Previous: Energy ||Table Of Contents|| Next: Pollution

TOURISM

The Zambezi Basin boasts some of the most important wildlife areas and destinations in southern Africa with great potential for offering exclusive experiences. Some of the national parks and game reserves located within the Zambezi Basin are even protected as internationally important sites.

They include sites protected as World Heritage Sites under the World Heritage Convention (1975). Examples include Lake Malawi National Park in Malawi, Victoria Falls between Zambia and Zimbabwe, and Mana Pools National Park in Zimbabwe. A large proportion of the Zambezi River Basin has been set aside for wildlife and tourism.

Protected areas cover about 27 percent of the basin area. Tanzania is the only exception, with none of its small Zambezi Basin area being protected for wildlife.

Upper Zambezi

In Angola, there are no tourist areas in the basin because of the civil war. The potential for tourism is big though, partly because of the network of important freshwater wetlands and the country's richness in wildlife. A substantial area in the west of the Zambezi headwaters is protected in the Kameia National Park (14,450 sq km). However, there are several population settlements in the park, and the civil unrest has made it difficult to manage the park properly.

In Zambia, the national parks of West Lunga, Liuwa Plain, Kafue and Sloma Ngwezi are all found in this part of the basin. The National Parks of Namili and Mudumu together with Caprivi Game Park are the main draw cards in Namibia. The mainstay of Botswana's tourism industry in the basin is Chobe National Park. The park, which was established in 1968, covers about 10,570 sq km. A wide variety of different habitats, ranging from deep Kalahari sands to permanent swamp are found here.

Middle Zambezi

The cities of Lusaka and Harare are in this section, the most intensively used and industrialised part of the basin. For example, the area between Victoria Falls and Kanyemba draws over 80 percent of Zimbabwe's tourists.

The prime tourist attraction in this section of the basin is the Victoria Falls on the Zambia-Zimbabwe border. The Falls comprise one of the wonders of the natural world and were declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1989. The development of the tourism industry in the Victoria Falls area has been fourfold over the past 10 years, with the most striking development in the accommodation sector.

Next to the Victoria Falls, the most important tourist area in Zimbabwe's share of the basin is Lake Kariba. Since the dam increased the water-availability in this arid area, it has attracted large herds of wildlife, making it an important tourist destination. The Zambezi River itself and all of the protected areas are other major attractions in this section of the Zimbabwean part of the basin. Over-booking at Mana Pools, for example, indicates the attractiveness. Bookings are generally over-subscribed 12 months in advance and are, therefore, decided in a draw. For this reason, the occupancy rate of accommodation facilities has been 100 percent most of the time.

Lower Zambezi and Lake Malawi/Nyasa B
Shire River system

Lake Malawi/Nyasa is the most important lake for tourism in this section and so are the wetlands of the Zambezi Delta in Mozambique, which are well known for their extensive areas, economic importance and species diversity.

Malawi and Tanzania belong to the Lake Malawi/Nyasa-Shire River system. While there are no specific tourist areas developed in the Tanzanian part of the basin, there are many in Malawi, including Lake Malawi National Park. The offshore islands and part of the mainland were first protected in the 1930s but a new concept is that of preserving the actual waters of the lake and the marine life, up to 100 metres from the shore. The Lake Malawi National Park was declared a World Heritage Site in 1984.

Tourism activities
Wildlife related activities

Most wildlife-based tourism is developed in national parks and game reserves where the big mammals, including lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo and rhino, are the major attraction. Increasingly, however, there is a growing interest in other forms of wildlife such as birds and plants. The location of wildlife areas in the basin is largely an artifact of the presence or recent past presence of tsetse fly and poor agricultural potential of designated areas. On a country basis, Botswana has the largest proportion of its basin area under effective wildlife management (65 percent).

Water based activities

Most of the water based activities, such as canoeing, boating, whitewater rafting, sport fishing, bungee jumping and scuba diving, are carried out on the Zambezi River and Lake Kariba in the Middle Zambezi and on Lake Malawi/Nyasa.

Canoeing on the Zambezi River was initiated in 1982 and it has since become popular on both the river and Lake Kariba. About 250 km of the river is available for canoeing. The number of canoe trips in Zimbabwe waters in 1994-95 were about 1,900, totalling 22,800 persons carried per year.

Sport fishing and boating activities are concentrated on Lake Kariba and Lake Malawi/Nyasa. About 2,080 boats are available for tourist activities, with the majority being on Lake Kariba. Boat cruises are operated from a number of jetties mainly along the Zimbabwean side, but also from two jetties on the Zambian side.

Whitewater rafting and bungee jumping are perhaps the most prominent of the adventure sports on offer. The gorges below the Victoria Falls comprise the finest one-day whitewater rafting run in the world. Bungee jumping off the Victoria Falls Bridge, with its 111m-drop, is the highest commercial jump in the world and has become an important addition to the adventure sports attractions. An estimated 7,500 people make the jump each year.

Lake Malawi/Nyasa is also a popular site for anglers, mainly due to its many fish species. About 500 fish species are found in the lake, making it a popular site for scuba diving and snorkelling.

Impact of tourism on the environment

Tourist behaviour is often motivated by environmental conditions. Even though accommodation and other components such as infrastructure, political stability and social structure are essential to the success of tourism, they are irrelevant if the environment is unattractive. The future threat to the environment lies in the uncontrolled growth of tourism and the pressures and demands, which will be placed on the natural resources of the Zambezi Basin. Areas within easy reach of large numbers of people are especially under threat.

The most significant impact of increased visits by people to the Zambezi Basin is the expansion of hotels and tourist facilities to cater for this demand as well as an improvement in the road network.

The impacts from activities such as rafting, canoeing and, motor boating directly relate to pollution and waste. The number of boats on Lake Kariba, for example, is very high and oil and fuel pollution is caused by accidental leakages or spillage from engines and/or deliberate waste oil dumping into the lake. Oil is hazardous to animals and people and it reduces the water quality.

Noise pollution is also high and the continued wave action caused by the wake damages riverbanks, disturbing the micro-ecology. There is concern that sport angling can overexploit game fish species. The sport has also led to the introduction of alien species in some areas such as trout and bass both of which are favoured by anglers.

Water quality can be impaired by sewage discharges from lodges and towns, siltation due to erosion caused by riverbank disturbance, overexploitation of wetland resources such as reeds and fish, and pollution by fuels and pesticides, and other chemicals. The flora and fauna, which contribute greatly, if not solely, to the attraction of the Zambezi River Basin, require adequate supplies of good quality water.

The curio industry has developed as a byproduct of tourism and is a big consumer of indigenous hardwoods. Demand for curio products has increased in many areas with the expansion of the tourism industry. Localised over-harvesting of large and increasingly rare indigenous trees is believed to be occurring at an unsustainable rate, and often illegally. It is estimated that a total of about 246 cubic metres (cu m) of wood is carved per year.

In commercial farming areas, conservancies and some community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) areas, wildlife management may compete with crop cultivation as cultivated lands are being turned into game ranches and wildlife buffer zones. If the current trend of converting cropland into game ranches continues, food security and self sufficiency may be threatened. However, in some of these areas, particularly in drier areas, the economics of wildlife management is better than that of crop cultivation. Game farming coupled with tourism is seen as a more sustainable and productive land-use option than agriculture.

Future challenges

Concerns on the sustainability of the tourism industry hinge on the environment and the distribution of its economic and social costs and benefits. One of the future challenges, therefore, for the sustainable development of the tourism industry is to convince stakeholders that tourism cannot continue to grow unless impacts on nature's life-supporting systems are considered.

For tourism to become a strong economic sector in the Zambezi Basin, and to become a force for creating more jobs and combating poverty, it is important that the symbiotic relationship between tourism and healthy ecosystems be maintained. To strike a balance between tourism and ecology, some of the future challenges include:

• Efficient planning such as adequate forecasting of tourist pressures and capacities.
• Natural resources-oriented tourist marketing.
• Improved cooperation between organisations involved in the industry.
• Adequate awareness by operators on the effects of tourism on the environment.
• Greater public-private sector cooperation and among governments of the basin states for tourism.

It is also fundamental that tourism developments and activities in the area develop links with local communities. Mechanisms to allow an equitable sharing of the benefits should be pursued vigorously. This is to avoid potential negative social impacts of tourism such as cultural change and anti-social behaviour, including begging, prostitution and alcohol abuse. There is need, therefore, for planners and national governments to minimise the negative social impacts arising from tourism development in the Zambezi Basin. The tourism business concerns have a responsibility too, to optimise benefits and minimise 'social costs' by promoting a better understanding of the problems. Overall, tourism as an industry if properly managed, has the potential to foster sustainable regional growth in the basin countries.

Top