Health

Kasungu National Park is under siege - not just from the usual poaching, but from HIV too. Situated in central Malawi on the border with Zambia, it is the country's second largest protected area. In recent years, intensified poaching has caused a serious decline in numbers of buffalo, elephant and other big game that wander its forests and savannah. Malawi's parks department is doing its best to combat the poachers, but it is hard to mount patrols when your scouts are sick and dying with AIDS, or caring for ailing relatives.

Between 2000 and 2006, 17 of Kasungu's staff died - 22 per cent of its workforce at the start of that period. Recruitment cannot keep pace: the number of staff in Malawi's national parks system has fallen from 193 in 2000 to 176 today. It is a similar story elsewhere in Africa, as HIV tightens its grip on the continent.

Last week, at the Society for Conservation Biology's annual meeting in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, researchers and conservationists gathered to highlight how the HIV epidemic is threatening biodiversity, and to share information on how to alleviate an escalating human and environmental tragedy.

"We must understand that conservation is done by people. They do it in order to benefit from it," says Daulos Mauambeta, executive director of the Wildlife and Environmental Society of Malawi. "Unfortunately, people doing conservation in Africa are dying due to HIV/AIDS. We have to deal with this if conservation is to survive."

To talk about threats to conservation when entire communities are being decimated may seem like a case of misplaced priorities, but loss of biodiversity and the HIV epidemic are closely intertwined, and their effects conspire to keep people living in poverty. For example, researchers are now starting to document how the economic havoc wrought by AIDS can force survivors to use natural resources in unsustainable ways.

There is hope: delegates in Port Elizabeth heard about pioneering efforts to break this cycle of despair, and how conservation is helping bring healthcare to remote communities. "It's not just a case of maintaining our own capacities," stresses Judy Oglethorpe of conservation group WWF in Washington DC, who organised the session on HIV at the meeting.

However, those capacities are under extreme strain. Jennifer Cash, a graduate student at the University of Montana in Missoula, has surveyed conservation managers in South Africa and Zambia, asking them to rank the most serious impacts of HIV/AIDS on their work. Top of the list: loss of expertise as senior staff die. "To train someone in wildlife management takes a long time," agrees Mauambeta. "In Malawi, we don't have a wildlife college. Most people are sent outside the country for training, to Tanzania and South Africa. It is very expensive."

For this reason, protecting employees is now a top priority for African conservation organisations - especially since this work may increase workers' risk of infection (see "In harm's way"). Such NGOs are encouraging staff to get tested for HIV, so they can receive treatment or avoid physically demanding field work. But even among well-informed workers, it can be tough to combat the stigma of taking the test. In Malawi, Mauambeta is confronting these attitudes head on. "If you don't want people to talk about you, you can die," he tells his staff. "We have good examples where people have been tested and have taken anti-retroviral drugs for 10 years."

Conservation groups are trying to roll out HIV prevention efforts into the communities they work with, but in such places stigma is even harder to overcome. The problem is particularly acute in the Caprivi region, a sliver of mostly forested land in north-east Namibia pinched between Angola, Botswana and Zambia. Desperately poor, and on a major trucking route, it is a hotspot for HIV. Tests on pregnant women in the area suggest up to 48 per cent of Caprivi's adults carry the virus.

"We experience absenteeism, low productivity and low morale," says Velia Kurz, a former nurse who runs HIV programmes for the Namibia Association of Community-Based Natural Resource Management Support Organizations, or NACSO. Along with Namibia's Ministry of Environment and Tourism, NACSO manages a network of 50 local conservancies across the country, under which some 300,000 Namibians are involved in efforts to preserve natural resources and make money through trophy hunting, tourist lodges and so on. "All of these people are affected by HIV/AIDS," says Kurz.

NACSO began trying to tackle the epidemic in Caprivi in 2004, recruiting members of the local committees that manage its conservancies to serve as "peer educators". Initially, none of the 90 educators would take an HIV test; even after a year, only 25 had done so.

While it may be an uphill struggle, ethnographic research conducted in Caprivi by Rachel DeMotts of the University of Botswana's Okavango Research Centre suggests that conservation groups can play a key role in fighting HIV. Not only do they work full-time with communities who may rarely see a healthcare worker, they can also be better at reaching out to people who fear being labelled HIV-positive.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.