Enhanced Management of Protected Areas Estate in Ethiopia

Towards a Solution

The project seeks to counter the threats to biodiversity and overcome the barriers to effective management of protected areas and to combat illegal wildlife trade. It supports Ethiopia’s capacity for biodiversity conservation through increased effectiveness of protected area management and implementation of measure to reduce illegal wild life trade and poaching. The project will contribute to long-term global environmental impacts including the recovery of wildlife populations, conservation of habitat and agro-biodiversity. The project aims to: improve protected area management in the targeted protected areas; site level law enforcement initiatives supported; management system for wildlife products and live animals that are confiscated, seized and collected; legislation guidance for law enforcement agencies is developed; microeconomic schemes for local communities developed and implemented.

As of 2019 the project has achieved the following results: deploying sniffer dogs at Bole international airport, setting up of database on ecological trends on Illegal Wildlife Trafficking. Moreover, as part of mitigation of human-wildlife conflict, a plan is being developed for the production of a toolkit describing the procedures to be used for mitigating the conflicts.

As part of the project, South- South experience sharing visit was conducted in Kenya, Sri Lanka, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia. Extensive lessons have been learned in the areas of: efficient wildlife product management, collaborative law enforcement at various levels (site, regional, national and international levels); approaches used to increase efficiency of detection of illegal wildlife products—particularly on the use of sniffer dogs at airports—; community-based protected area management; mitigation of Human-Elephant Conflict, nature-based ecotourism; trans frontier protected area management; Ecological monitoring, database management and dissemination of information; community outreach; handling orphanage animals.