The Guardian: Nairobi’s lions are almost encircled by the city. A Maasai community offers a key corridor out

Nairobi national park in Kenya is the only large wildlife conservation area to fall within a capital city. It is hemmed in on three sides by human development, and unfenced only on its southern boundary – this gap providing a crucial wildlife passageway, linking the park’s animals to other populations of wildlife and wider gene pools.

The gap, however, is also home to a small Maasai community, where farmers face an agonising choice between protecting livestock and making space for the predators that prey on their cattle.

Despite the dangers, the pastoralists are choosing to leave tracts of their land open, allowing the flow of wild animals to avoid what scientists call an “ecological extinction” via a shrinking gene pool.

“Our forefathers found the wild animals here,” says 55-year-old Isaac ole Kishoyian, a resident of Empakasi, a small settlement overlooking Nairobi national park. “There was enough prey before people built permanent settlements around the park.”

Now, wildebeests and impalas no longer migrate from the south, he says, and lions find his cows to be easy targets. “But we still want our children to enjoy the same wild heritage as we did.”…

With 65-75% of wild animals in Kenya living outside conservation areas, the government relies on private landowners to host and protect wildlife. It is reviewing wildlife laws to entrench a more community-led approach to conservation.

Silvia Museiya, from the state department for wildlife, says: “If people see no benefits of hosting wildlife on their land, they will convert [the land] to other uses.”

In April 2025, 256 landowners, including those adjacent to Nairobi national park, Amboseli and Masai Mara, more than 100 miles away, received $175,000 (£129,000), the first of a biannual payment earned from a pilot programme that pays landowners to keep more than 14,000 hectares (35,000 acres) open and intact. Each landowner will be paid $5 an acre each year, a modest amount that locals hope will increase as more join the programme and it attracts more finance.

“I got 6,000 shillings [£34] for my 20 acres of grassland,” says 35-year-old Daniel Parsaurei. “The amount is not much but … if we open up the land, we can all have enough grazing areas and help increase the wild animals so that lions can also have enough food and reduce attacks on cattle.”

The programme uses remote-sensing technologies developed by Andrew Davies at Harvard University to measure the extent of biodiversity within a given region and create “biodiversity credits” to sell for its protection. Proponents of this programme say it is a more direct and immediate form of nature financing, to incentivise the individuals who directly protect such biodiversity every day.

Viraj Sikand, co-founder of EarthAcre, a local startup that finds funders for biodiversity and monitors how such capital reaches local communities, says: “Unless such payments are delivered directly to landowners, all the land will go.”

Read the full article at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/25/lions-kenya-wildlife-conservation-migration-community-land-predators-maasai-farmers-nairobi-national-park