Rewilding a desert
In Southern Namibia, the Orange River-Karoo Conservation Area (ORKCA) is rewilding a landscape devastated by biodiversity loss. Supported by the Perpetual Planet Initiative since 2023, the project is creating a conservation corridor where landscape, wildlife and community thrive.
Over the past 100 years, commercial farming in the ǁKaras region of Southern Namibia has transformed the landscape into a patchwork of farm holdings and reduced the region’s biodiversity by 90 per cent. As fences went up, natural processes like the trekbokken – a seasonal migration of more than 10 million springbok – were disrupted and the harmonious relationship between predator, prey, landscape and community was threatened. The ǁKaras region, the largest and least populated expanse in Namibia, has suffered more local extinctions than anywhere else in sub-Saharan Africa – a devastating loss for an area that straddles three distinctive biomes: the Succulent Karoo, Nama Karoo and the desert.
