By Nneka Nwogwugwu
Tanzanian government has been urged to speed up the process of gazetting wildlife corridors in order to improve wildlife protection from severe decline and extinction.
Wildlife corridors are places considered to be safe transition zones for migratory animals.
Sometimes, animals may live and thrive in these places indefinitely, however, the corridors have recently been encroached by human activities.
The Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA) senior lecturer in the Department of Wildlife Management, Dr Alfan Rija, said Tanzania was probably the remaining country on earth that retains the largest wildlife migration zones that could accommodate over two million wild animals.
He said the survival of such migratory animals required intact corridors, urging that failure to gazette the corridors will see the country losing the wildlife to other favourable ecosystems.
“In the previous years, Europe and other continents had wildlife migration. But, human destruction on the corridors leading to disappearance of migratory animals. Tourists arriving in the country in large numbers are attracted by the natural resources we have,” he said.
Dr Rija was speaking at the Burunge Wildlife Management Area when tabling his presentation titled: ‘Relevance of wildlife corridor in biodiversity efforts are needed to ensure the GN is put in place’.
The event was organized by Traffic which is an organization that was established by World Wide Fund (WWF) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Traffic acts as a wildlife trade monitoring network to undertake data collection, analysis, and provision of recommendations to inform decision making on wildlife trade.
Burunge WMA secretary Benson Mwaise said almost every authority knows the essentiality of wildlife corridors, noting that all procedures including prerequisite meetings have been conducted for the corridors to be gazetted.
“It is the government gazetting is what has remained. The move will reduce human encroachment of the corridors and put those violating the corridors’ laws and regulations to task,” he said.
Source: The Citizen
