Our solutions
Climate resilience
Room to Roam endeavours to build climate-resilient landscapes in East and southern Africa where human communities and wild animals can thrive together, despite the challenges they face from climate change.
Protecting, restoring, and effectively managing biodiverse ecosystems and landscapes highly vulnerable to climate change, land-use change, and environmental degradation helps maintain existing carbon stocks. These actions also capture and store atmospheric carbon dioxide, further restoring and increasing biodiversity and improving the long-term availability of the ecosystem services upon which people and wild animals depend to flourish.
Therefore, by supporting vulnerable communities, local businesses, and local authorities to adopt low-carbon practices and appropriate forms of renewable energy, we help people reduce their environmental impact and build landscapes resilient to climate change. As households and communities transition away from environmentally incompatible livelihood practices, the drivers of biodiversity loss that threaten endangered species and contribute to climate change are mitigated.
Landscapes benefit in many ways through climate-smart agriculture, embracing regenerative farming techniques, agroforestry, beekeeping, and improved livestock management. These include increased biodiversity, soil and water conservation, improved ecosystem health and landscape resilience, and climate change mitigation through avoided deforestation and carbon sequestration.
Science
Based on more than 20 years of science, Room to Roam aims to maintain persistent elephant populations in a matrix of connected habitats in East and southern Africa. To assess the health of elephant populations, their potential to persist in the long term, and their ability to respond to disturbance and/or management interventions, IFAW uses methods established by the University of Pretoria’s Conservation Ecology Research Unit. A deep understanding of elephant population dynamics and demography informs this work.
Our studies show that some local elephant populations have declined throughout their fragmented landscapes to the point that they are vulnerable to extinction. Other populations, however, appear to thrive.
These ‘populations of populations’—metapopulations—require massive space. Room to Roam’s scientific foundation validates the need to secure space and connectivity to link these isolated populations, stabilising elephant numbers naturally and making the species more resilient to climate change and other threats.
People
Room to Roam acknowledges that elephants and other wildlife need access to vast areas outside formally protected areas as they seek food, water, safety, and other wildlife. As they do so, however, they are more likely to interact and even come into conflict with local communities.
At its core, Room to Roam embraces community involvement as the key to conservation success. Therefore, IFAW works with people closest to the animals and habitats we strive to protect. Our approach is to work with local communities to develop and implement case-specific, co-designed strategies that promote human-wildlife co-existence.
IFAW’s experience clearly shows that when communities are engaged as key stakeholders, they are more likely to participate in wildlife protection programs benefitting their daily lives, even if those benefits are only indirectly linked to wildlife. This is why IFAW is committed to providing communities with wide-ranging support.
Key elements are:
- improving literacy
- improving money management skills and access to banking for income generated by land leases, small businesses, and investments
- developing appropriate and compatible land-use policies
- promoting climate resilient agriculture
- creating frameworks and governance for land trusts and conservancies
- developing skills and promoting alternative, sustainable livelihood practices that do not solely rely on exploiting wildlife
In doing so, we acknowledge that supporting the increased devolution of wildlife conservation primarily overseen by central government agencies towards community-led management, often with oversight by traditional leaders, comes with challenges and political sensitivities. Managing this transition is one of the key reasons we’ve established the Conservation Network of Traditional Leaders in Africa to amplify their participation in ambitious conservation efforts.
Rescue to release
Every elephant is crucial to the survival of the species. That’s why IFAW works with elephant nurseries in Zimbabwe and Zambia that rescue and rehabilitate orphaned elephant calves, giving them each a second chance at life in the wild. When the orphans reach three to five years of age, they are often ready to be transferred to a reintegration site, where they interact with free-roaming wild elephants. Their final release completes our rescue-rehabilitation-release cycle, but we also support the post-release monitoring of animals to track their movements and understand their behaviour as part of wild families as well as to ensure their safety.
Every problem has a solution, every solution needs support.
The problems we face are urgent, complicated, and resistant to change. Real solutions demand creativity, hard work, and involvement from people like you.