Five nations share the world’s second-largest parkland
The Kavango–Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area stitches Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe into about 520,000 square kilometres—the planet’s second-largest nature and landscape reserve. Nearly 287,000 of those square kilometres were already protected before the borders softened.
KAZA wraps major stretches of the Upper Zambezi and Okavango basins, including the Okavango Delta and Namibia’s Caprivi Strip, so wildlife can move where fences once stopped. Its hub is the confluence of the Zambezi and Chobe, where four of the five national borders touch, and it takes in Chobe and Hwange national parks as well as Victoria Falls. Land shares break down roughly as Botswana 30 percent, Zambia 25, Angola 17, and Namibia and Zimbabwe 14 each. The concept grew from the Shoshong Constituency Foundation and WWF, echoing earlier Okavango–Upper Zambezi tourism and Four Corners natural-resource schemes.
Tourism ministers from the five states floated the vision in 2003. They met at Katima Mulilo in Namibia; in 2006 the Southern African Development Community adopted KAZA as one of its projects and the five governments signed a memorandum of understanding at Victoria Falls. Heads of government sealed a founding treaty on 18 August 2011, and the area formally opened back in Katima Mulilo on 15 March 2012. Money later arrived from Germany’s KfW and federal budget, the World Bank, the Netherlands, and Sweden. In November 2014 Zambia and Zimbabwe launched a shared KAZA visa so visitors could cross interior frontiers without restarting paperwork, treating the mosaic as one ecological estate.
Researchers surveyed lions across the area in 2014, underscoring how large carnivores need contiguous habitat that no single capital can supply. Elephants make the point most vividly: roughly 250,000 of them roam the area, the largest population anywhere on Earth. Of the 520,000 square kilometres, some 287,132 were parks and reserves before the treaty, so the novelty lay in linking them rather than creating wilderness from scratch.
Source: Kavango–Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area
