Can Africa Save Its Wildlife and Grow Its Economy at the Same Time?

Africa stands at a crossroads that will define the fate of the planet’s most spectacular wildlife and hundreds of millions of people who depend on it. A sweeping new scoping review published in BMC Environmental Science examines a quarter-century of research on the tangled relationship between biodiversity conservation and socio-economic development across the continent, and its conclusions are both sobering and hopeful. Researchers Kelvin Ngongolo and Moses Kyando of the University of Dodoma in Tanzania systematically analysed peer-reviewed studies published between 2000 and 2024, asking a deceptively simple question: how do efforts to conserve biodiversity intersect with human activities and economic development in the African context? Their answer reveals a continent where the fates of elephants, pollinators, forests and farming families are bound together in ways that no single policy can untangle.

The scale of the review is impressive. The researchers searched four major databases, PubMed, Scopus, Google Scholar and AGRICOLA, using carefully constructed Boolean search strings that combined terms for biodiversity conservation, ecosystem protection, human impacts, socio-economic development, poverty alleviation and sustainable development with geographic terms covering Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. That search identified 439 publications. After applying the rigorous four-step PRISMA process of identification, screening, eligibility and inclusion, only 36 studies survived the methodological gauntlet. Of those, roughly 64 percent focused on conservation initiatives themselves, including protected areas, community-based management and the human activities that threaten biodiversity, while the remaining 36 percent examined socio-economic outcomes such as ecosystem services, carbon sequestration, tourism and recreation. The narrow funnel is itself telling: far fewer studies than expected rigorously connect ecological data with economic outcomes, leaving policy-makers to navigate a landscape of fragmented evidence.

The theoretical backbone of the review rests on three frameworks that give the findings analytical teeth. The Sustainable Livelihoods Framework examines how conservation affects the five capitals that rural households depend on: natural, financial, human, social and physical. The Human-Environment Systems framework treats ecological health and human well-being as a single dynamic system, making trade-offs and synergies visible rather than hidden. The Capability Approach, rooted in human development thinking, asks whether biodiversity initiatives expand or constrain the freedoms and opportunities available to African communities. Together, these lenses shift the debate away from the tired framing of fences versus people, and toward a systems view in which conservation success and human prosperity are treated as coupled variables that rise or fall together.

The evidence for coupling is striking. In Tanzania’s Kihansi River Basin, the successful reintroduction of the Kihansi spray toad, a species once extinct in the wild, depended directly on involving local communities in natural resource management, demonstrating that inclusive governance can rescue even the most technically demanding conservation programmes. In East Africa, research on pastoralist-wildlife interactions found that coexistence can actually improve local livelihoods and incomes, countering the assumption that livestock and wildlife are always in conflict. Yet the same continent offers cautionary examples: in South Africa’s Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, interactions between people, livestock and wildlife drive disease transmission, including foot-and-mouth disease and trypanosomiasis, alongside fierce competition for grazing and water. In Tanzania’s Maasai Steppe, expanding agriculture and pastoralism are accelerating land-use change with significant consequences for biodiversity. The lesson is that context determines everything, and interventions imported without local adaptation routinely fail.

The threats catalogued in the review read like a diagnosis of a patient in intensive care. Rapid population growth and urbanisation are projected to consume between 11 and 33 million hectares of natural habitat globally by 2100, with African urban expansion running above the global average and fragmenting the corridors that large mammals need to survive. Agricultural expansion, from cotton cultivation in the Mid-Zambezi Valley to broad-scale cropland conversion in West Africa, destroys habitat while pesticides and monoculture farming degrade what remains. Industrial and domestic pollution has pushed toxic metal concentrations in some East African agro-ecosystems beyond FAO and WHO soil health limits, and poor urban waste management in South Africa and elsewhere drives respiratory and waterborne disease in low-income communities. Overexploitation compounds the pressure: overfishing depletes marine and freshwater stocks, charcoal burning and overharvesting strip woodlands, and poaching has devastated iconic species.

The poaching statistics are among the most dramatic in the entire review. Tanzania’s elephant population collapsed by 72 percent between 1977 and 1991, falling from roughly 203,000 animals to 57,334, with the heaviest losses concentrated in the Selous Game Reserve and Serengeti National Park. Black rhinos suffered similarly catastrophic declines. The review notes that trade bans under CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, have been a cornerstone of protection for four decades, but it also flags a worrying set of factors that sustain illegal trade: inelastic demand for ivory and rhino horn, a long trading history, ambiguous property rights, negative economic incentives and inadequate enforcement. Responses have included Tanzania’s nationwide Operation UHAI and the global ivory ban, and the review argues that future efforts should pair robust law enforcement with advanced technologies such as drones and AI-based monitoring.

Governance emerges as perhaps the single most decisive variable. In a study of 109 resource management areas, law enforcement was the key factor determining great ape survival, outweighing even the economic benefits of tourism or research. Weak governance, corruption and poor enforcement of conservation laws allow illegal activities to flourish, and armed conflict makes everything worse: during civil unrest, weakened conservation capacity opens the door to poaching, habitat destruction and wildlife trafficking, as the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Virunga National Park illustrates. Invasive alien species add another layer of biological stress, with South Africa’s Cape region contending with dozens of established invaders, from wattles and pines to Eastern grey squirrels, that alter fire regimes, water resources and even urban infrastructure. Climate change interacts synergistically with all of these drivers, shifting species distributions, stressing sub-Saharan fisheries and, in Tanzania, projected to shrink suitable habitat for three tsetse fly species by 12.9 to 23.1 percent by 2050, a change that doubles as a predictor of sleeping sickness hotspots.

Yet the review is emphatic that conservation, done well, pays. Healthy ecosystems deliver pollination, clean air, water purification, soil fertility, pest control, climate regulation, flood protection, tourism revenue, cultural value, genetic resources and fisheries. The numbers are concrete: afforestation could mitigate an estimated 4.9 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide per year by 2050 at a cost of about 200 US dollars per tonne, while Kenya’s Mukogodo dryland forest landscape stores a cumulative 682 tonnes of carbon per hectare in forest reserves and generates sequestration potential worth roughly 40 million US dollars annually. Ecotourism employment across Southern Africa has measurably lifted rural household incomes and improved community perceptions of conservation. National parks such as Kruger, Serengeti and Virunga anchor legal protection, scientific research and tourism economies simultaneously. The review’s schematic logic is straightforward: where biodiversity is depleted through overexploitation, communities lose nearly everything, from tourism income to pollination services; where it is managed wisely through parks, reserves, reforestation and ecotourism, benefits flow sustainably.

The path forward, according to the authors, demands integration rather than trade-offs. Their recommendations include strengthening collaborative conservation strategies across borders, adopting sustainable and pollinator-friendly agriculture, expanding protected areas, deepening community-based conservation with genuine financial incentives, and implementing targeted policies that support both ecological resilience and human well-being. Innovative financing, public-private partnerships and inclusive governance structures all feature prominently. The review is candid about its own limits: reliance on secondary data may miss local nuance, the continental scope smooths over country-specific ecological and political realities, and marine biodiversity, indigenous knowledge and industrialisation impacts remain under-researched. Future work, the authors argue, should prioritise long-term monitoring, interdisciplinary collaboration, scalable models and emerging tools such as artificial intelligence and remote sensing.

What makes this review resonate beyond academic circles is its refusal to treat Africa’s biodiversity as a luxury to be protected from Africans. The evidence assembled here shows that the continent’s wildlife, forests and fisheries are not obstacles to development but infrastructure for it, as fundamental as roads and power grids. When enforcement fails, when communities are excluded, when agriculture expands without ecological guardrails, both nature and livelihoods collapse together. When parks, people and policy align, as the Kihansi toad’s return and the carbon-rich forests of northern Kenya demonstrate, prosperity and biodiversity reinforce each other. For a continent whose ecosystems underpin economies from the Serengeti to the Zambezi, that insight may be the most valuable export of all.

Subject of Research: The relationship between biodiversity conservation and socio-economic development in Africa

Article Title: Biodiversity conservation and socio-economic development for Africa’s harmonious future: a scoping review

Article References: Ngongolo, K., & Kyando, M. (2025). Biodiversity conservation and socio-economic development for Africa’s harmonious future: a scoping review. BMC Environmental Science, 2(1), Article 11. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44329-025-00021-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44329-025-00021-x

Keywords: biodiversity conservation, Africa, socio-economic development, protected areas, community-based conservation, poaching, climate change, ecosystem services, urbanization, sustainable agriculture, wildlife trade, scoping review