Technology has become integrated into most aspects of human society, why are we not using it to advance conservation efforts in Africa?
By Andrew Stein, CLAWS Founder and Director
There is a common misconception that wildlife and technology are incompatible in Africa, where only 28% of the population uses the internet.
However, with the recent call from the United Nations to bridge the gap between conservation and technology on the back of World Wildlife Day, the plea to incorporate the two has never been greater.
In 2013, I began working on a lion conservation project in Botswana’s Okavango Delta in response to regional poisoning that was claiming the lives of vast numbers of wildlife, including up to 50% of the lion population in a single year. Poison is indiscriminate, not only killing targeted lions but also endangered vultures and other scavengers essential to ecosystem health.
Although these large carnivores have always played crucial roles in regulating ecosystems that enhance human well-being and significantly contribute to tourism economies, safeguarding them is far from easy, particularly due to their tendency to prey on valuable livestock in communal lands. The economic ramifications of livestock losses to wildlife can be severe, with households enduring substantial income shocks as a single predation event may result in the loss of up to two-thirds of their personal wealth.
Faced with this situation, we came up with a two-pronged approach to protect the community’s resources whilst also ensuring the survival and prosperity of both humans and wildlife alike.
We established Claws Conservancy in 2014 to address the underlying conflict issues that led to the devastating poisoning events. Most villagers felt that lions were a conflict species, so we felt that sharing the stories of individual lions might help bring awareness and understanding to conflict mitigation strategies. We put satellite tracking collars on individuals within different social groups and asked the villagers to name the individual lions in their local language to foster a deep connection. Once named, we could share their pride dynamics and conflict risk.
Through the satellite collars, real-time data on the lions’ whereabouts would be relayed to a cloud-based platform, which would then dynamically compute their proximity to nearby villages, homesteads, and cattle posts, promptly dispatching SMS alerts to residents as they would draw near. Recipients received the messages in the media (text or voicemail) and language (English or Setswana) that they preferred to make the messages more actionable. Upon receiving these notifications, individuals would be able to swiftly enact preventive measures, such as corralling their livestock and igniting controlled fires to discourage approaching lions.
Thanks to the resources provided by Tusk, this system has, since its inception in 2019, continued to prove successful, with over 20,000 alerts recorded by 2022 and a significant reduction in the number of clashes between humans and wildlife. Lion poisoning has ceased and the population has rebounded.
Similarly, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in this sphere is also becoming more widespread, with many parks across Africa beginning to use different camera trapping devices that can actually analyse the shape of animals in real-time. This can be very valuable when there are limited resources in the field, streamlining processes for greater efficiency and lower costs.
Ultimately, technology is not going to solve all our problems, but it can offer environmental research and methods to make better choices, as long as local communities are at the heart of it. For generations, African people have understood how to live and coexist with wildlife, and they therefore have more answers than we in the West ever will.
Recognising this and uplifting their voices is the only way forward — the only way in which we can successfully digitalise conservation and realise that it is indeed compatible with technology.
