80% of Africa's Biodiversity Survives on Community-Managed Lands, Not Protected Parks
New research from 200 African biodiversity experts reveals what indigenous communities have always known: the future of Africa's wildlife depends on the people who've lived alongside it for generations—not fortress conservation that excludes them.
This article draws on research published in Nature, the Biodiversity Intactness Index for sub-Saharan Africa, and interviews with conservation leaders working across the continent's grassroots conservation network.
What You'll Learn
- ✓ Why 200 African biodiversity experts collaborated to map where the continent's wildlife actually survives, and what their findings reveal about the 80% of species living outside protected parks.
- ✓ How communities across Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, and Cameroon are proving that people and nature are not separate—and why traditional land management practices maintain biodiversity while supporting livelihoods.
- ✓ The political and economic forces threatening successful community conservation, from Ethiopia's Tama Area losing $8.5 million in funding overnight to the DRC's Batwa people fighting for ancestral land rights.
- ✓ What you can do to support the communities stewarding Africa's landscapes, wildlife, and indigenous knowledge systems that conservation has historically overlooked.
The Wild Coast: Where People and Biodiversity Thrive Together
On South Africa's Wild Coast, Sinegugu Zukulu faces a painful contradiction. Thirty years after voting for liberation, he finds himself in constitutional court fighting the very government that freed his people. The battle isn't over oppression—it's over land, biodiversity, and an indigenous knowledge system that has sustained both for generations.
"No one would have imagined, no one would have seen it coming in 1994, that we now, 30 years down the line, would be in courts fighting against a government who fought to liberate us," says Zukulu, founder of Sustaining the Wild Coast. "But instead, we are being strangled and pressurised to let go of our land."
The land Zukulu and the Amampondo community defend is no ordinary territory. The Wild Coast harbours close to 200 endemic plants found nowhere else on Earth. For years, Zukulu and Sustaining the Wild Coast have fought mining companies and Shell's seismic exploration in constitutional court while building alternatives—working with 2,000 farmers to restore traditional organic farming methods that rebuild soil fertility so exceptional their sweet potatoes command premium prices in South African cities, developing coastal ecotourism that benefits women directly, and planning an Indigenous Knowledge Resource Centre to preserve the understanding that sustains both people and biodiversity.
The region's biodiversity remains intact not despite human presence, but because of how communities have managed the land for centuries.
"Indigenous knowledge is the knowledge that forms the foundation of who we are," Zukulu explains. "And it is important to find means and ways to preserve that particular knowledge." As elders pass away, he worries they take with them irreplaceable understanding—which plants heal, how to read weather patterns, which farming methods sustain soil health, how to maintain biodiversity.
Yet Zukulu recognises a pattern that extends far beyond his coastal homeland. "If you look at the places, like for instance, one of the challenges we have due to climate change is the loss of biodiversity. But when you go to indigenous people's territories everywhere, whether you go to the Amazon forest, whether you go to Philippines, Southeast Asia, whether you come to Africa, the indigenous people's territories are the only places where biodiversity is not being lost at an alarming rate as it is everywhere else."
What Zukulu describes reflects a worldview that western conservation has historically been in conflict with.
While 'Nature' as wilderness separate from humanity emerged as a European concept, indigenous languages like Shona, isiZulu, and isiXhosa contain no word for the environment as a distinct entity. The Shona concept of Ukama embodies instead a monistic understanding: humans, spirits, ancestors, and the land exist as a single, inseparable web of life. People are not separate from nature because the separation itself is a foreign idea, one that Western conservation exported alongside the false solution of fortress parks: fenced reserves that exclude people.
Now, groundbreaking research published in Nature confirms what Zukulu and indigenous communities have always known: across sub-Saharan Africa, 80% of remaining biodiversity survives not in fenced national parks, but on working lands where communities like his farm, graze livestock, and harvest resources. The finding challenges the idea that conservation means protecting nature from people. Instead, the data reveals that people and nature have never been separate, and the indigenous knowledge systems conservation overlooked may hold our best hope for preserving what remains.
"This fundamentally shifts how we think about biodiversity conservation in Africa"
The research took five years to complete. Dr. Hayley Clements, lead researcher at Stellenbosch University's Centre for Sustainability Transitions, coordinated 200 African biodiversity experts—field ecologists, rangers, tour guides, museum curators, and researchers—to build the continent's first Biodiversity Intactness Index from African expertise rather than extrapolated global models.
"Many global biodiversity assessments do not represent African conditions well because they rely on sparse local measurements and draw insights from more data-rich regions of the world, where contexts are very different," Clements explains. "By working directly with the people who study and manage African ecosystems, we were able to capture a much more realistic picture of where biodiversity is declining, where it is being sustained, and why."
The results reveal what conservation has long overlooked. Sub-Saharan Africa has lost 24% of its biodiversity since pre-industrial times, with large mammals suffering declines of over 75%. Yet protected areas, the focus of billions in conservation funding, cover only 8% of the landscape. More than 80% of remaining wild plants and animals depend on working lands where 500 million people farm, graze livestock, and harvest resources.
The map reveals dramatic regional variations. Botswana and Namibia retain the highest biodiversity intactness at 87%, while Nigeria and Rwanda, with the continent's highest cropland coverage, show intactness around 50%. Central African countries maintain relatively high levels due to persistent humid forests. West Africa shows severe degradation from overharvesting and agricultural expansion.
Cropland expansion emerged as one of the greatest pressures on biodiversity. Intensive, high-yield agriculture reduces habitat diversity and increases chemical inputs, with devastating impacts across species groups. Yet the research also identified where biodiversity persists: areas where communities practise sustainable pastoralism, traditional farming methods, or participate in community conservancies show intactness of 40-70%, dramatically higher than intensive agricultural zones at 10-30%.
"This fundamentally shifts where and how we think about biodiversity conservation in Africa," Clements emphasises. "Protected areas remain vital, especially for Africa's large mammals, but alone they are insufficient to curb biodiversity loss. Sustainable management of shared working landscapes is key to maintaining biodiversity and supporting livelihoods."
Previous biodiversity assessments relied on patchy data and extrapolated from other continents. This study did something different: it asked 200 people who work with African wildlife daily—rangers, field ecologists, tour guides, museum curators—to assess what they actually see. Bird experts evaluated bird populations. Tree specialists assessed forests. Large mammal experts tracked elephants and lions. They compared notes across online meetings, debated uncertainties, and built the first comprehensive picture of African biodiversity from African expertise.
The knowledge of hundreds of biodiversity experts was used to calculate the Biodiversity Intactness Index, which provides a score of how all native species populations have been affected by human activity in a region.
"We can learn from successful examples of landscape governance systems, such as sustainable pastoralism practices, community-led wildlife conservancies, and biodiversity-positive farming approaches, that support both conservation and sustainable development," Clements notes.
For the 500 million Africans living on lands harbouring 80% of the continent's biodiversity, the implications are profound. Conservation that ignores them is destined to fail. Yet environmental defenders like Zukulu often face a three-front battle: against governments promoting extractive industries, corporations seeking profits from their land, and even conservation organisations that exclude communities from decision-making.
When Political Decisions Threaten Community Conservation
In January 2025, Barkede Kulumedere received the phone call that would unravel fifteen years of work overnight. USAID was immediately terminating $8.5 million for Ethiopia's Tama Community Conservation Area, 500,000 acres where four Indigenous tribes had just secured legal recognition to protect their lands. Without funding, scout salaries would stop. Anti-poaching patrols would end. The largest community-managed conservation area in Ethiopia would lose its lifeline.
The Tama Conservation Area sits in Ethiopia's Omo Valley. For years, it demonstrated an alternative to the industrial development reshaping the region. Under community management, elephant and giraffe populations increased. Illegal hunting decreased. Twenty thousand Indigenous people across four ethnic groups (Mursi, Bodi, Kwegu, and Ari) made conservation decisions through traditional consensus-building.
Just 160 kilometres north, a different path was chosen. In 2016, the Ethiopian government completed the Gilgel Gibe III Dam, Africa's tallest at 243 metres. The dam eliminated the annual Omo River flood that 100,000 people had depended on for flood-recession agriculture for centuries. Its reservoir deprived Lake Turkana of 85% of its normal water flow, dropping water levels by 2 metres and threatening the Nile crocodiles, hippos, and fish species that support fishing communities.
Downstream, the government launched the Kuraz Sugar Development Project: 245,000 hectares of sugarcane plantations that promised 700,000 jobs. The government allocated land, built factories, and began what it called "villagisation," resettling Indigenous communities to make way for industrial agriculture.
The jobs never materialised. Only 4% of the promised employment became reality, paying $7-28 per month while the cost of feeding a family reached $56. By October 2022, twenty-two members of the Mursi community had died of malnutrition. The annual flood that fertilised Indigenous farms disappeared behind the dam. Traditional cattle herds died. Wild game and fish vanished.
"That's how they tricked us," one Mursi farmer told researchers, speaking anonymously for fear of reprisals. "They took the Omo River waters and channelled them. They divided out cultivation sites for the Mursi and poured water on the land. The corn ripened. When we wanted to plant again they bulldozed the crops. 'The land will be cultivated by its owner, the government,' said the officials."
The development blocked wildlife mobility between Omo and Mago National Parks, fragmenting the corridors that allow species to survive.
"We used to protect these animals because they were part of our heritage," says Alawara Kolbala, a Tama Council Member. "Now we protect them because we know they can secure our children's future, if we can keep the programme alive."
The Gibe III Dam and Kuraz Sugar Project cost billions. Five hundred thousand people now face food insecurity and disease outbreaks from contaminated water. The Tama Conservation Area operated on a fraction of that budget and reversed wildlife decline while supporting 20,000 people. In January 2025, USAID terminated funding for the conservation programme.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the violence embedded in fortress conservation plays out at Kahuzi-Biega National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site home to one of the world's last populations of eastern lowland gorillas. In the 1970s, the government expelled 6,000 Batwa people without consultation and revoked their customary land rights. The exiles were left landless and without compensation. Many still live in roadside squatter camps.
"Our traditional lands in the park are numerous, because each clan has its own hills," says a Batwa elder now based in Bukavu near the park, speaking anonymously for safety. "Among these hills, there are sacred sites where we communicated with the ancestors and communed with the forest, which we consider to be the nourishing mother. These lands are our identity. To deprive us of them is to exterminate us."
The promised conservation never materialised. Almost since its creation, the park has been unable to repel repeated incursions from armed militias and illegal mining operations extracting coltan and gold. A rapid decline in gorillas and elephants resulted in UNESCO putting the park on its endangered World Heritage Sites list in 1997, where it remains today.
When 2,000 Batwa attempted to return to their villages in 2018 after years of failed negotiations, park guards and military responded with shelling and burning. A subsequent report documented at least 20 Batwa killed and 15 women raped in attacks over three years.
In July 2024, the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights ruled that the DRC government should hand back parts of the park to the Batwa and recognise their customary land rights. The ruling found the government had violated 11 articles on human rights in the African Charter. The Wildlife Conservation Society, which took over park management in 2022, formally recognised "the legitimate claims of the Batwa to their remaining ancestral land."
Some researchers question whether the Batwa can manage the park effectively after decades of displacement, noting that illegal logging and militia activity continue within park boundaries. Advocates push back strongly. They argue the Batwa are the primary victims of lawlessness that arises from a corrupt and militarised system of park management.
The solution, they say, is restoring land rights with support. Deborah Rogers, president of the Initiative for Equality, acknowledges the Batwa will need "lots of expert research and consulting, just as do the current managers. They will also need help in dealing with the militias, mining operations, and refugees. But I am completely convinced that their objectives and worldview give them a much better shot at protecting nature."
In Ethiopia and the DRC, communities demonstrated they could sustain biodiversity on their lands. Political decisions—from the government's support for industrial projects over Indigenous land rights to USAID's abrupt funding termination—determined whether those communities could continue as guardians of the land.
Where Biodiversity Persists—And How
The BII research makes explicit what Zukulu observed from the Wild Coast: the 80% of Africa's remaining biodiversity that survives outside protected areas does so in specific contexts. Rangelands managed through sustainable pastoralism, forests where communities harvest resources without clear-cutting, farms that maintain ecological complexity rather than monoculture uniformity.
In Kenya's Maasai Mara, a 2021 census by Kenya Wildlife Service and the Wildlife Research and Training Institute revealed a pattern that exposes conservation's fundamental miscalculation. Community conservancies, working landscapes where Maasai communities graze cattle and manage wildlife, contain 83.7% of the ecosystem's large mammals. The protected Maasai Mara National Reserve and Mara Triangle, the focus of traditional conservation efforts, contain just 16.2%.
"Most of Africa's biodiversity depends on lands owned and managed by local communities," says Fred Nelson, CEO of Maliasili, an organisation that supports grassroots African conservation groups. His research reveals that conservancies now cover 16% of Kenya's total land mass: 22 million acres. These aren't fortress parks. They're working landscapes where communities earn revenue through carefully managed tourism that makes conservation economically competitive with conversion.
The approach restructures incentives. Communities that once lost livestock to predators with no compensation now receive lease payments totalling $3.7 million annually in the Maasai Mara alone. Lions, once killed in retaliation for livestock attacks, are now found at higher densities in some conservancies than in the adjacent national reserve. In northern Kenya, elephant populations increased 12% between 2012 and 2017, attributed largely to conservancy expansion. By 2023, the region recorded no elephant killings, a transformation from decades of human-wildlife conflict.
The conservancy model in Kenya isn't without criticism. Research reveals that in the Mara ecosystem, land ownership requirements mean benefits flow primarily to land-rich older men, while women, young people, and the landless poor are largely excluded from conservation income despite living alongside the wildlife.
However, the conservancy model demonstrates what the BII research documented: lower-intensity land use maintaining 40-70% biodiversity intactness while supporting livelihoods.
Botswana and Namibia pioneered similar approaches, which helped take them to that biodiversity intactness figure of 87%, the continent's highest.
On South Africa's Wild Coast, Sustaining the Wild Coast works with close to 2,000 farmers across 10 villages. "Part of the reason why we started investing time on ecotourism development and agriculture was to demonstrate, to convince that if we protect our land and use it to produce food and surplus food, we would be better off," Zukulu explains. The region's endemic plant diversity persists not in a park, but in a working landscape where centuries-old farming practices evolved alongside the ecosystem.
In Tanzania's northern rangelands, PAMS Foundation combines anti-poaching work with forest restoration that pays individuals directly rather than through committees. Co-director Krissie Clark describes the transformation: "What we're seeing is that in the past, the value of a tree for them typically was when you cut the tree down... Now they are seeing value in a tree growing." Of 300 participants in their Afromontane forest restoration project, about 30% have already built better homes or started small businesses with payments received. The model creates economic incentives for conservation that compete with the pressures driving deforestation.
In Cameroon's degraded watersheds, Ecological Balance uses the Miyawaki method, a Japanese technique that creates forests 10 times faster than conventional planting, to restore rivers that dried completely during dry seasons. "Local communities must be at the centre of all conservation endeavours," Limbi Blessing Tata emphasises. The project has created over 300 part-time jobs through community nurseries while restoring natural water systems. "Our second forest was planted in March 2020, and it became a bird heaven," Tata recalls. Within two years, water storage tanks rose significantly and communities piped water to new neighbourhoods for the first time in decades, tangible proof that restored forests recharge groundwater systems.
The loss of 24% of the continent's biodiversity represents a crisis, but the 80% that remains outside protected areas represents an opportunity. Success will require parks, conservancies, traditional farming systems, and community forests functioning as a connected network rather than isolated interventions. What Clements calls "successful examples of landscape governance systems" already exist across the continent.
What You Can Do
Dr. Belinda Reyers, affiliated with the University of Pretoria and involved in the BII research, argues that fortress conservation failed because it rested on a false premise. "We need to see people and nature as inextricably intertwined," she says. "Not as opposing forces, but as part of the same living system."
This "people-with-nature" perspective isn't new. It has long guided indigenous and rural communities whose daily lives are interwoven with the land. The evidence from the BII research confirms what these communities have demonstrated for generations: biodiversity thrives where people maintain strong cultural and spiritual ties to natural spaces. The Wild Coast communities working with Sustaining the Wild Coast, the farmers restoring forests with PAMS Foundation, the villages planting Miyawaki forests with Ecological Balance, neighbours protecting heritage trees in their streets, and gardeners choosing native plants that support local pollinators.
"If we think of biodiversity loss as a straight line going down," Reyers explains, "what we're trying to do is bend that line, not only make it less steep, but make it go upwards—making things better rather than just less bad."
The challenge, she notes, is scaling up these deeply local successes into a global model of coexistence. While governments, corporations, and conservation organisations must drive change at scale, that pressure comes from individuals—through how we relate to the land where we live, the food we eat, the businesses we support, and the voices we raise demanding that systems change.
Take Action
Support grassroots conservation directly. Subscribe to AfricaLive's newsletter at africalive.net. The platform connects with grassroots conservation projects across the continent, creating visibility for organisations like Sustaining the Wild Coast, PAMS Foundation, and Ecological Balance that maintain biodiversity while supporting local livelihoods.
Choose tourism that supports community conservation. Eco-tourism initiatives like Sustaining the Wild Coast ensure revenue reaches communities managing biodiversity-rich landscapes, creating direct economic incentives for conservation decisions made by people living alongside wildlife.
Understand where your food comes from. Smallholder farms maintaining crop diversity and applying agroforestry techniques support higher biodiversity while feeding families and generating income. Seek out food from these biodiverse farming systems rather than industrial monocultures.
Continue learning. Track biodiversity intactness across sub-Saharan Africa at bii4africa.org/map-of-sub-saharan-africas-biodiversity-intactness. The interactive map shows where biodiversity persists and where it's declining.
Look for projects local to you. Ecological Balance grew from one person's determination to solve her community's water crisis, creating over 1,000 jobs while restoring dried rivers. Preserving ecosystems isn't only about large mammals in vast parks—it's about birds returning to restored forests, springs flowing again in villages, communities building livelihoods from standing trees.
Anyone can learn about biodiversity in their local area: native plant species that support pollinators, water sources that need protection, heritage trees in neighbourhoods. Even the smallest actions such as planting native species in a garden, protecting a local stream, and supporting community forestry contribute to the larger pattern of coexistence.
Use your voice. As citizens, consumers, and voters, we can pressure decision-makers to act on the evidence. Contact representatives to demand foreign aid budgets shift resources from fortress conservation towards supporting communities managing biodiverse landscapes. Urge policymakers to recognise traditional land management systems and ensure communities have legal rights to the lands they've sustained for generations.
The evidence from 200 African experts analysing the species they observe daily points to where biodiversity and opportunity remain: on working lands managed by communities whose survival depends on the same ecosystems conservation claims to protect. As Zukulu observed, indigenous territories remain "the only places where biodiversity is not being lost at an alarming rate."
AfricaLive connects with grassroots conservation projects across the continent, providing visibility and media coverage for community-led conservation. Subscribe to our newsletter to discover more stories amplifying voices often overlooked by traditional conservation funding.
Sources
- Clements, H.S., et al. (2025). "Biodiversity Intactness Index for sub-Saharan Africa." Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09781-7
- "How We Grew It: Taking on Shell, Mining Giants and Building Community Resilience on South Africa's Wild Coast." AfricaLive. Read article
- "Wild Coast Communities Seek Investment for Indigenous Knowledge Resource Centre." AfricaLive. Read article
- "Fighting for Survival: Ethiopia's Largest Community Conservation Area Faces Extinction After US Aid Pulls Support." AfricaLive. Read article
- Pearce, Fred. "Fortress Conservation: Can a Congo Tribe Return to Its Forest?" Yale Environment 360, September 17, 2024. Read article
- "Kenya's wildlife conservancies criticised for making old men rich, while making women and young people poorer." AfricaLive. Read article
- "How We Grew It: PAMS Foundation. From Village Patrols to Growing Tanzania's Wildlife Anti-Trafficking Network." AfricaLive. Read article
- "How We Grew It: At Ecological Balance Cameroon, We Used a Japanese Tree-Planting Technique to Revive Our Villages and Forests." AfricaLive. Read article
- "The Real Forces Behind Biodiversity Loss and What We Can Do About Them." Daily Maverick, October 15, 2025. Read article
