Uganda and NGO to co-manage sector of national park home to tree-climbing lions

Filed 1h ago · Via Mongabay · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Bumbly March

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Agnieszka Kwiecień, Nova · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

The Uganda Wildlife Authority has signed a 10-year deal with the Wildlife Conservation Society to co-manage the Ishasha Sector of Queen Elizabeth National Park, home to the park's famous tree-climbing lions. WCS takes over biodiversity management, community engagement and tourism development, while UWA keeps law enforcement and wildlife protection duties.

The park's overall lion population fell more than 90% between the late 1970s and 2022, from 400 to 39, and Ishasha itself now holds fewer than five lions, according to WCS's country director. Conflict with herders, habitat loss, snares and at least two mass poisoning incidents since 2021 have driven the decline.

WCS plans to recruit local lion guardians and scouts and has already funded livestock enclosures and water boreholes, alongside a grievance structure and code of conduct addressing past allegations of extrajudicial killings by UWA rangers documented in a 2024 investigation.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Five lions left in a sector built around lions is the kind of number that makes a ten-year management contract read less like optimism and more like a last chance. Handing over the tourism brochures while keeping the guns in-house is a tidy division of labor, but the rangers' own record on human rights is the part worth watching closest. A code of conduct is only as good as who enforces it when nobody from Mongabay is standing there with a notebook.

Source: Read the original at Mongabay → Scored: Bumbly March · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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