Background :: Kunene Region

Home to the desert-adapted Rhino

The Kunene region (former Kaokoland and Damaraland) in the north-west of Namibia encompasses a range of biomes or landscapes neatly arranged parallel to one another. On the west is the forbidding Skeleton Coast - a region of rocks, fog, shipwrecks and desolation, washed by the waters of the Benguela current, which brings Antarctic cold to desert heat. Parallel to the beach lies the northern extension of the Namib desert - the oldest and most fascinating desert in the world. Fascinating because of the uniqueness and diversity of plant and animal life which it supports - from the Welwitschia mirabilis, a plant that has been on earth almost since time began, to the dancing white lady Orchestrella longpipes, a strange spider of the dunes. The desert dunes form a narrow band along the coast, seldom reaching further than 20 km inland except in the far north, where the sand extends 60 km from the coast. The sand desert is replaced eastwards by a zone of gravel plains, the inner or pro-Namib. Further inland the escarpment mountains rise from the plains. The escarpment runs from Angola through the Kaokoveld  and far to the south, where it becomes the great escarpment of South Africa. It is a broad chain of mountain ranges sometimes broken and cut by river valleys, deep gorges and chasms, sometimes a solid rock wall. To the east of the escarpment lies the central drainage basin, itself an extension of the rugged and broken escarpment, and a transition to the next great region, the highlands. This high country extends as the interior plateau far to the east - beyond Etosha, beyond Bushmanland into Botswana, and eventually to the great interior plateau, the highveld of the Transvaal.

The Skeleton Coast National Park lies between the Ugab River in the south and the Kunene in the north. Its eastern boundary is a line on the map, 30 - 40 km from the coast. The southern boundary of the park is the Ugab River and the northern boundary, the Kunene River. Damaraland to the south and Kaokoland to the north - now the Kunene region - form the eastern boundaries. There is no fence dividing the Skeleton Coast Park from Damaraland and Kaokoland permitting free movement of all wildlife in and out of the proclaimed area. In fact, only one fence exists in the Kunene, the veterinary cordon fence or ‘red line’ that was erected in the 1970s to prohibit cattle from the northern Herero and Himba herds mixing (and possibly spreading disease) to the exported beef from the commercial farmlands. The fence actually runs from the Skeleton Coast through Namibia into Botswana.

Although a majority of the desert wildlands within the Kunene Region lack any formal protection, pioneering efforts in community-based conservation led by local conservation NGOs, private tourism companies, local authorities and the government’s Ministry of Environment and Tourism have created opportunities for local communities to benefit from utilization of their resources, consumptively or non-consumptively. This has led to improved conservation measures by local people who now have a vested interest in conserving their livelihood resources.

The deserts of the Kunene represent one of the last true wildernesses remaining in southern Africa. This distinctive and floristically rich desert ecoregion is also the only desert in the world that maintains a full assemblage of native megaherbivores and large carnivores such as the famed desert elephants, desert lion, cheetah, leopard and hyena, and healthy populations of ungulates including the endemic mountain zebra, giraffe, springbok, oryx and kudu. The Kunene, and especially the escarpement zone, also harbors Namibia’s hotspot for endemic reptiles, scorpions and birds.