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THE Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area established by a treaty in 2011, although the agreement between the five countries involved and the SADC endorsement goes back to 2006, now needs to move into the next level and become something considerably more than a friendly agreement.

KAZA covers 519 912 square kilometres in southeast Angola, northern Botswana, the Caprivi Strip and a north-west block in Nambia, a solid block of southwest Zambia and northwest Zimbabwe encompassing Lake Kariba and adjoining parks. 

It includes almost 200 national parks, game reserves, forest reserves and the similar under a variety of names and types.

Around 2 million people live within the conservation area, some in growing urban centres such as at Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, Livingstone in Zambia and Maun at the base of the Okavango Delta in Botswana, while others are farmers, miners and national parks staff. 

Most of those working within the area are attached directly or indirectly to the conservation agencies, and the tourism and recreation industries and even when the human population is taken into account, the population densities are low even outside the national parks and similar areas.

The concept of KAZA was to develop common conservation strategies and by allowing a large slice of Africa to become a single conservation area, to reverse the problems of continually chopping up the game and nature areas into ever smaller pieces and the resulting dangers of loss of biodiversity and isolated populations. This is a serious problem in the modern world in many areas.

So KAZA was seen as having open movement of animals across the very artificial national boundaries, allow common marketing and tourism, and to allow communities within and bordering KAZA to benefit from the conservation area and its constituent national and similar parks. A fair amount of planning has been in progress over the last 13 years as experts meet and set out their desires, and there have been some joint efforts, mainly funded by donors. 

But it would be vain to assume that we are very close to a single functioning conservation area. 

In fact, most of the parts of the five countries included have yet to create even the building blocks of national conservation areas connecting the national parks, forest lands and the like in each country. 

It must be stressed that the conservation area connects all the 46 specially protected areas, but does not replace them.

A good example is in Zimbabwe. The national section of KAZA has a high proportion of the total National Parks estate with the Hwange, Victoria Falls, Chizarira, Matusadona National Parks, the Lake Kariba Recreational Park plus a large Safari area and some other small bits of the parks estate. 

But it also includes the Hwange and Binga Rural District Councils, the Hwange Local Board and the City of Victoria Falls and all their people and livestock and even pets. 

And those people have their own needs. It is much the same into the other four countries, a greater than average part of the land set aside for specially protected areas, but still people live there.

A major part of the planning is to establish game corridors, so presumably an elephant can walk from Matusadona to Angola and back. That is not a serious oversimplification and shows the sort of total planning that is required.

We would also need to look at invasive animals and plants. Most crops and livestock die quickly without a farmer taking continual care, so none of these are going to go wild and get out of control. 

But are we listing the trees that people in Victoria Falls can plant in their gardens and road verges? 

There are also veterinary considerations. A buffalo can carry foot and mouth, and thus infect cattle upon contact with domestic cattle. So farmers will be nervous about game corridors allowing buffalo to walk across cattle range. 

But how a corridor can limit what species cross using it is an extra challenge. Much of the initial planning and studies have involved wildlife and conservation experts, possibly with some input from the tourism industry, although more is almost certainly required. 

This is fair enough, but we are possibly moving into the stages where we must also involve the local communities and the others who rely on the KAZA area. 

There is nothing impossible that has to be worked out, but a lot that must be worked out and preferably in a coordinated way with the other four countries.

This is why the meeting of the five Presidents after the relevant ministers this week in Livingstone is so important, to move KAZA into the operational phases. 

This requires budgeting from the five countries; we cannot expect the donors to carry the burden. It also requires practical commitments, and that includes financial commitments inside each country as well as the KAZA budget, still minute, but likely to grow as more gets done.

The idea of the world’s second largest transfrontier conservation area is a good one, and a noble one, and the advantages both in natural conservation and in areas like tourism are so large that it must be implemented and made fully operational. But that does require resources and time and effort.

We are now getting the leadership with the Presidents themselves giving the push, but as has been noted, this will also mean that a lot of other people, especially the communities living within the five national sections of KAZA, are going to have to be brought in and made part of the system.