While communities in the conservation sector are already battling the impacts of climate change-induced human-wildlife conflict (HWC), the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has greatly exacerbated the situation. As we have indicated, Namibia's frequent droughts over the past few years have encouraged the movement of wildlife such as elephant closer to human settlements, searching especially for water and resulting in competition with people for already scarce resources. As in Kenya, where climate change has also been observed to contribute to HWC, particularly with elephants (Mukeka et al. 2019), these combined circumstances have escalated HWC in communities in Namibia's communal-area conservancies.1 Instead of revenues from conservation hunting and tourism being spent on addressing developmental challenges facing communities, they are being rerouted to address climate change-induced human-wildlife conflict. Recent funding acquired from the Green Climate Fund through the Environmental Investment Fund of Namibia has thus been prioritising water infrastructure maintenance in the conservancies to address the current water situation for conservation and reducing human-wildlife conflict. 2 Apart from supporting water infrastructure, different insurance schemes have also been put in place to cover the cost of HWC in communities in Namibia, as well as globally (Leslie et al. 2019). During 2020, already hard-hit revenues from the conservation and tourism efforts of local communities, became further severely affected by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which halted the inflow of tourism and conservation hunting revenue into conservancies, because of the closure of international borders which disrupted tourism arrivals. These events seriously limited revenue inflow and slowed down conservation and monitoring interventions including addressing human-wildlife conflicts, thereby additionally increasing communities' vulnerabilities in rural, wildlife-rich areas (Lendelvo et al. 2020). We trace these interconnections in more detail for two specific communal-area conservancies below, drawing on a survey with which we were involved. 3 This survey formed part of the project Integrated Approach to Proactive Management of Human-wildlife Conflict and Wildlife Crime in Hotspot Landscapes in Namibia (UNDP 2020), carried out for Namibia's Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism (MEFT), and supported by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) through the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).