When oil drilling meets threatened wildlife

By Rachael Bale, ANIMALS Executive Editor

It’s home to endangered wild dogs, lions, leopards, giraffes, pangolins, and one of Africa’s biggest concentrations of elephants. Nestled among the scrub are hundreds of species of birds, reptiles, and amphibians. The Okavango region (pictured above), in northwest Botswana and northeast Namibia, is spectacularly biodiverse, and the Okavango Delta itself is a UNESCO World Heritage site, a landscape of “exceptional and rare beauty” and an “outstanding example of the complexity, inter-dependence and interplay of climatic, geo-morphological, hydrological, and biological processes,” UNESCO says.

“Clean water: That is the oil and the gold,” wrote National Geographic’s David Quammen in a 2017 story documenting the region.

Except ... there is oil. And gas. Probably. As much as 31 billion barrels, one company believes. On Wednesday, Laurel Neme and Jeffrey Barbee reported that a company called ReconAfrica has licensed more than 13,600 square miles in the Okavango region—just west and north of the delta—to explore a massive geological formation. One industry media source called it possibly “the largest oil play of the decade.” Neme and Barbee dug into ReconAfrica’s investor presentations, technical reports, and public statements, and they found that the company’s plans—if the test wells prove promising—would likely include drilling hundreds of wells, some of which could involve fracking.

This has conservationists and local communities worried. Fracking requires large amounts of water and has the potential to pollute or divert waterways away from the people and animals that rely on them. It can poison food chains and degrade habitats. Oil extraction and transportation cuts across animals’ migration paths, and new roads can facilitate poaching. The noise and dust and commotion is enough to scare off some animals and change the behavior of others. In highly interconnected environments, the ripple effects could be magnified.

A ReconAfrica spokesperson told Neme and Barbee that the company “will ensure that there is no environmental impact” from the wells—which is hard to verify because the environmental impact assessment and management plans provided to Nat Geo addressing the topic were flawed and incomplete, according to independent experts we spoke to.

The oil exploration plan has received scant media attention, and some local communities and conservationists National Geographic contacted either knew little about it or had never heard of it. We’ll continue to follow the story.

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Today in a minute

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In a few words

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The last glimpse

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