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Namibian Wildlife Crimes article archive
This archive of published media articles about wildlife crime in Namibia aims to:
- provide easy public access to published information and statistics
- enable easy stakeholder access to articles
- provide a comprehensive archive of wildlife crime reporting in Namibia
Public access to information is a vital component of ensuring community engagement in prevalent issues. Wildlife crime is one of the pressing environmental issues of our time.
Wildlife crime investigations are generally covert operations requiring utmost confidentiality to succeed. Investigations and prosecutions in complex cases may take months or even years to complete. For this reason, the information that can be released to the public without compromising cases is often limited. Nonetheless, the Namibian government strives to share as much information as possible with the public.
The Namibian media has welcomed this approach and regularly publishes statistics and feature articles on wildlife crime. These are entered into the database at regular intervals, creating a comprehensive archive of wildlife crime reporting in Namibia.
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Plant poaching has been the final straw for some. Conservationists say there’s no time to lose, as they consider an ecological triage for the most at-risk species here. "The most important thing we can do is to reduce other threats on these species, to make sure that the pressure of land transformation, for agriculture, for mining, overgrazing, and, of course, succulent plant poaching, all of these disrupt those systems and really reduce the resilience and the opportunities they have to adapt on their own.
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| SA_2025_03_Bleak future for Karoo succulents as desert expands in South Africa_Mongabay.pdf | 602.08 KB |
South Africa has faced a surge in poaching of rare succulents by criminal syndicates since 2019. A recent spike in prices paid for a different kind of plant, a drylands-adapted lily, the miracle clivia (Clivia mirabilis), has drawn the attention of plant-trafficking syndicates to the lone reserve where it grows. Large numbers of clivias have been seized by law enforcement, raising fears that this rare plant is quickly being wiped out from the limited range where it’s known to occur.
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| SA_2024_12_Poachers target South Africas miracle plant with near impunity_Mongabay.pdf | 616.41 KB |
Kanyaruchinya, Democratic Republic of Congo - Amid a circle of spectators, a troupe of performers takes center stage. Songs resound, accompanied by the beat of drums and lively dances. A large banner carries a powerful message: "The future of our environment depends on our behavior today." The drumming soon gives way to a play performed in Swahili. We're in Kanyaruchinya, in the Nyiragongo territory of North Kivu province in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Some 200,000 people have sought refuge in the southern part of the province, seeing a conflict that has been raging since…
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| DRC_2024_12_DRCs reliance on charcoal threatens forests and fuels armed conflict_Mongabay.pdf | 472.3 KB |
The most comprehensive data on poaching of African elephants comes from the Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants (MIKE) program, which reports numbers of illegally killed carcasses encountered by rangers. Recent studies utilizing MIKE data have reported that poaching of African elephants peaked in 2011 and has been decreasing through 2018. Closer examination of these studies, however, raises questions about the conclusion that poaching is decreasing throughout the continent.
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| State_space models reveal a continuing elephant poaching problem in most of Africa.pdf | 382.92 KB |