South Sudan’s wildlife conservation sector has only recently come to prominence, with new evidence of species, including the largest mammalian migration on the planet, raising some of the country’s National Parks and Game Reserves to Key Biodiversity Area status. Conservation has been a late starter, due in large part to the country’s more visible needs relating to basic human requirements, political stability and lasting resolution to seven decades of recycling civil wars and armed conflicts. As a result, the management of South Sudan’s wildlife Protected Areas has not evolved in a way that may be seen elsewhere on the African continent. This is occurring amid the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, all matters acutely reflected in South Sudan today. Of these, reversing biodiversity loss presents an opportunity in the country, which could even be linked to a revenue in tourism with benefits reaching rural communities.

Given the above, the management of South Sudan’s Protected Areas is extremely complex, risking antagonism and conflict. Most issues are not new but the scale is considerable. Hence there is a requirement to examine where and how the South Sudanese people fit into the evolution of their conservation story and the future of conservation in their country. A fundamental part of this turbulent history is that the country’s many rural people are either settled inside or traverse the Protected Areas, dependant on resources provided by nature, and grazing vast herds of cattle. Baseline wildlife data, mostly from the early 1980s, lacked the technology to be accurate resulting in many key species and migrations existing outside of designated PAs. The viability of the current Protected Area network is further brought into question by recent years of flooding in the Sudd – Africa’s largest wetland – that has displaced both human and wildlife populations to compete over suitable habitat. New designated areas might lead towards the Convention on Biological Diversity’s agenda under forms of community conservancies, but approaches cannot hang on the old paradigm of ‘humans or wildlife’: this is about conservation amongst the people.

Download – The people in South Sudan’s wildlife conservation story