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Sperrgebiet National Park proclaimed

With the proclamation of the Sperrgebiet National Park on 1st December 2008, the largest single proclamation in Africa in the past 25 years, the entire coast of Namibia is now covered by protected areas. This presents the opportunity for the creation of one huge National Park, which may be called "Namib-Skeleton Coast National Park" (hereafter NSP) - stretching along the entire Namibian coastline, a distance of 1,570 km from the Orange River in the south to the Kunene River in the north. It could comprise four main Management Areas (MAs), the "Sperrgebiet" MA (name under review by the Heritage Council) in the south, the Namib-Naukluft MA, the Central Coastal MA and the Skeleton Coast MA. At its narrowest point, in the Skeleton Coast MA, the Park extends about 25 km inland, while at its widest in the Naukluft area it extends inland about 180 km, to the top of the escarpment. Namibia would be the only continental country in the world that had its entire coastline protected as a national park. The NSP would be the 8th largest protected area in the world, the 6th largest terrestrial protected area, and the largest park in Africa, covering an area of 10.754 million hectares, or 107,540 km2.

The 10 largest protected areas in the world are as follows:

  1. Greenland's National Park (97,200,000 ha)
  2. Ar-Rub'al-Khali Wildlife Management Area, Saudi Arabia (64,000,000 ha)
  3. Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, Australia (34,500,000 ha)
  4. Northwestern Hawaiian Islands' Coral Reef Ecosystem Reserve, USA (34,000,000 ha)
  5. Amazonia Forest Reserve, Colombia (32,000,000 ha)
  6. Qiang Tang Nature Reserve, China (25,000,000 ha)
  7. Cape Churchill Wildlife Management Area, Canada (14,000,000 ha)
  8. Namib-Skeleton Coast National Park, Namibia (10,754,000 ha)
  9. Northern Wildlife Management Zone, Saudi Arabia (10,000,000 ha)
  10. Alto Orinoco-Casiquiare Biosphere Reserve, Venezuela & Bolivia (8,000,000 ha)

The NSP would not exist in isolation. In the south across the Orange River it borders on the Richtersveld in South Africa, which comprises a protected area of about 160,000 ha within a multiple use buffer zone of about 398,425 ha. This whole area forms the Ai- Ais/Richtersveld Transfrontier Conservation Area (TFCA) under a formal cooperative Agreement between the Governments of Namibia and South Africa.

To the north across the Kunene River it borders on the Iona National Park in Angola, which covers about 585,000 ha. The Governments of Namibia and Angola have signed an Agreement to promote transfrontier cooperation between these parks.

In Namibia the NSP is contiguous with a large number of protected areas, concessions, conservancies and private land managed for conservation. Most notable amongst these are the following:

In total the NSP would border onto over 14 million ha of land and sea that is managed primarily for wildlife, biodiversity, conservation and tourism. Together with the NSP, this represents a contiguous area of almost 25 million ha. The terrestrial component in Namibia covers 28% of the land area of Namibia. One of the greatest challenges, with potentially the greatest rewards, is to develop effective, constructive and efficient co-management mechanisms across these sea- and landscapes to optimize both the environmental (including biodiversity) and socioeconomic values, while at the same time using these open systems to (a) mitigate and buffer the impacts of climate change, and (b) create incentives for neighbouring land owners and custodians to become part of this conservation landscape. The NSP would cover the coastal biome and three terrestrial biomes, namely the hyper-arid Namib Desert, the Nama Karoo and the Succulent Karoo.

[2 Dec 2008]

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