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Okavango Basin

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The Okavango Region, a rich biodiversity hotspot and haven of several Indigenous groups, is
under threat of the gigantic fossil fuel industry; in this case, the Canadian petroleum exploration
company, ReconAfrica. Situated across the international borders of Botswana and Namibia, the
company has got the license over an area of 13,600 square miles in the two countries. The area
encompasses a multicountry conservation park (KAZA), six locally managed wildlife reserves, and one
UNESCO World Heritage site.

Key facts and figures:

The Okavango region is home to the largest herd of African elephants left on Earth and myriad
other animals—African wild dogs, lions, leopards, giraffes, amphibians and reptiles, birds—and
rare flora.
The Okavango Delta is one of the largest inland deltas. This approximately 7,000-square-mile
wetland is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is also sheltered by Ramsar Convention, whose
signatories include Namibia and Botswana.
If the test wells prove to be successful in finding oil and gas deposits, fracking could be the next
disaster in this pristine region. Fracking causes water pollution, unsustainable water usage,
earthquakes, GHG emissions and physiological problems.
The Indigenous People who live in the Okavango Region express their grave concern as most of
them were unaware of the company’s prospect to destroy their ecological habitat.
The Namibian Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), which gave the license to construct test
wells in the region, is alleged to defy public participation and is mere desktop analysis without
actual fieldwork and exploration.

Click the triangle to learn more about the situation!


One of the last habitats of African wild Elephants and several other endangered species is
the Okavango Region in West Africa. The region is situated in the desert cross-border region of Namibia
and Botswana with the Okavango Basin’s main water source being the Okavango River. The river’s
watershed includes a major share of Angola’s seasonal rainwater. More than 200,000 people, among
them several indigenous groups, inhabit these desert regions that are dependent on the Okavango
River’s water for their sustenance.
The latest update on the region is that a Canadian Petroleum Exploration company, ReconAfrica, is set
to construct test wells in the Namibian part of the region in December 2020 to analyse the prospect of
oil and gas deposits for extraction through fracking.  ReconAfrica has already licensed more than 13,600
square miles of Okavango Basin land in Namibia and Botswana and says “it could hold up to 31 billion
barrels of crude oil—more than the United States would use in four years if consumption remained the
same as in 2019.” It is also envisaged that the Okavango Basin might meet the same fate as the Niger
Delta where the petroleum production began in the 1950s and destroyed the region due to oil
pollution which forced the indigenous group of Ogoni people to abandon fishing.
The project has wide scale implications. The licensed land area encompasses Kavango-Zambezi
Transfrontier Conservation Area, or KAZA, an initiative by five neighboring countries in the region to
protect the wild animals. The Botswana portion has the Tsodilo Hills, a UNESCO World Heritage site
that has been called the “Louvre of the desert.” More than 4,500 rock paintings there, some dating
back 1,200 years, were created by the Indigenous San, who consider it a sacred place. The land
area also overlaps six locally managed wildlife reserves, and a UNESCO World Heritage site, the
Okavango Delta itself.
It has been alleged by the people living in the region that they were not consulted about the project as a
typical EIA should. The Namibian Government’s EIA largely comprised only desktop analysis which
lacked exact figures and conditions of the Okavango Region.


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