Pride in Our Prides: Innovative Approaches to Promote Human-Lion Coexistence

CLAWS works in the Wildlife Management Areas north of the Okavango Delta, Botswana. This area is of key importance to lion conservation, both as a result of housing part of one of the continent’s largest populations, but also as a connectivity pathway with nearby Namibia and Angola. CLAWS engages communities to promote human-lion coexistence and improve livestock management of livestock to restore degraded rangelands. CLAWS has developed a first-of-its-kind Lion Alert System that generates real-time warnings when lions approach local villages.  These warnings are dispersed to the preferences of the individual livestock owner by language (English or Setswana) or media (text or audio) to improve the preventative protection of livestock. These measures are likely to reduce depredation of livestock and thus retaliatory killing of lions by communities. The first LRF grant helped support the establishment of the Lion Alert System and building the first Communal Herding Program in Botswana. A second grant was provided to CLAWS in late 2020 to help strengthen the organization, to build indigenous leadership capacity and to support a strategic planning process to focus conservation efforts in the years to come.  The third, and current, grant, provided support for a fleet of new satellite collars to extend the Lion Alert System and a field vehicle to improve monitoring efforts for lions and their prey.