Birdlife South Africa

The African-Eurasian Flyway (AEF) is one of the four great global pathways migratory birds use.  Stretching from Greenland and the Arctic to southern Africa, the flyway is used by hundreds of millions of land and waterbirds every year, and the habitats within the flyway also support hundreds of non-migratory bird species, many of which are globally threatened. Various human pressures, including habitat destruction and degradation, illegal hunting and trapping and climate change, severely impact the flyway.

Working at a flyway scale enables this essential ecological connectivity and builds collaboration across borders, raising our collective ambition, problem-solving together, sharing knowledge and leveraging the power of partnership.

The programme will drive the development and delivery of conservation projects throughout southern Africa. This will include working with BirdLife South Africa to protect the Berg River Estuary, 130 km north of Cape Town. This is one of the country’s most important estuaries for conservation, with the largest area of saltmarsh in the country. Work will combine habitat restoration, the development of monitoring tools and skills around ‘blue carbon’ and the creation of case-study and knowledge-sharing documentation to lay the foundations for a large-scale roll-out of restoration interventions across the country and potentially beyond.