ID: 949

Wildlife Connect

Wildlife Connect is an exciting initiative of WWF, and the Centre for Large Landscape Conservation is advising on its development. The partnership aims to create ecologically connected and thus climate-resilient landscapes by stopping habitat fragmentation, ensuring production lands enable wildlife flows, improving land-use planning, creating wildlife corridors, and mitigating barriers to wildlife movements such as infrastructure. Wildlife Connect has four demonstration landscapes that will be a focus of innovation, implementation, and learning: Pantanal Chaco, Southern Kenya and Northern Tanzania, Central India, and the Carpathian Bioregion (stretching across Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine). The Pantanal Chaco initiative aims to protect, manage, and restore ecological connectivity in the Pantanal-Chaco Landscape (PACHA). The transboundary area covers four countries: Argentina (Salta, Santiago del Estero, Chaco and Formosa provinces), Bolivia (Santa Cruz, Chuquisaca and Tarija departments), Brazil (Matto Groso and Matto Grosso do Sur states), and Paraguay (Presidente Hayes, Boquerón and Alto Paraguay departments). The PACHA landscape is one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet, but with industrial scale soybean and cattle production, the region is experiencing some of the highest rates of fragmentation and land conversion in the world. PACHA contains several critical jaguar conservation units and many of the continent’s critical jaguar corridors, the majority of which are categorised as ‘of concern’. To survive as a healthy ecosystem, it is critical that this threatened landscape identifies key areas of ecological connectivity and implements strategies to maintain corridors and protect the flow of wildlife and processes across the landscape. The focus of the PACHA landscape is to reduce habitat loss and fragmentation and maintain ecological connectivity. The Southern Kenya and Northern Tanzania initiative aims to link over 40 national parks, forest reserves and community conservation areas across Southern Kenya and Northern Tanzania (SOKNOT). The SOKNOT landscape includes some of the most renowned wildlife havens on Earth including the Serengeti, and one of the world’s most famous migrations – the great wildebeest migration. Most of the iconic wildlife populations found are living outside of protected areas, and wildlife corridors, the beating heart of the landscape, are under threat from land conversion, fencing, infrastructure and climate change. The focus of the SOKNOT landscape is to secure a viable future for the ecosystems and wildlife, and the environmental services provided to hundreds of communities. The Wild Connect initiative is still under development, so more specific areas of work are yet to be defined.

Planned actions

Protection of land/water

Management of land/water

Species management