River Restoration

Kariba Dam on the Zambezi RiverWhen the world’s first mega-dam, Kariba, was to be built on the Zambezi River, Allan Savory’s father, JHR Savory, then Permanent Secretary for Water Development, won the bid to survey the road that would carry traffic to the dam site. He completed the job in record time and well below budget by heeding a simple observation – that elephants over the centuries had already found the easiest gradients into the Zambezi Valley. Through the rough escarpment country he simply walked that route, connecting elephant paths, for his engineers to follow, saving months of surveying.

Years later his son made use of the same observation to learn where the permanent water existed on Elephant PoolsDimbangombe Ranch, which he had donated to the Africa Centre for Holistic Management (ACHM).  The elephants had over centuries developed virtual highways to Elephant Pools, the only permanent dry-season water on the ranch.  As in so many places elsewhere in Africa, the Dimbangombe River was no longer perennial, but for a series of spring-fed pools at the river’s headwaters.  The ACHM staff and interns had built an observation blind from which people could observe and photograph the elephants at the largest of these pools.

Today the blind is abandoned and the elephant highways to the pool are overgrowing.  Not because there are no elephants – some 600 of them held up traffic on the road into Dimbangombe Open water in late dry season a kilometre above old Elephant Poolsfor over an hour recently.  The elephants no longer bother to visit their ancient watering point simply because the river has open water, water lilies and fish a kilometer above Elephant Pools each dry season and they find it more convenient to water up there.

How have we increased river flow through a series of average to below-average rainfall years?  Very inexpensively.  Simply by practicing what we teach – Holistic Management and planned grazing using livestock as a watershed/wildlife habitat management tool.

The management herd doing its work.When Allan Savory first recommended, in the 1960s, that livestock be used as a tool to reverse desertification, he was a wildlife researcher with a strong dislike of livestock which he, like most scientists, believed were responsible for the degradation.  Through years of management and trial and error research, he and the many ranchers who elected to work with him, had gradually learned that the ONLY tool that can reverse desertification in Africa on the scale required is livestock integrated (as on Dimbangombe) with healthy and diverse wildlife populations.

ACHM has achieved this improvement in the health of the Dimbangombe River by:

• Increasing the cattle/goat management herd numbers by 400%.

• Herding the stock daily to a grazing plan that ensures livestock and wildlife benefit mutually and do not compete for resources.

• Training herders in low-stress animal handling so livestock remain productive and healthy.

• Constructing portable lion-proof kraals (corrals) that keep livestock safe at night from leopard, wild dog and hyenas as well as lions.

Moving the kraals every week, so that different sites, such as cropfields, are treated to the tillage and fertilization provided by concentrated hoofs, dung and urine.

Visiting range and wildlife scientists, development specialists and pastoralists from afar have been impressed with the land and water improvements on Dimbangombe.  ACHM is now working with them to extend the knowledge and skills to the communities they work with in their countries – which stretch from the Cape to Ethiopia.