Namibia’s twin identities—as one of Africa’s most environmentally progressive nations and one of its fastest-growing mining frontiers—are colliding in its desert heartland.
The same landscapes that showcase black rhinos, rock art and desert elephants are now at the centre of an escalating fight between community conservancies and the extractive industry.
At the centre of the dispute lies the Red Mountain Joint Management Area (JMA) in the Kunene–Erongo corridor, where three conservancies—Doro !Nawas, Sorris Sorris and Uibasen Twyfelfontein—have petitioned the government and the High Court to halt mining inside their wildlife zones.
They say the mining road graded into the area in 2024, without their consent, symbolises everything that has gone wrong with Namibia’s once-praised balance between nature and development.
“In Namibia, open-pit mining is expanding into community-managed conservation areas despite legal protections and joint land governance arrangements,” the Environmental Investigation Agency stated in June 2025.
A sanctuary turned battlefield
The Red Mountain JMA was established in 2018 to protect fragile desert ecosystems, safeguard the range of Namibia’s desert-adapted black rhino and generate income through wildlife tourism.
The conservancies agreed to ban hunting, firewood collection and livestock grazing within the zone. Yet in August 2024, heavy machinery moved in.
When complaints went unanswered, the conservancies turned to the courts, alleging that the Environmental Commissioner had “grossly violated the Environmental Clearance Certificates issued by his office.”
They accused the Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism (MEFT) of ignoring their Game Management and Utilisation Plans—official documents lodged with the ministry and approved by conservancy members.
Laurensia //Naobes, manager of Uibasen Twyfelfontein Conservancy, told Mongabay that wildlife had already fled the disturbance. “There used to be a quiet riverbed where the mining was happening, with antelopes, ostriches, springboks. They moved out because of human disturbance,” she said.
The loss is more than ecological. Tourism built around rhino tracking and rock-art heritage generated over US $16 million in projected income for local communities over 20 years, according to documents cited by the Daily Maverick. That model, community leaders say, is now collapsing under dust and diesel fumes.
The breaking point came in October 2025. According to WWF Namibia, “large-scale blasting occurred in Sorris Sorris Conservancy in violation of the Environmental Clearance Certificate and in contempt of a High Court interdict.”
The organisation described the event as “highly undermining of CBNRM and the tourism joint ventures that support local community conservancies,” warning that Sorris Sorris lies “in a rhino breeding area and in a high-value tourism zone.”
“We are about to close a US$75 million deal for Community Conservation—how can we confidently say to donors that their money will be put to good use?” WWF asked in its communication to MEFT and the Ministry of Industries, Mines and Energy.
A legal framework unraveling
Namibia’s Environmental Management Act of 2007 was designed to prevent precisely this kind of overlap. It requires every mining or exploration project to obtain an Environmental Clearance Certificate and undergo public consultation.
Appeals—under Section 50 of the Act—must be decided by the Minister of Environment, not by the officials who issued the permit.
In practice, however, the system is fraying. The High Court’s ruling in Doro!Nawas Conservancy & Others v Ndimulunde and Others (October 2024) ordered MEFT to decide whether to suspend or cancel a contested ECC, ruling that the ministry’s delays violated due process.
It was a rare judicial rebuke for an institution once hailed as a global conservation model.
WWF Namibia’s Summary of Concerns on the Environmental Commissioner’s Conduct paints an even more troubling picture.
It says the Commissioner “issued an ECC for an area that had been officially withdrawn from mining for environmental reasons” and later took “five months to respond” to the Mining Commissioner’s inquiry about that decision.
The report alleges that he “facilitated the registration of a mining claim without consulting senior MEFT staff,” conducted a field visit “in the company of the mining proponent,” and then issued a Compliance Order that effectively “condoned all illegal activities carried out contrary to the EIA.”
The WWF document concludes that “the current scale of operations is clearly large-scale mining, which by law cannot and should not be conducted under the guise of mining claims.”
A 2018 joint policy paper by MEFT and the Ministry of Mines and Energy had already warned that Namibia needed “strong policy frameworks and tools… to protect biodiversity, ecosystem services and cultural heritage from development impacts.” Seven years later, that warning reads like prophecy.
A pattern across the country
The conflict at Red Mountain is part of a wider pattern. In southern Namibia, residents have raised objections to lithium and graphite exploration around the //Huab and Tsau //Khaeb areas, citing broken environmental-management plans and lack of consultation.
In the east, farmers in the Stampriet Basin fear that in-situ uranium leaching could poison one of the country’s few renewable aquifers.
For conservationists, these cases expose a systemic failure. The Ministry of Industries, Mines and Energy grants mining licences, while environmental oversight rests with MEFT.
The two offices seldom coordinate, allowing exploration to proceed even while environmental appeals remain unresolved.
Chief Zacharias Seibeb of the Dâure Daman Traditional Authority, whose jurisdiction spans parts of Erongo and Kunene, has become the latest voice of frustration.
“Tourism and mining should coexist to benefit my community and the Namibian nation at large,” Seibeb wrote in a letter dated 30 September 2025 to MEFT, copied to the Kunene Regional Council and the Uibasen Twyfelfontein Conservancy.
“If our voices are ignored, we will bulldoze the structures that disrespect our land and restore community ownership of resources,” he warned in a statement reported by Observer24 on 2 October 2025.
His words echo growing anger among traditional leaders who feel sidelined in decisions that reshape their ancestral lands.
The cost of silence
Namibia’s reputation as a conservation leader—built on 86 communal conservancies covering more than 20 percent of the country—is eroding under the weight of political inertia.
Rural communities that once saw wildlife as a form of capital now question whether the state still values their stewardship.
“If tourism collapses, people will go back to poaching,” warned one conservancy chairperson during a recent stakeholder meeting. “We cannot protect rhinos on empty stomachs.”
WWF Namibia has warned that continued inaction risks alienating global donors and jeopardising the country’s US $75 million conservation-financing deal.
The organisation’s correspondence described recent decisions by the Environmental Commissioner as “acts of intimidation and bullying,” accusing him of threatening joint-venture closures while under active court proceedings.
Searching for a future
Reconciling mining and environment will require political will as much as policy reform. Experts and conservation agencies alike argue that MEFT and MIME must jointly vet projects in sensitive zones, enforce cumulative-impact assessments, and ring-fence conservancy wildlife corridors from mineral claims.
So far, however, Namibia’s development model remains tilted toward extraction. The conflict in the Red Mountain JMA is no longer an isolated case—it is a reflection of how the nation’s green credentials are being tested in the age of critical minerals.
If the courts and ministries fail to strike a balance, the desert’s silence—once broken only by wind and wildlife—may soon echo with the sound of machines where black rhinos once walked.
