While the amount needed to renew Africa’s parks may seem daunting at first, Fearnhead pointed out that it is a minuscule amount on a global scale.

“Literally a single individual — admittedly a very wealthy one — could be the solution to a continental challenge, and that creates hope,” he said.

In addition to philanthropic donors and companies, the shortfall could be remedied if developed nations and agencies such as the World Bank stepped up their conservation commitments, Lindsey said.

Africa currently receives around $51 billion in annual development aid — about 200 times more than it does for supporting its protected areas. Reallocating just 2 percent of those funds toward conservation, Lindsey and his colleagues write, could stem much of the impending crisis.

“We have reached a fork in the road,” Lindsey said. “It is time for the world to decide if Africa’s iconic parks and reserves are worth fighting for.”