the role of tourism in natural resource management in the okavango ...

and resulted in the publication of the well known book entitled 'Symposium on the
Okavango Delta and its Future Utilisation'. The second was by a private Australian
firm Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation (SMEC) in the mid-1980s, whose
brief was to increase the water supply to Maun. Proposals made by the SMEC to
dredge the lower reaches of the Boro River were not received well by either local
people or international conservation agencies, and the involvement of Greenpeace,
and subsequently the World Conservation Union (IUCN), resulted in these proposals
being provisionally shelved. However, as water is such a scarce commodity in
Botswana, the Delta will continue to be an area of interest to developers, and it is
likely that in the long term there will be some sort of compromise between the
requirements of the ecosystem and the needs of the people.
It must, however, also be noted that since the late 1980s and the development of
tourism in the Okavango Delta, the conservation/preservation of the Okavango has
gained much importance with the Botswana Government. Any negative
developments in the Delta, such as the large scale extraction of water from the
system, or the construction of dams/hydro-electric schemes, would seriously impact
upon the Delta's tourism industry, and hence the amount of revenue accruing to the
government/economy from this industry. As such, the Botswana Government is far
more committed to ensuring the long-term protection of the Okavango than it was in
the 1970s and early to mid-1980s. At present, Namibia is investigating the feasibility
of water abstraction from the Okavango River to supply its capital city, Windhoek,
with additional water. The impact of this is currently under investigation. Ultimately, it
is to be recognised that developments outside of Botswana such as abstraction by
Namibia or agricultural development in central Angola may have a bigger impact on
the Okavango Delta than any activities carried out within the Delta itself (Ellery and
Ellery, 1997).
Today, within the Delta itself, the biggest pressures are from the major towns, such
as Maun, Seronga and Shakawe, and other areas of dense settlement. This is
where relatively large volumes of water are used, effluent may find its way into the
river, and plant life is destroyed as a result of fields being cleared, the collection of
building materials and fuel wood, and overgrazing (Mendelsohn and el Obeid, 2004).
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