Rangelands and Drought in Namibia: What Okonjima’s Landscape Reveals
Land Degradation in the World's Drylands: The Scale of the Crisis
During the severe drought of 2018 to 2019, AfriCat Foundation recorded the loss of at least 15 Temminck’s ground pangolins (Smutsia temminckii) within Okonjima Nature Reserve in Namibia. Not to poaching, not to habitat loss, but to the invisible consequence of dry soil. When moisture retreats, ants and termites move deeper underground. For a pangolin, the food is still there. It is simply unreachable. This is what desertification does before it becomes visible. It reorganises survival itself.
On 17 June, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) marks World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought under the theme “Rangelands: Recognise. Respect. Restore.” At Okonjima, a 22,000-hectare private reserve at the base of the Omboroko Mountains, that theme is not a policy position. It is the framework within which we manage land, monitor wildlife, and make decisions that determine what this landscape looks like in another thirty years.
This year’s theme brings long-overdue attention to ecosystems that are often overlooked. Rangelands, which include grasslands, savannas, shrublands, and open woodlands, cover more than half of the Earth’s land surface. They support billions of people, sustain vast wildlife populations, and underpin essential ecological processes in some of the most climate-variable regions on the planet. This year, Kenya is hosting the global observance, bringing international attention to the critical role rangelands play in climate resilience, food and water security, biodiversity conservation, and the well-being of pastoralist and Indigenous communities.
The challenge facing these ecosystems is not simply drought. Drought has always been part of the story. The greater concern is what happens when landscapes lose their ability to recover. When soils become less productive, vegetation struggles to return after rain, and ecological resilience begins to erode; the result is a process known as desertification.
Desertification in Namibia’s Drylands: Beyond the Spread of Sand
Desertification is a more subtle and more pervasive process than most people expect, and Namibia sits squarely within the landscapes most vulnerable to it.
It is defined as “land degradation in arid, semi-arid, and dry sub-humid regions caused by climatic variation and human activity”.
In practical terms, desertification occurs when land loses its capacity to function. Soils become less stable and less fertile. Vegetation struggles to re-establish after rainfall. Ecological processes weaken, and with them, the ability of the system to support both biodiversity and human livelihoods. The distinction between drought and desertification is critical. Drought is a temporary climatic event, a period of reduced rainfall that dryland ecosystems have evolved to endure. Desertification occurs when repeated pressures prevent recovery once drought ends. A resilient system bends and rebounds, but a degraded one fractures.
Drylands cover approximately 40% of the Earth’s land surface, support more than two billion people, and provide food, livelihoods, biodiversity, and carbon storage across vast regions of Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas (UNCCD, 2022). According to the UNCCD, up to 40% of the world’s land is already degraded, highlighting the scale of the challenge facing dryland ecosystems (UNCCD, 2024).
Namibia’s Rangelands Support Wildlife, Livelihoods, and Climate Resilience
Namibia’s rangelands are dynamic systems finely tuned to variability, supporting intricate networks of species interactions from soil organisms and insects to large herbivores and predators. As highlighted in our recent International Day for Biological Diversity article, these ecosystems demonstrate that biodiversity is fundamental to ecosystem resilience and recovery.
Unlike forests, which display their abundance openly, dryland ecosystems respond dramatically to rainfall. Following months of drought, dormant seeds germinate, grasses grow rapidly, insects emerge in vast numbers, and wildlife responds to the sudden pulse of resources. These bursts of productivity drive ecological processes across rangeland systems.
This productivity depends on healthy soils, intact vegetation cover, and the ability of landscapes to capture and store water when rain falls. When these ecological foundations are maintained, rangelands can recover remarkably well from drought and other natural disturbances. When they are degraded, however, recovery becomes slower, less predictable, and increasingly difficult. Desertification is therefore not simply the loss of vegetation. It is the gradual weakening of the ecological processes that allow dryland ecosystems to respond, recover, and remain productive over time.
Livestock, Land, and Survival: The Reality Behind Rangeland Decisions
Across much of sub-Saharan Africa, livestock are far more than agricultural assets. They are financial security, cultural identity, and the reason land management decisions are rarely as straightforward as the science suggests. In regions where access to formal banking systems may be limited, cattle, goats, and sheep often function as living savings accounts.
This reality profoundly shapes land management decisions. As Okonjima landowner Wayne Hanssen explains:
“Without addressing poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, efforts to combat desertification will remain limited. When survival is uncertain, long-term environmental management is not a priority.”
This statement captures one of the central challenges of sustainable land management. Ecologists may recommend reducing livestock numbers before drought arrives. From a scientific perspective, the logic is sound. Lower stocking rates reduce pressure on vegetation and improve the likelihood of ecosystem recovery. For many land users, however, reducing herd size means accepting immediate financial risk in exchange for uncertain future benefits. The result is a difficult balancing act between ecological sustainability and economic survival.
This challenge lies at the heart of the UNCCD’s Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) framework and Sustainable Development Goal 15.3, both of which seek to balance productive land use with long-term ecosystem health. Success depends not only on ecological knowledge but also on governance, investment, education, infrastructure, and long-term support. The science of restoration is often understood. Creating the conditions to implement it remains the greater challenge (UNCCD, 2015).
Namibia and Desertification: Living Within a Dryland Reality
Few countries understand dryland realities better than Namibia. This is the landscape we work within, season after season, and its rhythms of abundance and scarcity shape every management decision we make at Okonjima. Often described as one of the world’s most arid countries south of the Sahara, Namibia occupies a unique position within the global conversation on desertification and drought. Much of the country lies within arid and semi-arid climatic zones where rainfall is highly variable and water remains the ultimate limiting resource.
Productive years can transform landscapes and fuel rapid ecological growth, while drought years tighten ecological constraints and place increasing pressure on wildlife, livestock, and people. These fluctuations are not signs of dysfunction, but are a defining feature of Africa’s drylands.
Namibia’s experience has also positioned it as an important contributor to international dryland policy. In 2013, Windhoek hosted UNCCD COP11, bringing together representatives from around the world to address desertification, drought, and sustainable land management. The meeting reinforced a lesson Namibia has long understood: thriving in drylands requires adaptation, flexibility, and respect for ecological limits.
Restoring Dryland Landscapes: Lessons from Africa’s Great Green Wall
Restoration in drylands is not about returning landscapes to a fixed state. It is about rebuilding the processes that allow them to function. Across the world, efforts to combat desertification are attempting to reverse decades of land degradation. Among the most ambitious is Africa’s Great Green Wall Initiative. Stretching across the Sahel from Senegal to Djibouti, the project is often described as a wall of trees crossing the continent. While the image is powerful, it oversimplifies a far more sophisticated undertaking.
The Great Green Wall is a vast network of restoration efforts designed to improve ecological function, strengthen food security, increase agricultural productivity, and enhance resilience to climate change. Across parts of Niger, Ethiopia, and other participating countries, degraded lands have been rehabilitated through sustainable land management, agroforestry, and community-led restoration initiatives.
Vegetation cover has increased. Soil fertility has improved. Agricultural productivity has recovered. Communities have regained a greater degree of control over landscapes that once appeared trapped in decline. The initiative demonstrates that restoration is possible, even in some of the world’s most environmentally challenging regions. It also reveals the scale of the task ahead. Long-term success depends on sustained investment, effective governance, and local participation. Landscapes can recover, but recovery requires commitment measured not in years, but in decades.
At Okonjima, that commitment is built into how we plan, not as an aspiration but as a management baseline.
Drought in Namibia’s Drylands: Regulator, Not Disaster
In Namibia’s dryland ecosystems, drought functions as a regulating force, not a disaster. As Wayne Hanssen observes:
“Drought is not an anomaly in dryland systems; it is a fundamental component of how these ecosystems function.”
Periods of rainfall allow populations to expand and resources to accumulate. Drought reduces those populations, limiting pressure on the system. This cycle of expansion and contraction has shaped dryland ecosystems over evolutionary timescales. The problem arises when human pressures reduce the system’s capacity to absorb these fluctuations. Overgrazing, soil degradation, and restricted movement weaken resilience. Under these conditions, drought shifts from a natural regulator to a driver of long-term decline.
How Okonjima Nature Reserve Manages for Drought
At Okonjima, drought planning is central to how we manage the reserve. Rather than treating drought as an unexpected crisis, management assumes it will occur repeatedly and prepares accordingly. This philosophy influences decisions ranging from stocking rates to habitat management. Grazing pressure is deliberately managed at conservative levels, generally around 10 to 15 hectares per animal, depending on feeding strategy. The objective is not to maximise production during favourable years. It is to preserve ecological function during difficult times.
Drought’s Impact on Pangolins and Aardvarks at Okonjima
At Okonjima, drought’s most significant impacts on pangolins and aardvarks occur not above ground but below it. Ants and termites, which form the foundation of many dryland food webs, respond to declining soil moisture by retreating deeper into the soil. For specialised insectivores such as Temminck’s ground pangolins (Smutsia temminckii) and aardvarks (Orycteropus afer), this creates a critical challenge. The prey remains present, but becomes inaccessible. While herbivores face declining forage and predators respond to shifting opportunities, it is this invisible reorganisation below the surface that hits specialist feeders hardest.
During the severe drought of 2018 to 2019, this dynamic played out across Okonjima in ways that were impossible to ignore. Juveniles were particularly vulnerable, unable to withstand prolonged periods of reduced food availability. Those losses, at least 15 pangolins alongside multiple aardvark mortalities, were recorded through AfriCat’s long-term monitoring and remain among the most significant drought impacts documented at Okonjima.
The Future of Africa’s Drylands Depends on Resilience, Not Rainfall
The battle against desertification is often portrayed as a fight against change. In reality, the challenge is learning how to live within change. Drylands have always been landscapes of uncertainty. Their strength lies not in stability but in adaptability. They bend with environmental pressures, absorb shocks, and recover when conditions improve. The danger emerges when repeated pressures erode that capacity for recovery.
The theme “Recognise. Respect. Restore.” offers a framework grounded in this reality.
Recognise the value and function of rangelands.
Respect the ecological processes and human constraints that shape them.
Restore the systems that allow them to recover.
At Okonjima we are watching that question play out in real time, season by season, on land we know intimately.
Because when the rain finally arrives, resilience determines what happens next. A resilient landscape captures the water, nourishes the soil, and bursts back into life. A degraded landscape lets the opportunity slip away. In the world’s drylands, the future is not determined by whether drought comes. Drought will come. It always has. The future is determined by whether the land still remembers how to respond when the rain returns.
Desertification is land degradation in arid, semi-arid, and dry sub-humid regions, caused by a combination of climatic variation and human activity. It happens when land loses its ability to support plants, animals, ecological processes, and the people who depend on it, including in places like Namibia.
Drought is a temporary reduction in rainfall that dryland ecosystems are adapted to withstand. Desertification occurs when repeated pressures, including drought and unsustainable land use, reduce the land’s ability to recover after rainfall returns.
Rangelands cover more than half of the Earth’s land surface and support billions of people and diverse wildlife. They provide essential ecosystem services, including food production, biodiversity support, soil stability, and carbon storage. Okonjima’s 22,000 hectares are part of this larger rangeland system.
- Recognise: Understand the ecological and economic value of rangelands
- Respect: Acknowledge the role of people, livelihoods, and local knowledge in managing these landscapes
- Restore: Rebuild ecological processes that allow degraded land to recover
Desertification is driven by a combination of factors, including prolonged drought, overgrazing, deforestation, soil erosion, climate change, and unsustainable land management practices.
No. In drylands, drought is a natural and important ecological process that regulates populations and resource use. As Wayne Hanssen, owner of Okonjima Nature Reserve, puts it, drought is not an anomaly in dryland systems but a fundamental part of how they function. Problems arise when ecosystems are degraded and lose their ability to recover after drought.
Desertification reduces habitat quality, food availability, and water resources. Specialised feeders such as Temminck’s ground pangolins (Smutsia temminckii) and aardvarks are particularly vulnerable, since drought drives their prey underground rather than removing it entirely. At Okonjima, AfriCat’s monitoring recorded the loss of at least 15 pangolins during the 2018 to 2019 drought.
The Great Green Wall is a large-scale African restoration effort that aims to rehabilitate degraded land across the Sahel through sustainable land management, agroforestry, and community-led initiatives.
Namibia is a global leader in dryland management and hosted the UN Convention to Combat Desertification Conference of the Parties (COP11) in Windhoek in 2013, contributing to international policy and knowledge on sustainable land use in arid environments. Reserves such as Okonjima put this knowledge into daily practice through long-term drought planning and conservative grazing management.
Namibia is a global leader in dryland management and hosted the UN Convention to Combat Desertification Conference of the Parties (COP11) in Windhoek in 2013, contributing to international policy and knowledge on sustainable land use in arid environments. Reserves such as Okonjima put this knowledge into daily practice through long-term drought planning and conservative grazing management.
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