South Africa: Covid-19 Could ‘Devastate’ Nature and Parks Without Emergency Funding Plan

Warning bells have been sounded that the current pandemic and its aftermath could undermine decades of conservation effort, with, for instance, 75% of the tourism income from wildlife safaris in Africa drying up overnight, and government budgets being cut and diverted.

Rather like teenagers gifted with magic credit cards, most governments and companies find it easier to raid rather than to replenish the Bank of Nature.

You need only glance at the criteria for measuring a nation’s Gross Domestic Product to appreciate that GDP accounting is closely akin to a calculator with no minus symbols.

Extract timber – press plus. Extract minerals – press plus. Extract clean water – press plus again.

But when the tropical forests have been felled, coal and gold hauled from the bowels of the Earth and clean water sources fouled or depleted… well, who presses the minus buttons?

And now that the Covid-19 wolf is howling at the door, will the global Nature Bank sink deeper into overdraft as governments focus attention more narrowly on economic and social recovery plans?

Writing in the latest issue of Parks, a journal of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a group of 32 global conservation…