Module 147 · Conservation Economics
The Conservation
Deficit
Africa’s wildlife generates $29.3 billion in tourism GDP. The illegal trade extracts $23 billion. The conservation funding to protect it all: $1.1 billion. The arithmetic does not work.
$0B
wildlife tourism GDP
$0B
illegal wildlife trade
$0.0B
conservation funding
$0B
30×30 annual shortfall
0%
species unfunded
001 · The Map
Where the money goes. Where it doesn’t.
Green markers: populations that are stable or recovering. Red: populations under active threat with inadequate funding. The pattern is consistent — funding follows fame, not need. The best-known parks get resources. Everything else gets median funding of $200 per square kilometre. In Zimbabwe, half the lion protected areas receive less than $1 per square kilometre.
002 · The Asset
Six species. Six trajectories. One pattern.
Elephants down 77%. Lions down 88%. Rhinos down 93% then partially recovered. Pangolins — nobody even knows the baseline. Only the mountain gorilla is increasing, and only because one country decided to build an economy around keeping them alive. The bar shows what remains. The empty space is what’s gone.
Savanna -70%, Forest -90% over 50 years. 77% combined decline.
-88% since 1900. Extinct in 26 countries. 7% of historic range.
-93% since 1960. Now 6,788 — growing 5.2% per year.
From 80 in 1930s → 20,000 by 2018 → 15,752 in 2024. -11.2%.
+316% from 254 (1981). Only great ape increasing.
8.5M removed 2014-2021 from West/Central Africa alone.
Bar width = % of historic population remaining. Data: IUCN Red List, Edwards et al. (2024), TRAFFIC, Funston & Lindsey (2025). © Dancing with Lions
003 · The Gap
They generate billions. They receive fractions.
Wildlife tourism contributes $29.3 billion to Africa’s GDP. The illegal wildlife trade extracts $23 billion. International conservation funding for all protected areas in developing countries reached $1.1 billion in 2024. The 30×30 target needs $6 billion per year by 2030. At current growth rates, the world will miss that target by $4 billion annually.
$4B
annual shortfall to meet 30×30
$619M
lion PA funding deficit
94%
threatened species with zero funding
Sources: WTTC (2024), Indufor/Pew (2025), AWF/Lindsey et al., UNODC. © Dancing with Lions
004 · Dead vs Alive
Every species is worth more alive. The market doesn’t care.
An elephant generates $1.6 million in lifetime tourism revenue. Dead, its ivory fetches $21,000. A rhino horn sells for $300,000 on the black market, but the living animal generates $1.6 million over its lifetime. The ratios range from 5:1 to infinity. The gorilla has no dead value at all — nobody trades in gorilla parts. That’s why it’s the only one increasing.
Lifetime tourism value per elephant (Amboseli) vs Raw ivory per elephant (~6kg tusks × $750/kg + tips) — iWorry/IFAW
Lifetime tourism revenue (Cecil, Hwange) vs Trophy hunting fee (one-time) — Loveridge et al.
Lifetime tourism value per rhino vs Black market horn value (~5kg × $60k/kg) — WWF / TRAFFIC
$515/day tourism revenue per gorilla (Rwanda) vs No commercial trade — zero dead value — RDB 2024
Estimated eco-tourism potential per pangolin vs Scales + meat on black market (~1 animal) — TRAFFIC
005 · The Extraction Economy
Five commodities. One direction: out of Africa.
Ivory, horn, scales, bone, meat. COVID disrupted trafficking more than any ban ever did — pangolin seizures dropped 75%, ivory 94% compared to 2019 peaks. But the networks adapted. Angola and Mozambique replaced Nigeria for ivory. Syndicates now target dehorned rhinos. The only commodity increasing is bushmeat — 5 million tonnes per year across Africa, unregulated, unmeasured, and destroying the prey base that lions and wild dogs depend on.
Sources: WJC (2025), TRAFFIC, CITES CoP20, EIA, UNODC World Wildlife Crime Report. © Dancing with Lions
006 · What Works, What Doesn’t
Seven models. Three succeed. The successes share one thing.
The models that work — Rwanda’s gorilla permits, Namibia’s conservancies, Kenya’s Lion Guardians — share one structural feature: the people who live with the animals receive direct economic benefit from their survival. The models that fail — trophy hunting, captive breeding, trade bans without enforcement — share one structural failure: the money either doesn’t reach communities or doesn’t exist at all.
$1,500/permit → $200M revenue, population +316%
High-value low-volume. 10% to communities. Former poachers become trackers.
86 communal conservancies, desert lion 20→150+
Community wildlife ownership. Revenue stays local. Trophy hunting revenue negotiated by communities.
Retaliatory killing dropped 99% in programme areas
Maasai warriors paid to protect lions. Cultural status maintained. Early warning system for livestock.
Southern lion stable/+11%, but gene flow restricted
Fencing secures populations but fragments habitat. Requires active genetic management.
1.8% of tourism revenue, 3% reaches communities
Generates 15× less than ecotourism. Corrupt quota allocation. Removes prime breeding individuals.
10,000-12,000 captive lions, zero conservation value
Canned hunting. Lion bone trade to Asia. No genetic or population benefit.
Poaching down since 2019, but inelastic to bans
COVID disrupted trafficking more than bans. Corruption enables continued trade. One-off legal sales spiked poaching.
007 · Who Pays
Five donors. 54% of all funding. The architecture is brittle.
Germany alone provides $267 million annually — more than any other country. The World Bank and GEF add another $320 million. The United States was the sixth-largest funder until USAID shuttered in 2025. Philanthropy grew 89% post-pandemic but cannot fill a $4 billion annual gap. The A-PACT initiative — a Pan-African Conservation Trust launched in 2022 — aims to create continent-wide endowment funding, but it is early-stage. The ranger in the field cannot wait for the architecture to catch up.
Vulnerability: 5 donors provide 54% of all funding.
USAID shuttered 2025. UK and France signalling cuts. The architecture is brittle.
Annual averages. Sources: Indufor / Campaign for Nature / Pew (2025), State of International 30×30 Funding. © Dancing with Lions
008 · The Architecture That Doesn’t Exist
The money exists. The mechanism does not.
Africa holds 25% of the world’s remaining megafauna, and that megafauna drives an industry worth $29.3 billion per year in direct GDP and supports 3.6 million wildlife-specific jobs. Add the wider tourism economy and it reaches $186 billion and 25 million jobs. By 2033, WTTC projects another 12.7 million new jobs on the continent from tourism alone.
The illegal trade in wildlife products — ivory, horn, scales, bone, meat — extracts between $7 billion and $23 billion per year. The legal conservation funding meant to counter it: $1.1 billion internationally in 2024, up from $396 million in 2014 but still $4 billion short of what is needed.
The paradox is structural. The species generate the revenue. The revenue enters national economies. But the national economies do not return sufficient funding to the protected areas where the species live. Tourism taxes go into general budgets. Park fees cover a fraction of operational costs. International donors fill some gaps but concentrate funding on charismatic species in well-known parks — a 2025 PNAS study found that almost a third of conservation funding goes to non-threatened species, while 94% of threatened species receive zero dedicated support.
Funding follows fame, not need. The Serengeti is well-funded. The Ruaha killing fields are not. Kruger gets international attention. Angola’s lions get $1 per square kilometre. The median protected area receives $200/km² per year. The minimum needed for effective management: $1,000–$2,000/km².
The models that work are islands. Rwanda’s gorilla permits. Namibia’s conservancies. Kenya’s Lion Guardians. Each proves the thesis: when wildlife generates direct, tangible, local benefit, people protect it. When it does not, they eliminate it. The challenge is connecting these islands into a continental system. A-PACT attempts this. But it requires an endowment of billions, and the political window for building it is narrowing as donor countries retract.
COVID proved both the fragility and the logic. When tourism stopped, poaching surged. Rangers went unpaid. Parks that depended on gate fees collapsed. The species most vulnerable were the ones with the least diversified funding. The species most resilient were the ones with trust-fund backing or community ownership structures that survived the revenue shock.
The architecture that Africa’s wildlife needs does not yet exist at continental scale. The components exist: permit models, community ownership, trust funds, intelligence-led enforcement, revenue sharing. The question is whether they can be assembled into a system before the species they are meant to protect disappear.
Africa’s wildlife generates enough revenue to fund its own survival three times over. The money enters national economies as tourism GDP, exits as general budget, and never returns to the protected areas where the animals live. The deficit is not financial. It is architectural.
009 · Connected Intelligence
The pattern.
The success model. $1,500 permits, 10% to communities, former poachers as trackers. 254 → 1,063. The only great ape increasing.
The failure model. 200,000 → 23,000. $20.5B safari market, $619M funding gap. The species funding its own extinction.
The Barbary lion went extinct because nobody built an economic model around keeping it alive. The Atlas lion is the historical warning.
Conflict zones are extinction zones. 60% of Burkina Faso outside state control. W-Arly-Pendjari lost 7,000 elephants. Wagner replaced France. Wildlife got worse.
Wagner/Africa Corps extract $2.5B+ in gold from 7 African countries. Zero tax paid. The same networks that mine gold facilitate ivory and pangolin trafficking.
BRI railways and roads cut through wildlife corridors. $182.3B in infrastructure loans. The question: does infrastructure enable conservation tourism or habitat fragmentation?
Sources
IUCN Red List — African elephant, lion, rhino, gorilla, pangolin assessments (2021–2025)
Edwards et al. (2024) — Survey-based inference of continental African elephant decline. PNAS.
Funston, Lindsey et al. (2025) — Range-wide assessment of threats to African lion. Global Ecology & Conservation.
TRAFFIC / IUCN (2025) — Rhino populations, poaching and trade. CITES CoP20 report.
Wildlife Justice Commission (2025) — Pangolin scale & ivory trafficking trends 2015-2024.
IUCN SSC Pangolin Specialist Group (2025) — Conservation status, trade & enforcement. CITES.
Indufor / Campaign for Nature / Pew (2025) — State of International 30×30 Funding.
WTTC (2024) — Africa Travel & Tourism Economic Impact. $186B GDP contribution, 25M jobs.
AWF / Lindsey et al. — 90% of Africa's protected areas lack critical funding for lions.
Guénard et al. (2025) — Taxonomic bias in conservation funding. PNAS.
Loveridge et al. — Cecil and the economics of trophy hunting vs ecotourism.
Rwanda Development Board (2024) — Gorilla permit revenue and tourism statistics.
World Bank (2023) — Rwanda Economic Update: Nature-based Tourism.
UNODC — World Wildlife Crime Report. $7–23B illegal wildlife trade annually.
Data compilation, visualisation & analysis: Dancing with Lions
© Dancing with Lions 2026