- Zambia’s Kafue National Park, co-managed by Zambia’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife and conservation NGO African Parks, is home to up to 22 different species of antelopes, the highest diversity in Africa, more than 500 species of birds and at least 2,400 hippos in the river from which the park takes its name.
- Park manager Craig Reid says the nine game management areas that provide a buffer zone around the park have been modified in one way or another — including by climate-affected farmers and livestock herders — and illegal hunting also poses a threat to the core zone’s ecological integrity, as does pollution from mining and large settlements upstream.
- But, he says, around 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres) of the GMA buffer remains completely unsettled, and the park and the stretch of the Kafue that runs through it are doing well – more than $4 million worth of fish is sustainably caught within its boundaries every year.
- African Parks plans to introduce as many as 60 black rhinos to Kafue NP in the coming years and has already reestablished a thriving population of Kafue lechwe, a wetlands antelope unique to this landscape.
African Parks, the conservation NGO, has a 20-year agreement with Zambia’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife (DNPW) to co-manage Kafue National Park.
Running through the heart of the park is the Kafue River, which is crucial for Zambia’s economy and people. But it faces threats from pollution, including a major acid spill hundreds of kilometers upstream near the city of Kitwe, and from overfishing outside the safety of the park.
At least half of the area contained within nine Game Management Areas (GMAs) that surround the park has been occupied by small-scale farmers, driven there partly by the impact of climate change.
But significant intact habitat remains, and recovering wildlife is beneficial to the communities that live around the park.
Co-managed by Zambia’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife and conservation NGO African Parks, Kafue NP is home to up to 22 different species of antelopes, the highest diversity in Africa, more than 500 species of birds and at least 2,400 hippos in the river from which the park takes its name. In 2026, park authorities plan to reintroduce black rhinos (Diceros bicornis), whose population was wiped out in the 1980s.
At Chunga, the headquarters of Kafue National Park, Mongabay met Craig Reid, the park manager, and spoke with him about the work AP and the DNPW are doing to safeguard this biodiversity hotspot. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Mongabay: The Game Management Areas [GMAs] surrounding the park appear to be a vital component. But how effective are they in providing buffers against encroachment?
Craig Reid: The GMAs are actually extremely important in terms of the bigger system because they provide not only an ecological buffer to the park, but also a mechanism for local communities to benefit from wildlife, which is properly protected.
There are a lot of challenges, though, and in recent years there’s been a lot of illegal settlement in the GMAs. The buffering impact that they can have has diminished.
If you look at all of the nine GMAs around the park, about half of this area is now modified in some shape or form, which is quite alarming. But because of the scale that we’re talking about, I think there’s probably somewhere in the region of 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres) outside of the park that’s still totally unsettled.
There’s a lot of intact habitat still there, and the government is working very hard with a number of other partners to secure what is remaining of the GMAs, but a big chunk of them is completely gone.
Mongabay: There are also climate refugees coming from the south. Can you tell me about that?
Craig Reid: A lot of people in Zambia rely on rain-fed agriculture to survive. With the changes in climate, in particular in the southern part of the country, the rainfall has diminished below the level which allows for effective rain-fed agriculture. People in that area are struggling.
And then we’ve obviously got a lot of population growth as well.
So, people are moving, looking for better opportunities for agriculture. In order to do that, they’ve got to go north where the rainfall is higher. There’s a major movement of people in general, and unfortunately, a lot of them are moving into game management areas, even though there is a lot of other land outside of the GMAs.
Mongabay: I understand there are plans to reintroduce black rhinos to Kafue National Park. When do you anticipate that will happen, and how many animals will you bring in?
Craig Reid: Black rhinos disappeared from Kafue in the 1980s. It’s quite striking, actually, when you consider the extent of this place, this vast ecosystem, and people managed to find every last rhino [out of possibly as many as 2,000].
Our immediate target is to reestablish the species at a scale which is viable demographically and genetically. That’s why we’re going through a big introduction of between 40 and 60 individuals.
It will be a mix of subspecies [drawn mostly from South Africa and Namibia], because it’s felt that historically, this part of Zambia would have been an area where there was a mixing of the different subspecies.
We’re still in the planning stages of that project, but we anticipate that we’ll do it in 2026, probably in the latter half of the year. We have established an intensive protection zone (IPZ) of 150,000 hectares (370,650 acres). We’re busy putting up the rhino fence around that as we speak, doing a lot of law enforcement recruitment training and lots of work on infrastructure. Intensive monitoring is a very important part of the rhinos’ security.
The first step is the 150,000-hectare IPZ — that’s going to fill up with rhinos eventually, and then we’ll consider the next step. It would be lovely to have a free-ranging population of many hundreds of black rhinos one day.
Mongabay: The other key mammal that you’ve brought to Kafue National Park is the Kafue lechwe. I understand that it faces threats in the Kafue Flats [a vast wetland south of the park]. Is there suitable habitat for them in Kafue National Park, and have they adjusted to this place?
Craig Reid: The Kafue lechwe [Kobus leche kafuensis] have a very specific range, and that is the Kafue Flats all the way west into what is now the Kafue National Park, although they disappeared from the park in the 1960s or so.
But with the building [in the 1970s] of Lake Itezhi-Tezhi [downstream of the park] for hydropower, it’s actually created amazing [new] floodplain habitats on the lakeshore. That’s where we put them. There’s actually more suitable habitat in the park now than there ever was historically.
We brought in about 400 of them [from private game reserves], and we’ve been monitoring them since the release. A number of them were predated, as expected, but most have settled very well. From the monitoring flights that we’ve done, we’ve started to see quite a lot of youngsters now.
It’s also very good just having an extra population here that is now secure. The biggest impact on the Kafue lechwe [in the Kafue Flats] is illegal offtake [through hunting]. There were historical reports of literally hundreds of thousands of lechwe on the flats, and their numbers have collapsed.
Mongabay: Have the numbers of other animals increased since you’ve been operating here?
Craig Reid: We don’t actually have survey results that formally show that. We’re doing an aerial survey this year, which will be a repeat of the one which was done in 2021.
Anecdotally [from] moving around in many different locations, there’s a lot more wildlife than we’ve ever seen before. And most of the tourism operators last year commented on the fact that it was one of their best game viewing seasons that they’ve ever had. Wildlife numbers are definitely on the increase.
And then interestingly, hearing from our aerial support unit, the guys fly over the park a lot and they very often report wildlife in areas where they weren’t seeing them before. Species like elephants that had very specific distributions previously are now moving more freely through the park.
So, in general, the environment for them is a lot safer.
Mongabay: The Kafue River is a vital feature of the Kafue National Park landscape as well as important to Zambia’s economy and people, yet it appears tremendously vulnerable to pollution, overfishing and invasive species. Is it a river in peril?
Craig Reid: I think the Kafue, like most rivers nowadays, is under a lot of pressure. Probably the biggest threat is the pollution from mining on the Copperbelt [a mineral-rich province] upstream. The recent acid spill into the Kafue system was a sure indicator of just how vulnerable we are. We’re very fortunate that the [polluted] water doesn’t seem to have actually reached the park.
The river is definitely under pressure, but it is strategically extremely important for Zambia, not only as a supply of water for Lusaka, but for irrigation as well. In the park itself, we estimate that the value of the fish extracted is between $4-6 million a year. All of that goes to local communities.
And then obviously the other massive contribution that it makes is hydropower [at the Kafue Gorge Power Station downstream of the park]. The role the park plays in securing a big part of the watershed of the Kafue is extremely important for Zambia in general.
Mongabay: How many visitors are you getting now to Kafue National Park, and how does that compare to several years ago?
Craig Reid: We had just short of 24,000 last year, and the year before that, we were sitting on just over 16,000, so the numbers are definitely growing.
It’s very encouraging that a lot of those tourists, roughly half of them, are local Zambian residents.
Mongabay joined an expedition of The Wilderness Project traveling the length of the Kafue River, part of TWP’s wider project to gather data in Africa’s major river basins. Read Ryan Truscott’s other articles from this journey here.
Banner image:A herd of elephants gathers to drink beside the river several kilometers below Hook Bridge, on the main highway running through the middle of the park. Reid says elephants that had very specific distributions previously are now moving more freely through the park. Image courtesy of Kyle Gordon.
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