Addressing Growing Threat to African Wildlife: Gaps, Opportunities and Solutions

Background • Wild lands have shrunk and degraded in the face of expanding human populations and agriculture; • Rifles, fast vehicles, and widespread armed conflict and unrest have helped wipe out wildlife populations across vast areas; • Previously remote forest and desert areas are exposed to intensive hunting along rapidly spreading networks of logging, oil, mining and road construction projects; • Pronounced urbanization in Africa and the growing African diaspora abroad has greatly increased the demand for bushmeat; • rapidly expanding human populations and settlement are creating a surge in human-wildlife conflict especially with ‘problem’ wildlife populations – lions, elephants, great apes among them; • the export in live wildlife and animal parts is linked to enormous international demand and largely unregulated and illegal trade networks