Lion Conservation Projects
in 2010 Dr Pieter Kat started the process to lobby UNESCO to recognise lions as a World Heritage Species. Doing so will greatly help increase the level of conservation and protection for lions. This is an ongoing campaign with much activity behind the scenes in the form of information gathering, reporting and lobbying. Please contact us to get involved.
Stabilisation Through Conservation #StabilCon, a strategy developed by the Tsavo Trust is a holistic approach to securing stabile human and wildlife ecosystems. It rests on the premise that for sustainable development and wildlife conservation you first of all need to stabilise and secure the ecosystem. Stabilisation is achieved by:
(1) reduce physical insecurity for people and wildlife to a manageable level as a mandatory first step;
(2) use the resulting physical security as the foundation on which to build and diversify nature-based economic opportunities and access the social services enabled by greater prosperity;
(3) strengthen environmental security so that the benefits of a healthy environment, which underpins all life, can be shared between this generation and those that follow; and
(4) build more robust, equitable and representative governance systems.
LionAid and StabilCon Working Together to Help Save Wild Lion Populations
LionAid have teamed up with the StabilCon program to look at how together we can enrich our Lion conservation programs in Africa. Importantly working with local communities to put in place maintainable, scalable and collaborative programs.
LionAid Predator/Livestock Damage Mitigation Project in Kenya
Over 100 lions a year are killed in Kenya as a result of retaliatory killings by rural communities, particularly in areas where community land adjoins protected areas like National Parks and National Wildlife Reserves.
These communities are now suffering from debilitating losses of their valuable livestock to predation incidents. This vicious circle needs to be broken. Not only to safeguard the community, but also to ensure that healthy populations of wildlife can co-exist with livestock on community land.Here the big benefit of such peaceful co-existence comes into play. It paves the way for additional future sustainable employment for the communities themselves from eco-tourism and conservancy ventures. We need a sustainable scheme that compensates the communities reliably, fully and promptly for any livestock losses to predation whilst, at the same time, ensuring that their livestock enclosures (bomas) are adequately protected. Our project has been developed in collaboration with the Maasai communities themselves and has their full support. They will run the scheme themselves. Maasai Elders will decide the rules of their constitution. Once bomas are adequately protected with flashing lights,experience has shown that predation incidents drop by a margin of at least 70%.
We are delighted to say that this scheme has met with the full approval of the Kenya Government.
