Rehabilitating Protected Areas Around Lake Tanganyika

Rehabilitating the Protected Areas Around Lake Tanganyika

The LRF provided a grant to Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS) that enabled them to provide support to Zambia’s Department of Wildlife and National Parks (DNPW) for the management of the vast complex protected areas around Lake Tanganyika in the far north of the country. The area has enormous potential for recovery and the FZS / DPNW partnership offers hope that the landscape will once again be home to a large lion population. In the words of FZS, our interest in their project gave them the confidence to take this venture on – and as such, LRF funding was truly catalytic. The first grant provided support for law enforcement and a follow up grant was issued to translocate lion prey species to augment existing populations and to undertake a major de-snaring exercise involving community members to remove the remaining old snares. A third grant was issued to provide support for critical operations in light of a budget deficit arising as a result of the COVID-crisis. Emergency funds were provided to FZS’s operations in Nsumbu and North Luangwa in that grant.  A fourth grant was provided to FZS to help purchase a plane for aerial surveillance, which is critical to help detect and tackle threats to wildlife, and for monitoring of wildlife.