The Uganda Wildlife Authority released figures earlier this month showing a continued positive trend of elephant numbers in Queen Elizabeth National Park. The latest game survey puts their population around the 3,000 mark, an increase of more than 500 from the last count in 2004.
Playing teeter totter on the wind-bowed palm trees.
Reading my name in the sand.
Crabs crawling over each other in a light green bucket.
These are my memories of Mombasa, Kenya’s key coastal city. We went there often and the very name of the place makes me smile.
In an effort to give Kenya’s tourism industry an edge over its competitors, the Kenyan government has been looking for an investor to fund a $30 million, fully-fledged cruise ship terminal at the Port of Mombasa.
However, these plans were recently shelved. The government failed to find a strategic partner to invest in the facility, as many pulled their support after realizing that the project was not viable.
“The response was not good at all,” said Transport Permanent Secretary Gerishon Ikiara. “The investors could not fathom such a huge investment, saying it did not guarantee returns because the terminal would just act as a gate allowing cruise ships in to dock.”
Plan B s to improve the existing terminal being used by cruise ships. This new strategy, with an estimated price tag of $3 million, will include refurbishing the landing facilities and upgrading the road from the port to the town.
“What we have come to realise,” said Ikiara, “is that the cruise business will thrive in this country if there is a good road network integrated with the landing facilities at the port.”
“Cruise tourism is one of the fastest growing industries in the world,” said Auni Kanji, the managing director of Abercrombie and Kent, the ground handler for cruise ships in Kenya. “What the government needs to do is to improve the facilities without going for major investments, because the port is the first impression that the tourists get of the country.”
“Expanded budgets and antipoaching patrols since the mid-1980s have significantly reduced poaching and allowed populations of buffalo, elephants and rhinoceros to rebuild,” states the authors of a paper published in today’s issue of Science.
This technique has been used since the 1930s to estimate the abundance of fish. Now, a recent study has proved for the first time that enforcement patrols are effective at reducing poaching of elephants, African buffaloes and black rhinos in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania.
“Wildlife within protected areas is under increasing threat from the bushmeat and illegal trophy trades,” says Ray Hilborn, University of Washington professor of aquatic and fishery sciences and lead author of a paper, “and many argue that enforcement within protected areas is not sufficient to protect wildlife. Some say the $2 million spent annually in the Serengeti on patrols would be better spent on other preventive activities.”
However, his research proves otherwise. “The animals are ‘telling’ us poaching is down now that there are 10 to 20 patrols a day compared to the mid-1980s when there might be 60 or fewer patrols a year.” Hilborn says.
Previously, estimates of poaching have been difficult to verify. Therefore, Hilborn and his co-authors used the decades-old technique of catch-per-unit-of-effort, which has been to estimate fish abundance and set fishing limits.
The Serengeti has a 50-year-record of arrests and patrols. To estimate the amount of poaching, the paper’s authors divided the number of poachers arrested by the number of patrols a day, assuming that arrests per patrol were representative of poaching intensity.
“We show that a precipitous decline in enforcement in 1977 resulted in a large increase in poaching and decline of many species,” Hilborn and his co-authors wrote.
A press release announcing these findings stated:
The National Science Foundation funded, at least in part, the research.