Wildfires and an encroaching population are threatening grasslands that host some of the world’s rarest species

Conservationist Getachew Assefa points across the valley. “It started close to the mist over there, by the most spectacular viewpoint,” he says. “Almost all the grassland was burnt. All of that plateau and the steep cliff over there.”

Six months after wildfires torched this part of Ethiopia’s Simien Mountains, the scars are healing: heather and grass have returned to carpet the hilltop, brightened by the yellow daisies which bloom after the long rains. On the near side of the valley lie barley fields, rippling in the wind.

The scene is bucolic. But, as Assefa explains, these montane grasslands and the rare wildlife they host are under threat.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Simien Mountains are home to the highly endangered Ethiopian wolf. Photograph: Claudio Sillero/EWCP

Two fires broke out earlier this year, ravaging one of the oldest natural Unesco world heritage sites, and destroying, at least temporarily, the habitat of some of the world’s rarest species: the copper-coated Ethiopian wolf and the walia ibex, a goat found nowhere else on earth.

Few doubt the blazes’ cause. The park’s wolf monitors – which include Assefa – saw, through binoculars, two men setting tussocks alight, though they couldn’t confirm their identities.

“They did it in five areas, on purpose,” he says. The fire raged for several days, and it took thousands of locals including a nearby football club – eventually assisted by a team of Israeli firefighters – to bring the flames under control. Around the same time the Bale Mountains, in the country’s south, were also affected by wildfires that lasted for more than 20 days and which experts attributed to human encroachment on the park.

Incidents like these shed light on the pressures threatening Ethiopia’s fragile wildlife and delicate ecosystems: accelerating competition over resources as the human population swells, political instability, global heating and mass tourism.

“We are in a crisis situation,” says Greta Iori, Ethiopia technical advisor for the Wildlife Conservation Society, who fears the country’s endemic species are being driven close to extinction. “We are inundated with issues when it comes to wildlife.”

Ethiopia was one of the first countries in Africa to establish national parks. The Simien Mountains were formally added to these in 1969, and today there are 20 national parks, and many more protected areas nationwide. For a country with few minerals or natural resources such as oil, assets like these are an important source of national income.According to the World Bank, “natural capital”, including forests and agricultural land, accounts for 40% of Ethiopia’s total wealth.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ethiopia was one of the first countries in Africa to establish national parks. The Simien Mountains are also a Unesco world heritage site. Photograph: Henning Neuhaus

But the parks are in a dire state. In Omo national park, in the far south of Ethiopia near the border with Kenya, the government is building sugar factories and vast irrigated plantations. Awash national park, the country’s oldest, is severed in two by the railway and eastern highway towards Djibouti. Abijatta-Shalla, south of Addis Ababa, is home to a soda ash factory.

Meanwhile, ethnic unrest in eastern Ethiopia has had an enormous impact on Babile Elephant Sanctuary, one of the country’s most important elephant ranges. According to Iori a huge number of new human settlements have appeared inside its borders since 2017.

The elephant population is under extreme pressure due to “heightened and unavoidable human-elephant conflict”, she says. A population of about 500 could be decimated “in a blink of an eye” through poaching, with park staff struggling to secure the sanctuary.

“2019 has been brutal with an incredible spike in elephant killings,” she says. “It’s like we’ve already lost in Babile, and it’s heartbreaking.”

Nationwide, conservation efforts have been stymied in recent years by civil unrest and the political transition following the appointment of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in 2018.

“In general Ethiopia has never been a huge poaching-for-trafficking hotspot – but since law and order has crumbled we’ve seen a spike in opportunistic poaching and subsequent trafficking,” Iori says. “The police and army are busy with other things, and the risk of getting caught is low.”

In the Simien Mountains the problems are less advanced and the park better managed. But similar dynamics are present. When political protests broke out in 2016, the park was a target of popular anger, with locals breaking prohibitions against tree-chopping and livestock grazing. “Everyone was rushing to get his share,” recalls Assefa. “We lost two of the best wolf habitats.”

Today the park’s authorities still struggle to enforce local laws designed to protect the natural environment.

“There is a big conflict between the young, unemployed people and the park management,” Assefa explains. He reckons the fires this year were started by locals disgruntled by the authorities’ heightened clampdown on livestock grazing inside the park’s perimeters.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Setegn, a local farmer, says he depends on his livestock for survival. Photograph: Henning Neuhaus

Setegn, a local farmer whose house lies just beyond the park, admits he grazes his animals inside the boundary marked by the main road. “The park management said we can’t cross the road – they say we won’t get any benefit from tourism unless we graze on the right-hand side,” he says. “But it’s very difficult. There is no survival for us without livestock.”

Others interviewed by the Guardian expressed the same concerns, saying their incomes had been badly hit by the restrictions.

The barley fields on the left of the road are another sign of human intrusion, and of the waning authority of the park management, notes Nick Crane, the British owner of Simien Mountain Lodge. “They encroach slowly – imperceptibly – so you hardly notice it,” he says.

According to Abebaw Azanaw, the park warden, there are about 130 households around the edges of the park.

Relocating them would be costly and could spark renewed conflict. In 2016 the entire village of Gichi – nearly 500 households located on the escarpment where the fire started – opted to move to a new settlement near the town of Debark, which cost the government on average $17,000 (£14,000) per family. The compensation was sizeable but many complained about a lack of electricity in their new homes on arrival, and of a lack of jobs. Some threatened to return to the park.

“We learnt from Gichi that it is very difficult to resettle people from the park,” says Assefa.

The root of the problem is common in many developing countries when it comes to conservation: how to strike the right balance between the resource demands of local residents and the need to protect the natural environment for future generations.

Promoting tourism is part of the answer, should it mean jobs and higher incomes for locals, but only if managed well.

In 2015 the Ethiopian Ministry of Culture and Tourism announced that it intended to triple foreign visitors to more than 2.5 million by 2020.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The walia ibex, only found in the Simien Mountains. Photograph: Santiago Urquijo/Getty Images

But for John Watkin, who worked in the Simien Mountains as the chief technical advisor for Africa Wildlife Foundation between 2018 and 2019, “uncontrolled tourism” is the most serious threat to the park’s wildlife.

“The park infrastructure is simply not set up for huge numbers of tourists … Tourism is always looking for a new hot destination, and Ethiopia is it. But unless it is done well it is going to cause serious problems,” he says.

For Crane, one answer is to increase the park price for foreign visitors, to try to limit the number coming to the Simien Mountains each year.

Meanwhile Watkin suggests Ethiopia considers alternative conservation approaches that allow communities to take ownership of the process, moving away from the state-led “fortress conservation” model that prevails. He notes examples in Kenya and Tanzania, where local communities run eco-lodges and tourism ventures while ensuring the landscape is protected. “They’re 20 to 30 years ahead of Ethiopia in this,” he says.

Such approaches might make it possible for Ethiopia to square the circle between conservation and development.

“The core of the problem is that tourism is not working for the locals,” says Joshua Amlakse, a Simien Mountains guide. “Nothing ends up in the local community.”