COUTADA 5
The Government of Mozambique has contractually
transferred official Coutada 5, a formally protected
area, to Africa Futura Wildlife Restoration Lda for an
extended period of time, for the conservation and
sustainable use of the biodiversity resources found
within the Coutada.
The Coutada system of official protected areas in the
Republic of Mozambique has been established 50 years
ago, with the sustainable utilization of the renewable
natural resources of the Coutadas as the primary
objective. There are currently 11 operational Coutadas
in the country, of which Coutada 5 is the largest. In
addition to the Coutadas, there are also a number of
Transfrontier Protected Areas, National Parks and
Reserves in Mozambique.
Coutada 5 stretches from the Indian Ocean for about 130
km along the northern bank of the Save River and is
almost 687 000 ha or 6 870 km˛ in extent, thus making it
one of the largest officially protected areas in the
country, and indeed one of the biggest in southern
Africa. The Coutada harbours an impressive number and
variety of habitat types, ranging from extensive
mangrove forests along the Indian Ocean coast to salt
marshes, open ‘dambo’ or wetland systems, patches of
miombo woodland, riverine forests and thickets, large
expanses of open deciduous woodland, open mopane and
other savannah areas, as well as numerous fresh water
marshes and pans. The habitat of Coutada 5 is generally
speaking in a very good, and even prime, condition, with
anthropogenic disturbances very limited in extent.
During the collapse of civil order in the country as a
result of the protracted civil war of the 1980’s to the
early 1990’s, the wildlife resources of almost the whole
of Mozambique were unsustainably utilized to the point
of local extinction of most of the major herbivore and
predator species. Coutada 5 unfortunately did not escape
this wholesale destruction: only remnants of the
erstwhile abundant wildlife remain, and virtually all
the major predators and herbivores became locally
extinct.
Since the different habitats remained largely unscathed,
Africa Futura Wildlife Restoration accepted the
challenge of rehabilitating this prime protected area,
and plans to reintroduce as many as possible of the
species, both herbivores and carnivores, that locally
disappeared within the last twenty years or less.’
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