CNN news 2009-12-09 加文本

cnn 2009-12-09

It's one of the last wilderness areas, in Africa, last great wilderness areas in the world, and you have a very large intact savannah ecosystem which is adjacent to the largest wetland in Africa. So there are a lot of superlatives here in southern Sudan.

Some catastrophic things happened here to the wild life, particularly to species which don't migrate or don't go too far. And more sedentary species like buffalo, hartbeest. We.. There were estimated 47,000 hartbeests before the war here, we estimate now, may be a thousand. In southern National Park, something catastrophic happened to the elephants there. They went from 15,000 elephants to, we estimated, less than a thousand. Before the war you had our organization who's working there, there was international attention to the work that was going on here, but everybody had to pull out. And so there is this vacuum of 30 years of work now we've coming back. and we are still in discovery mode.

There is a sense of urgency here which needs to be expressed and we've been talking to our colleagues in the government of Southern Sudan about it, is they have a window of opportunity here, now. Right now they have a window of time when they need proper land who's planting and zoning. They need incentives and to work with local communities and they need strong law enforcement to secure those populations remaining. And if they do that over the next 5 years, with in partnership with the international community，they can secure, you know, one of the last great wilderness of the world.