Our results show that a preservation initiative that is aimed at increasing grazing and hunting opportunities would be supported by dryland communities. Although the Khomani San indigenous people are traditionally hunters and gatherers, over time a significant number have switched to livestock farming. Given that livestock farming is one of the main livelihood sources in the Kgalagadi dryland area, the Khomani San place a value on the ecosystem services that support their livelihood.

Visitors to Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, located between Botswana and South Africa, are concerned about the kind of activities that take place within the park. This is not surprising, given the highly fragile Kgalagadi ecosystem. In our study, visitors assigned a monetary amount to the value they derive from pristine tourism opportunities. If this monetary value is greater than the amount that local communities assign to their livelihood activities in the park, then one group can compensate the other.

Now that some of the resource rights inside the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park have been vested in the surrounding communities, the park should contribute toward improving the lives of these communities, so that land restitution and conservation objectives can reinforce each other. In this spirit, the aim of this study was to estimate optimal conservation fees which should be charged at KTP to maximise revenue.

In this study, researchers met with Khomani San “bushmen” and Mier “agricultural” communities who live in or near the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park in South Africa. The researchers proposed a biodiversity conservation programme that would include planting and protecting native trees, shrubs, and grasslands, and asked the local communities about their willingness to pay for the program.

International and domestic efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions require a coordinated effort from countries and individuals that differ in terms of their level of income, historical responsibility in terms of contributions to the existing stock of emissions, current intensity of energy use and costs of reducing emissions. This brief reports the results of an economic experiment that examines whether groups of individuals – who differ in terms of their individual costs of reducing emissions – can meet a collective emissions reduction target.

Combatting Poaching by Empowering Local Communities and Targeting Organised Crime.

The illegal exploitation of wild abalone in South Africa has been escalating since 1994, despite increased enforcement, leading to collapse in some sections of its range. South Africa banned all wild abalone fishing in 2008 but controversially reopened the fishery in 2010. This paper formulates a poacher’s model, taking into account the realities of the abalone terrain in South Africa – the high-value of abalone, use of recreational drugs, the prevalence of bribery, and corruption – to explore why poaching has not subsided.

The economic importance of the dryland ecosystem services in the Kgalagadi area is generally unknown, as is the distribution of benefits from use of the ecosystem services. This study seeks to value ecosystem services in the Kgalagadi area by applying the choice experiment technique and then assessing the potential for ecosystem services to contribute to the Khomani San livelihoods through a payment for ecosystem services (PES) scheme.

This study seeks to value ecosystem services in the Kgalagadi area in South Africa by applying the choice experiment technique. The values placed on dryland ecosystem services by indigenous communities are estimated using a conditional logit model, a random parameter logit model and a random parameter logit model with interactions.

The results show that local communities would prefer increased grazing, firewood collection, hunting opportunities, and harvesting of medicinal plants.