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THE FITFUL EVOLUTION OF THE SPERRBEBIET NATIONAL PARK, A NAMIBIAN WILDERNESS IN A BIODIVERSITY HOTSPOT

BY PHOEBE BARNARD

On paper at least, there could be few better examples of environmental planning and policy than the activities over the past few years leading--we hope--to the proclamation of a new park in a biodiversity hotspot, the Sperrgebiet National Park in southern Namibia. But whether this wilderness park will be proclaimed in the next 12 months as planned by the Namibian government remains to be seen, since the park represents a pioneering but often difficult partnership of conservation and mining, in which good intentions must be proven to be more than noble platitudes on paper.

The Sperrgebiet, or forbidden area,' is a vast and spectacularly beautiful wilderness in the southwestern coastal corner of Namibia, abutting the cold Benguela Current of the Atlantic Ocean. It forms the northern part of the Succulent Karoo biome, one of the world's top 25 biodiversity hotspots, and the only arid hotspot. The Succulent Karoo lies mainly in South Africa, extending into Namibia, and is home to an extraordinary richness of succulent plants and associated biota, some with extremely restricted ranges. It is a mediterranean-type but harsh winter-rainfall environment, a very species-rich island in the sea of the hyper-arid, summer-rainfall Namib Desert. Fog, wind, and sand movements are important ecological drivers.

Most of the Sperrgebiet has been protected for millennia by its harshness and inaccessibility. It is nearly uninhabitable by humans, and completely unsuitable for agriculture by virtue of its lack of water, fragile substrates, and the unforgiving wind which sculpts its austerely beautiful landscapes. Over most of the past century, the Sperrgebiet also has been protected because of its diamond deposits. Diamonds were found near the coastal village of Lüderitz in 1904, and coastal and riverine stretches of the area have been mined intensely under high security since then. The Namibian government now manages most of the 26,000 km² area (not including the active mining area held by the Namibia-DeBeers Corporation, which makes up about 5% of the overall area). However, more than a third of the Sperrgebiet is covered by mining and prospecting licenses issued by the Ministry of Mines and Energy, which is under pressure to open the restricted area to base metals prospecting and mining.

In 1998, a Sperrgebiet Land Use Plan was commissioned by a joint committee of the ministries of Environment and Tourism, Mines and Energy, Lands, Resettlement and Rehabilitation, and other parties to explore sustainable land use options and minimize opportunity costs of the short-term mining activities. An environmental investment fund and a natural resource accounting project in Namibia both are trying to facilitate the reinvestment of profits from unsustainable land uses into sustainable uses. Coupled with Namibia's constitution, which explicitly protects biodiversity and ecological processes in support of Namibians' welfare, and a recently completed national biodiversity strategic plan that promotes systematically derived conservation targets in biodiversity priority areas, the situation on paper in Namibia looks pretty good.

As always, however, the proof will be in the pudding, and not in the recipe book. The land use plan, prepared for the Namibian Government by Walmsley Environmental Consultants with the interministerial committee and other partners, proposes the proclamation of a multiply-zoned national park (with upgrading of zones as mines are phased out and restored). In the longer term, the park will be a major jigsaw puzzle piece in the envisaged trinational, transfrontier Namib Desert conservation area, which will link Angola in the north, Namibia at the core, and South Africa in the south.

The Sperrgebiet Land Use Plan is an excellent and visionary plan. But by April 2002 it still had not been submitted to the Namibian cabinet for approval, so the National Biodiversity Programme has resuscitated the plan and the steps toward park proclamation. The 2002 World Summit on Sustainable development provides a relatively rare window of opportunity' for fast-track political commitment, and in that light we have found good political support for the idea of a new national park--not an easy concept to promote in a country with very urgent needs for land reform and poverty alleviation. However, pockets of apathy remain, and it is not yet clear whether our efforts to proclaim the area will succeed.

Mining and conservation are not comfortable partners during the best of times, but Namibia has remarkably good mining partners. It cannot afford to forego millions of dollars in treasury revenues from diamond and zinc deposits in order to protect a remote and inaccessible biodiversity hotspot. So delicate negotiations at the political and technical levels are underway to secure commitment for a partnership of mining and conservation interests within a national park framework. At the same time, the Sperrgebiet Conservation Plan has been initiated to refine the initial land use zoning. This area-prioritization process is led by the Namibian firm EnviroScience in partnership with the National Biodiversity Programme, Directorate of Parks and Wildlife Management, and is expertly facilitated by Conservation International. The Sperrgebiet Conservation Plan is closely associated with SKEP (Succulent Karoo Ecosystem Plan), the larger, transfrontier conservation plan for the entire Succulent Karoo. SKEP is an important process facilitated by Conservation International that is similar to the very successful CAPE (Cape Action for People and Environment) program in the Cape Floristic Region, southern Africa's other top biodiversity hotspot.

The Sperrgebiet National Park will substantially increase the broad level of protection afforded to the Succulent Karoo hotspot. Strengthening of conservation measures in the adjoining Richtersveld Park in South Africa, and identification and protection of additional sites in that country, will be important outcomes of the SKEP process. Given the vulnerability of the Succulent Karoo biome to climate change and land use pressures, as demonstrated by Guy Midgley, Richard Cowling, Timm Hoffman and others, it is important to design conservation areas with process corridors to support predicted species responses. It is also essential that we have the management capacity to implement these conservation plans in the long term.

Phoebe Barnard
Namibian National Biodiversity Programme,
Directorate of Environmental Affairs,
Private Bag 13306,
Windhoek, Namibia
biodiver@iafrica.com.na or pb@dea.met.gov.na

Phoebe Barnard, Coordinator of the Namibian National Biodiversity Programme, received a 2002 Distinguished Service Award from SCB in recognition of her extraordinary contribution to conservation in Namibia, especially for putting science into practice. Building on her highly regarded research on animal ecology, Barnard has obtained the support of natural and social scientists throughout Namibia, whose expertise and energy are making the National Biodiversity Program a truly national effort.

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