How Lion Landscapes subsidizes trophy hunting and harms Zambians
Lion Carbon is a bogus carbon offset that does more harm than good.
Lion Landscapes is Amy Dickman’s personal blog when she can’t find a right-wing media outlet to publish her trophy hunting ramblings. It’s also a UK charity that says it’s trying to conserve habitat and large carnivores in East Africa by increasing “the willingness of local people to engage in coexistence.”
Dickman often downplays her support of trophy hunting by saying she desperately wants alternative funding sources. She noted that Lion Landscapes was “directly involved in helping develop some potential new models, e.g. Lion Carbon.”
Lion Carbon is a carbon offset created by Lion Landscapes and BioCarbon Partners. “Lion Carbon aims to help restore the Luangwa Valley’s wildlife and forests through improved community livelihoods,” according to BCP’s CEO Hassan Sachedina.
Lion Landscapes and BCP introduced Lion Carbon to secure funding for the Lower Zambezi REDD+ Project and the Luangwa Community Forests Project. BCP claimed “the REDD+ model benefits 225,000 people, making BCP’s REDD+ projects the biggest in the world in terms of community beneficiaries” across both projects.
The LCFP covers nearly 100,000 hectares and is BCP’s flagship project in Zambia. It generated more than $4 million “in direct payments to 12 chiefdoms for the protection of wildlife habitat and community development” in 2020-2021.
But the LCFP does not live up to its marketing hype. It subsidizes trophy hunting, protects Italian oil giant Eni, and harms Zambian people.
Dickman’s description of Lion Carbon as a potential alternative to trophy hunting could not be further from the truth. The carbon offset scheme provides supplementary funding that acts as a subsidy for trophy hunting operators.
BCP’s LCFP project description states, “It is worth noting that both the photographic and hunting safari industries are dependent upon sustainable management of forest resources, and as such, many of these operators have expressed willingness to support the REDD+ activities of the LCFP, which are viewed to be compatible.”
The project description did not sugar coat the trophy hunting industry’s failures in the Luangwa region.
“BCP is aware that the potential revenue from REDD could be substantial and in some instances exceed the revenue from hunting concessions that the communities are accustomed to managing,” noted the project description. “Wildlife populations are severely depleted in most GMAs and benefits are simply not flowing to local communities. The [Department of National Parks and Wildlife] does not generate enough income through leasing of hunting concessions and hunting licenses to efficiently manage wildlife populations and poaching is thus rampant.”
BCP mentioned that some trophy hunting blocks were “well managed” but conceded that “poorly managed hunting blocks are often sparsely populated with game species which have skewed demographic curves, with few of all age classes existing.”
BCP placed the blame for biodiversity loss on the local people despite the glaringly obvious unsustainability of the trophy hunting industry. “Primary threats to the biodiversity of the project zone are a burgeoning subsistence agricultural industry and population growth. Increased people entering the project zone seeking land for agricultural practice. This directly results in increased deforestation and indirectly in increased illegal harvesting of animal products.”
But the primary beneficiary of the project is not the trophy hunting industry. Eni, Italy’s largest oil company, benefits most from this carbon offset scheme.
Eni signed a 20-year agreement with BCP to support the LCFP in 2019. It did so to delay climate action and continue polluting the planet.
A Greenpeace Italy report determined the LCFP “most likely overstates their Emission Reductions (E.R.s) approximately by double, through the questionable choice of the reference area, baseline approach, fire risk probability, and deforestation rate used.” It also noted, “[I]f Eni was to offset all their emissions, which stand at about 537 million tons of CO2 per year, using carbon projects in developing countries’ forests, this is nearly impossible. These targets will not be achieved without harm to the forest-dependent communities.”
Climate change hurts everyone. But Zambia’s people are harmed most by the LCFP.
“One interesting aspect of the [Forest Management Statutory Instrument], which probably was advocated by Biocarbon Partners to ensure that the communities stick to the agreed-upon rules, is that they granted rights to the community where the forest is to exclude other villages from access. This somehow transformed the forest from open-access to restricted access. They granted the rights to communities that live within the forests while excluding those that live away from the forests, even though they could travel and access the forest. This means the communities that live within the forests now have more than usufruct use rights, but also have the right to exclude those that live outside the forests. However, even the communities that live within, because of the nature of REDD+ projects, have been stopped from using the forests except for some non-timber forest products such as honey (note that not all NTFPs collection/harvest is allowed).”
“So, by stopping households from using the forest to access NTFPs including wood fuel, the project is taking away about 35% or 23% (if we focus on charcoal/fuelwood only) of the household’s income,” noted Greenpeace Italy.
Lion Carbon shows that Dickman is nothing more than a snake oil salesman.
Lion trophy hunting in the Luangwa region
Dickman asked if there was evidence that trophy hunting bans can have positive conservation outcomes. She said she couldn’t find any.
She’s either lying or incredibly ignorant. She’s a lion researcher. Her Lion Landscapes charity works in Zambia’s Luangwa region. She should know about research that showed a trophy hunting ban “was effective at growing the Luangwa lion population and increasing the number of adult males.”
“We identified and monitored 386 individual lions within and around South Luangwa National Park, Zambia, for five years (2008–2012) with trophy hunting and for three additional years (2013–2015) during a hunting moratorium. We used these data with mark-resight models to estimate the effects of hunting on lion survival, recruitment, and abundance. The best survival models, accounting for imperfect detection, revealed strong positive effects of the moratorium, with survival increasing by 17.1 and 14.0 percentage points in subadult and adult males, respectively. Smaller effects on adult female survival and positive effects on cub survival were also detected. The sex-ratio of cubs shifted from unbiased during trophy-hunting to female-biased during the moratorium. Closed mark-recapture models revealed a large increase in lion abundance during the hunting moratorium, from 116 lions in 2012 immediately preceding the moratorium to 209 lions in the last year of the moratorium. More cubs were produced each year of the moratorium than in any year with trophy hunting. Lion demographics shifted from a male-depleted population consisting mostly of adult (≥4 years) females to a younger population with more (>29%) adult males. These data show that the three-year moratorium was effective at growing the Luangwa lion population and increasing the number of adult males.”
That was from the abstract, Amy. You can’t use the excuse that you can’t find any evidence anymore.
Dickman admits she has no evidence for her claim
Dickman finally admitted that she has no evidence to back up her claim that trophy hunting import bans caused Tanzania’s unsustainable trophy hunting operators to close their businesses.
Craig Packer, a more experienced lion researcher and former acquaintance of Pasanisi, said, “It’s very convenient for the hunting industry to blame restrictions that were, in fact, imposed because of the impacts of their past practices rather than to accept that they have long been part of the problem. Not only did they overhunt in much of Tanzania, but they also failed to generate the funding to protect the areas they were claiming to conserve. They were given dominion over the land at cut-rate prices, and they didn’t give back to some of the poorest countries and communities in the world.”
I believe him more than her.
Trivia time
Can you name the two women in this photo?
Hint: One is beloved by conservatives, takes advice from an economist with ties to the Institute of Economic Affairs, and opposes trade restrictions on businesses operating under racist policies in Southern Africa. The other one is Margaret Thatcher.
Amy just asked me if I can prove she receives funding from SCI from a statement I made on Facebook post by Pieter Kat a few weeks ago. 🥱🤣