Conservationists meeting in Kigali for the ongoing Africa Protected Areas Congress (APAC) have urged African governments to approve the establishment of  A Pan-African Conservation Trust (A-PACT), which will help mobilise resources for the conservation of Africa’s protected areas.

The call to ratify A-PACT was made by Hailemariam Desalegn Boshe, the former prime minister of Ethiopia during the discussions on "Needed African-driven innovative and sustainable financing solutions.”

Desalegn was speaking in his capacity as chairperson of the A-PACT steering committee and also the patron of APAC.  

The A-PACT concept has been co-created by the Africa Protected Area Directors (APAD) in collaboration with the co-organisers of APAC; the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

The initiative is seeking $200bn for a pan-African trust fund that would ensure sufficient and sustained financing for all of Africa’s 8,500 protected and conserved areas in perpetuity.

Not beggars

"We should have funding but we should have a segregated way of doing it. We need to have our own pan-African conservation trust. That is what we are trying to advocate for and maybe we will be launching very soon this fund which global community can contribute to it,” Desalegn said.

However, he said: "Africans we should contribute first. We shouldn’t be seen as beggars. We are not beggars. We should stand up and put our own resources into conservation.”

He noted that the African Union has already decided by its 2063 agenda clearly how to implement it.

"We need to understand the current status of African protected areas properly. Most of these protected areas are degraded parks,” Desalegn said.

While Africa is said to have 8,500 protected areas, the former Ethiopian Prime Minister said there is need for identifying those that are in the worst state.

"They are underfunded, they are undervalued,” he said.

He urged African finance ministers to consider protected areas in GDP as African assets.

"We have huge wealth in Africa but never valued it. We have to see first the intact areas. For example, out of 8,500 protected areas, we have to see key areas for conservation and humanity and focus on community conservation areas where communities can do better than we do,” he said.

The Minister for Environment, Jeanne d’Arc Mujawamariya said that governments should put green finance at the heart of planning.

"Rwanda has put environment at the heart of every policy, programmes and projects. Finance ministers should sit together with ministers in charge of environment to ensure planning in finance; environment is put at the centre,” she said.

She made the case for finance to conserve protected areas so that tourism revenues from them benefit communities.

"Rwanda allocates 10 percent of tourism revenues to support communities around the protected national parks," she said.

Financing gap

"Africa spends less than 10 percent of what is needed to protect and restore nature. Now is the time to invest in the areas set aside as the backbone of natural infrastructure that underpins the aspirations we have set out in Agenda 2063,” reads part of a policy brief on financing protected areas.

"This is an investment we cannot afford not to make. It is central to a just transition for Africa,” conservationists said.

According to the trust fund co-creators, there is the opportunity to close the financing gap for biodiversity, which is estimated globally to be as much as $700 billion, or less than one percent of global GDP.

Africa spends less than 10 percent of what is needed to protect and restore nature, they say.

Using estimated management costs of between $380 and $1000 per km2 to effectively manage a protected area, they said, the financing required for existing African protected and conserved areas is somewhere between $2.63-6.7 billion annually.

Most protected areas in Africa are managed on less than $50/sqkm.

Facing shortfalls, Protected Area managers are left without sufficient funds to pay staff and core operational costs.

Source of funding

A Pan-African Conservation Trust (A-PACT) would address this gap in Africa through a private, legally independent sustainable financing mechanism for Africa’s protected and conserved areas supported by an aligned African leadership and financed through global resource mobilization for ‘green growth’ Covid-19 recovery, among other sources, explains the concept.