Africa is the last continent on Earth where giants roam. Elephants, lions, rhinos, giraffes and more stand majestically at the peak of the ecosystem, ensuring it endures. But from the mammoth of Europe to the two-tonne wombat of Australia, humanity's journey out of Africa was rapidly followed by the slaughter and extinction of the large beasts that the travellers found.
And now it is happening in Africa too, with plummeting numbers of many animals in the famed Masai Mara and Okavango Delta. Fast-growing populations demand more land for food, destroying habitats. Poachers choose bushmeat over starvation, chased by few poorly paid rangers. New roads cut across migration routes, with legal protections for wildlife often missing or unenforced.
But what can be done? Conservationists across the continent are doing great work in small patches and with different approaches. But they agree on one thing: money talks.
That can come from tourism, which is conspicuously successful in places such as the Kruger national park in South Africa, where visitors pay handsomely to admire the fauna. But that cannot be the only solution. The Masai Mara in Kenya is equally iconic and is suffering. For the many poorer, war ravaged nations in Africa, the prospect of attracting rich westerners for holidays is a forlorn hope. Even in Gabon, a relatively rich nation, attempts led by the president to found safari tourism have floundered.
More and better linked national parks, with better law enforcement and less corruption, is another tactic that has halted the decline in places. But political will weakens quickly when faced with human hunger or deep drought, and the risk of being shot as a poacher is too often outweighed by the risk of an empty plate. The parks then exist only on paper, not on the ground.
Yet there are flickers of hope. A tiny primate project in Nigeria, for example, has successfully protected a forest and its inhabitants by putting the community at the heart of its operations.
And that is the key. Like climate change, also disrupting Africa's wildlife, the problem of wildlife declines is fundamentally the problem of poverty. Making the fauna and flora worth more when it is alive than when it is dead is vital. Do that and local people will gladly take the responsibility and jealously protect their natural assets.
Tourism can play a part in creating that value. Certification schemes for wood, food and other goods produced in a wildlife-friendly way would allow western shoppers to play a part, without incurring the carbon footprint of a long-haul flight. A potential gamechanger for Africa's vast forests could be the UN-backed scheme to pay carbon credits to preserve trees threatened by chainsaws.
In these ways, humanity's attempt to wipe out the last of the planet's great creatures can been foiled. And the people who, until recently, had happily shared Africa's lands with its magnificent animals for millennia will be able to go on doing so.
