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This week UNESCO officially recognized the Okavango Delta in Botswana as its 1,000th World Heritage Site, putting it alongside iconic places such as the Great Barrier Reef, the Grand Canyon, the Taj Mahal, Stonehenge, and the Great Wall, to name a few.

National Geographic Explorer Steve Boyes of the Wild Bird Trust fell in love with the Okavango on his first visit in 2000 and has been slogging through its soggy wilds and pushing for its protection ever since. National Geographic spoke with Boyes about what makes the place so deserving of international attention, and why he calls it his “spiritual home.”

The delta is the world’s largest undeveloped river catchment—only the Yukon is longer [counting just rivers without dams]. The technical term for the formation is “alluvial fan”; it’s flatter than a pool table and fans out perfectly into a dry wasteland visible from space.

This delta is a true oasis in the middle of the bone-dry Kalahari Sand Basin, a rare untouched wilderness that’s been preserved by decades of border and civil wars in the Angolan catchment. Many people along the Okavango River live like communities did some 400 years ago—and from them I think we can learn a lot about how to be better stewards of the natural world.

The Okavango floods up to ten cubic kilometers [8.1 million acre feet] of water into the Kalahari Desert every year. The rainy season brings an additional 24 to 28 inches [61 to 71 centimeters], but the harsh Kalahari sun evaporates or transpires 98 percent back into the sky. If no floods arrived and the rains didn’t come, the delta would dry up in a year.

It supports an amazing variety of wildlife. It’s home to the largest remaining elephant population on Earth—every winter more than 80,000 of them arrive in the delta to meet the oncoming floods, leaving with the first signs of rain in the northeast. This vast unfenced landscape allows them to live and migrate as they have for thousands of years. The delta is also home to the keystone populations of lion, leopard, hyena, wild dog, cheetah, hippo, and much else.

Why the delta is worthy of being a World Heritage Site. This is Africa’s last remaining wetland wilderness, an 8,000-square-kilometer [3,000 square miles] patchwork of floodplains, channels, lagoons, and thousands upon thousands of islands—some people say more than 10,000 of them.

The abundance of life is mind boggling: more than 530 bird species, thousands of plant species,160 different mammals,155 reptiles, scores of frogs, countless insects. Everywhere you look you find life. We surveyed bats and we found 17 species in three days. We started looking for praying mantises and found 90 different species. This is the ark of the Kalahari and this part of Africa.

It took eight years to achieve this status. Botswana only has two World Heritage Sites, Tsodilo Hills [an archaeological site] and now the delta. Dr. Karen Ross, the program design director at the African Wildlife Foundation and a long-time champion of the delta, managed to find independent funding to run the necessary stakeholder meetings and drive the process forward. She is a true delta hero.

What would be the next area you’d like to see UNESCO name? All of this is for nothing if we do not protect the water that feeds the Okavango Delta. This basin is the world’s largest remaining developed river catchment and Africa’s most important unprotected landscape.

Three things must happen to protect these waters.
First, Namibia must commit to protecting their section for the Okavango River and join us in calling Angola to join the push to establish a multinational UNESCO World Heritage Site that includes the entire catchment.
Second, we need Angola to establish the first protected areas in the Okavango’s catchment.
Third, we need OKACOM [the Okavango River Water Commission] to bring Angola, Namibia, and Botswana together in active discussion about the future of the Okavango River. Up until now Botswana has benefited hugely from the delta, while Namibia and Angola have benefited very little. We need shared benefit and high-quality scientific research to make UNESCO World Heritage a possibility.

What else would be helpful in this fight?  We need a special visa that allows easy access by road, air, and river to the entire basin in Botswana, Namibia, and Angola. Shared benefit from tourism can only happen when tourists can move freely between these countries. If we do not open up the Angolan catchment to ecotourism development, other land uses such as mining and agriculture will prevail.

Acknowledgement Jennifer S. Holland for National Geographic,  June 24, 2014

Why don’t you visit this wonderful wilderness yourself – look over these locations or go here to see more options