The Pandemic Has Undone South Africa’s National Parks
An hour’s drive south of Cape Town, at a small beach hidden from the main road by suburban houses, you’ll find one of Africa’s top tourist attractions: the Boulders colony of African penguins.
These birds usually nest on hard-to-reach offshore islands, but at Boulders a cordon of residential blocks shields the beach and the surrounding dunes from land-based predators like the caracal lynx, and the penguins feel safe enough to breed. Here you can hear their braying calls, smell their acrid guano, and stroll within a few yards of doting parents feeding their fluffy brown young. You can even swim with the birds in a bright-watered cove.
In 2019 the colony attracted 820,000 tourists, who paid a total of more than $6 million in ticket fees to South African National Parks, or SANParks, the government agency that runs the site. More than 80 percent of visitors were foreigners, who pay higher ticket fees than locals and so generated 95 percent of gate income. Numerous businesses nearby made yet more millions: A 2018 study estimated that Boulders generated about $18 million in annual spending and supported almost 900 jobs in Cape Town, making its famous waddlers almost certainly the most valuable birds in Africa.
But on March 27, 2020, this penguin-based economic edifice collapsed. South Africa entered the first phase of a COVID-19 lockdown: All “nonessential” businesses were forced to close, and beaches, nature areas, and borders shut down. Tourism vanished like a puff of smoke in a Cape winter gale. Boulders, along with every other profitable South African ecotourism destination, became a money-eater overnight: There were no customers, but facilities and wildlife still had to be managed and secured.
Much of the social, political, and financial support for South African conservation has flowed from the country’s successful tourism industry. But the coronavirus pandemic has exposed the weaknesses of ecotourism as a foundation for nature conservation—even in a country that’s been a world leader in both.
Despite substantial easing of pandemic-related restrictions and the resumption of some international flights, many tourism-dependent businesses have not reopened because their clients have not returned. Hundreds of thousands of jobs and the income to safeguard millions of acres of natural habitat have disappeared.
Unless tourism revenues return to pre-pandemic levels, conservation funding is heading into what Morné du Plessis, the CEO of WWF South Africa, has called a “valley of
