Opportunities and Challenges for Wildlife Conservation: The Case of Alatish National Park, Northwest Ethiopia.

Wildlife continues to be lost rapidly across the planet in spite of the effort of conservationist organizations towards natural resources protection. The aim of this study was to assess the opportunities and challenges for wildlife conservation. A mixed research approach was devised and a cross-sectional research design was employed. Tools for primary data collection were questionnaires, FGDs, interviews and observation checklists. Secondary data were collected from related articles and prior research conducted in the area, as well as documents obtained from offices. Quantitative data was analyzed using SPSS version 16.0. The findings revealed that opportunities for wildlife conservation are inter-alia: the wealth of the park in plant and animal species, the environmental policies of Ethiopia, the attentios of conservationist organizations towards wildlife conservation, and the potential benefit of the park in terms of ecological and socioeconomical significances. However, the habitat and wildlife of the park can currently be described as being badly degraded due to serious threats from a number of ongoing problems such as huge amounts of cattle of foreign nomads from Western and Eastern Africa traversing the land, recurrent fire, shortage of seasonal water, unsustainable utilization of resources, agricultural expansion, hunting, human-wildlife conflict, conflict of interest over resource utilization between host communities and foreign nomads, lack of natural buffer zones and global warming. The conclusion drawn from the study is that Alatish is an ideal ecological corridor for wildlife conservation due to its variety and abundance of fauna and flora, and if properly managed, the park can be an open air museum for wildlife conservation, and also serve as a green belt in preventing the expansion of the arid Sahara and Sahel deserts from the adjoining Sudan region