Vulture populations in Southern Africa are dwindling, yet the birds could bring large economic benefits to the region, according to a recent report by the NGO BirdLife.

Assessing the “value” of vultures in Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe, researchers found that the ecosystem services they provide are worth around $251 million per year for the three countries alone. Extrapolating those findings across the Southern African region, that figure rises to about $1.8 billion annually.

“We’ve always known that vultures [are] valuable in terms of their role in the ecosystem,” Lovelater Sembele, senior vulture conservation officer for Southern Africa at BirdLife Africa, tells Mongabay. “But we had never evaluated it to find the value of the role that they play in the ecosystem.”

The researchers reviewed scientific studies, surveyed beneficiaries in the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA), the general public in each country and internationally, and rangers and park managers; assessed the value of a range of “services” vultures provide, like ecosystem cleansing, sentinel species identification to carcasses, tourism, and cultural importance.

Overall, the report found that the “value” of vultures is around $18 million per year in Botswana, $92 million in Zambia and $141 million in Zimbabwe. They calculated that the loss of vultures amounts to an economic hit of $47 million per year, whereas conserving them amounts to a gain of $30 million per year.

“What this means is that vultures are valuable to the health of humans, to the health of livestock and the health of other wild animals as well,” Sembele says. “Vultures are saving us a lot of money that would be used to maintain the health of these three groups of living organisms. We should be actively conserving vultures.”

According to Mary Malasa, program manager at BirdWatch Zambia, much of the importance assigned to vultures comes from the fact that people want future generations to benefit from ecosystems with vultures.

Andrea Santangeli, a research fellow at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies, who wasn’t involved in the report, says the results should be cautiously approached as there’s always a range of uncertainty in such studies. He says there’s still limited evidence across different regions, aside from a study from India, when it comes to vultures removing carcasses and preventing pathogen spread among humans.

“The task was quite ambitious,” Santangeli says. “I appreciate and I acknowledge that this was a first attempt. What I would have liked to see a bit more [of] was a measure of uncertainty … it may propel some more research and more in-depth analysis.”

Yet, he also says it’s a good first attempt at quantifying the ecosystem services provided by vultures, particularly “non-use” values such as their presence in the ecosystem. The findings “can really make an impact in terms of vulture conservation in Southern Africa,” Santangeli says.

Framing the use of vultures

Sembele says the report aims to encourage conservation of declining vulture species across Africa. In Southern Africa, seven of the nine vulture species are considered threatened, with the white-backed (Gyps africanus), white-headed (Trigonoceps occipitalis) and hooded vulture (Necrosyrtes monachus) critically endangered.

These scavengers face threats from targeted and accidental poisoning, power line collisions, habitat loss, and what’s called “belief-based use.” Across Africa, vulture experts have raised alarm about the latter as a growing driver of vulture decline, particularly in West Africa.

“There are spiritual and physical healing aspects that are being associated with vulture medicine,” Sembele says. “We evaluated this by looking at how much people were spending visiting traditional healers in a year, and how many times they got medicine that was linked to vulture parts.”

Across the three countries studied, the authors estimated a value of more than $7 million per year from traditional medicine use.

“That’s a significant amount of money, and we are working with finite vulture populations,” says André Botha, co-chair of the Vulture Specialist Group at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority. “Using animals to that extent will drive these birds to extinction.”

Botha, who wasn’t involved in the research, says that though the study is a first step toward understanding the value and importance of vulture conservation in Southern Africa, the inclusion of traditional medicine as a provisioning service needs to be approached with caution.

“If you show this report and findings to people and policymakers without the finer background detail, they might see this [provisioning service] as a good thing,” he says, a concern being that the report doesn’t explicitly underline how this use is negatively affecting vulture populations.

Reduced populations will inevitably impact the potential sanitation and health benefits the birds provide, and the strong value assigned to their presence in ecosystems.

Both Malasa and Sembele say the report doesn’t promote the use of vultures and their parts. “It’s a use that we are trying to reduce by engaging with traditional healers to come up with alternatives,” Sembele adds. “It’s a value that exists because there is a monetary aspect being linked to the use of these vultures.”

Benefiting society and ecosystems

In the three countries surveyed, BirdLife’s report reveals that maintaining a healthy vulture population benefits park rangers by helping them identify carcasses and illegal activities; communities; and the general public, as it enhances ecosystems.

Sembele highlights the significant impact of waste disposal and sanitation on the majority of people in African countries. Having vultures in the landscapes “really benefits humans, regardless of where we are in the African landscape,” she says.

Though Santangeli and Botha expressed reservations about the report, they support the potential benefits of vulture conservation, suggesting improvements in studies of vultures’ ecosystem services like larger survey numbers, a wider range of expert opinions, and peer-review processes.

“It would be fantastic if we could [assess] all 54 African countries,” Botha says. “I do think it’s essential that at a national level, more countries should consider doing this.”

For Malasa, the hope is that the findings can build a strong case for vulture conservation. “It’s really a call to conservation action for all of us, as Zambians, as Africans and custodians of our ecosystems,” she says, “because vultures are a part of our ecosystem and we all benefit from their services.”

Banner image: A tagged vulture in Zambia as part of ongoing population monitoring efforts. Image courtesy of BirdWatch Zambia.