Africa has the fastest growing human population of any continent. A high proportion of its people live a rural existence where keeping livestock is the chief livelihood, creating intense pressure on natural areas and resources. Lion populations require large areas with high densities of prey- a recipe for wilderness that is increasingly scarce in Africa. As wild habitat is converted to farms and rangelands, lions inevitably find themselves at odds with people requiring land for their own needs. The remaining range for lions is contracting inwards to the protected islands of reserves and parks.

Africa’s protected areas are essential for the lion. Many are enormous- for example, Kruger National Park is the size of Israel. Critically, parks also protect an essential network of foundation populations for any effort to conserve the species across its range. However, lion biologists now recognize that game reserves and national parks on their own no longer guarantee the long-term survival of the species.

Read Panthera's Lion Report Card: The State of the Lion.

The African lion has experienced a catastrophic range collapse of 82.3% its historical range. Despite the grim statistics, the lion is a resilient species, capable of recolonizing areas quickly and are able to persist in rangelands provided wild prey is available and, most importantly, people choose to tolerate them. Fortunately, humans and lions have shared space in Africa for millennia and continue to today.

The result is that Africa’s great cat may still occur in one great connected crescent, running from the West African coast in a narrow band across the Sahel, through the lion’s heartland in East Africa and south into Southern Africa (see map below). Our objective is to create a Pan-African corridor for lions, maintaining them in the landscapes where the species still occurs and fostering connections between those landscapes. For some areas, it may already be too late and lions will only persist in isolated, small reserves if at all. Our strategy targets the critical landscapes and issues where it is most important to avoid that outcome. Please see Project Leonardo for information on how Panthera is addressing the threats to lions.