Regenerating the Kunene Highlands with Conserve
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Regenerating the Kunene Highlands with Conserve

August 28, 2024

In Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle, Nature, Man & Technology, the ecologist author lays out the four laws of ecology, the first of these being, “everything is connected to everything else.” At Cultivo, we not only see how this is true in nature, when we’re on site at one of our global landscape regeneration projects, we know it’s also true in our work; our projects are only possible because of close collaboration with our incredible partners.

This was true as ever on our most-recent project visit to Namibia’s Kunene Highlands Elephant Landscape, where we’ve partnered with Conserve Global and their local entity in Namibia, Kunene Conservation, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to build strong local institutions with robust governance, capacity, and financial resilience. Conserve’s aim is to deliver effective community led management of natural landscapes, creating connectivity to national parks, to unlock their enduring value for people.

The project area is enormous, roughly the size of Cyprus in northwestern Namibia, between Etosha National Park, the Kunene River Conservancies, and other conservancies neighboring Namibia’s famed Skeleton Coast. It’s a degraded grassland once populated by elephants, kudu, giraffe, black-faced impala, zebra and leopard – and currently rich with birdlife – and overlaps with ranges of numerous critically endangered, endangered, vulnerable, and near threatened species, as classified by the IUCN. It’s also home to the Herero and Himba people, who are predominantly pastoralists and have called the Kunene Highlands home for generations.

A team from Cultivo traveled to Namibia from the United States, Mexico, and the United Kingdom, respectively, and spent ten days collaborating with Conserve in South Africa; meeting with local communities, land stewards and stakeholders in Namibia to strengthen relationships and lay the groundwork for the regeneration project; and taking baseline samples of the soil, gathering data, and surveying the landscape of the Kunene Highlands.

“The Conserve team drove us into the Orupupa Conservancy, and we passed through multiple areas that the locals told us used to be lush and green grassland, that are now relatively bare or with encroaching Mopane trees growing on them,” recalled Colton Castleberry, Project Manager at Cultivo. “It was really impactful.”

“It was so eye-opening to see that the landscape has changed, and to realize that – beyond the drought – so much of the impact has come from overgrazing and a changing climate. It was sad. But, to me, it was also super motivating to think that we can help improve the landscape, and we can help the local communities at the same time.”

For Tamara Moctezuma, Cultivo’s Social Impact and Policy Manager, meeting our partners and members of the local communities was invaluable in terms of effectively planning the project work.

“We worked with Conserve and Kunene Conservation to discuss the implementation of the project, exploring potential on-the-ground activities informed by their first-hand experience in the landscape. It was information we could only have gained from speaking with them and visiting the site,” she says.

Tamara’s experience in the Kunene Highlands was noticeably peaceful. “There’s just so much space,” says Tamara. “I mean, it's one of the least-densely populated countries in the world, and you could really feel that.”

At the same time, sharing the environment with Namibia’s wildlife certainly kept her on her toes.

“There’s no barrier between you and the animals,” she laughs. “One day we came across leopard prints at our campsite, so we knew we were sharing their environment. And when I was walking at night, if I saw eyes glowing up in a tree, I had to decide quickly if they belonged to a small animal or a big animal. My nervous system was definitely functioning at a level beyond what I’m used to at home.”

Caroline Missen, Cultivo’s Chief Sustainability and Growth Officer, can attest to the team’s up-close-and-personal experiences with the Kunene’s native wildlife; the area contains the world’s tallest Tufa cliff, which is home to thousands of rosy-faced lovebirds, one of which flew directly into the side of Caroline’s head!

“I was just standing there in awe of all these birds, and then… thud!” she laughs. “Being dive bombed by a rosy-faced lovebird was a surreal experience!”

Caroline’s larger takeaways from the trip mirrored Tamara’s in terms of the importance of working with Conserve on the landscape.

“The real benefit of the trip was the time we spent with our partners at Conserve, particularly the team in Namibia,” continues Caroline. “The team is deeply experienced, having worked across sub-Saharan Africa in conservation and land management their whole lives, so they have a deep connection to the landscape.”

“And that speaks to our philosophy of doing these projects,” she says. “They really require a number of groups to collaborate and work together in order to succeed. Cultivo brings our technology, our models of the carbon potential and all the natural capital impacts, and our approach to designing high quality nature-based projects. But that designing is done in partnership with people who are intimately familiar with the landscape and the local communities. That collaboration is absolutely crucial to project success.”

“Exploring the landscape with the local team, who call it home, camping with them around a fire under the milky way at night, creates a unique connection on both a human level and with nature.”

And after Colton had a few weeks back home and time to reflect on the experience, he’s even more committed to driving the project forward.

“To go out into the Kunene Highlands, to see a place that’s so unique and know it’s a landscape we have an opportunity to help the local community to improve… it’s an experience am motivated by and know I'll carry with me for the rest of my life.”

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