06/10/2026
EMS FOUNDATION SUBMISSION
NATIONAL LEOPARD CONSERVATION STRATEGY AND ACTION PLAN 2026
The EMS Foundation supports the development of a coherent national framework that secures viable, free-ranging leopard populations and their habitats and improves coordination and transparency.
The gazetted Draft Strategy requires substantial revision before adoption. It treats the killing and use of a Vulnerable species as a negotiable stakeholder trade-off; creates pathways for access to leopard body parts; retains trophy hunting and lethal conflict responses without adequate evidential, precautionary or well-being safeguards; and relies on incomplete population, mortality and enforcement data while postponing essential controls to future implementation processes.
Most fundamentally, the Draft Strategy does not identify the population figure, population model or alternative decision rule currently used to support leopard-management and quota decisions. It records an exceptionally wide range of estimates, conflicting national trends, substantial provincial variation and significant geographical data gaps, but does not disclose how monitoring results, uncertainty and cumulative mortality were translated into the current national, provincial and hunting-zone allocations.
The governing legal question is not whether a compromise among stakeholder preferences can be found. The Strategy and every decision taken under it must comply with section 24 of the Constitution, the environmental principles and public-trust duties in the National Environmental Management Act 107 of 1998 and the National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act 10 of 2004, the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act 3 of 2000, and NEMBAās express object of providing for consideration of animal well-being in the management, conservation and ecologically sustainable use of animals. These are legal constraints and public duties. They cannot be balanced away by demand for trophies, skins or other body parts.
The Draft Strategy itself acknowledges the absence of a rigorous national population estimate, large variation among published estimates, limited standardised long-term monitoring, fragmented populations and multiple sources of anthropogenic mortality. Yet the 2026 and 2027 domestic export quotas were set before the Strategy consultation, while revision of the leopard non-detriment finding is relegated to an activity to be undertaken āas and when requiredā. That sequence is incompatible with a genuinely precautionary approach.1 The scientific and legal foundations for any authorised mortality must precede and not follow the decision to permit it.
The EMS Foundation accordingly requests that the Minister:
1. extend or reopen the comment period for at least 30 days calculated from the corrected publication, and disclose the full consultation, scientific and administrative record;
2. withdraw the present Draft Strategy for revision and publish the revised draft for a further meaningful public-comment process, accompanied by a comment-and-response report;
NOTE:
The precautionary principle pertains to risk management and states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is not harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking an action. The principle is used to justify discretionary decisions when the possibility of harm from making a certain decision (e.g. taking a particular course of action) is not, or has not been, established through extensive scientific knowledge. The principle implies that there is a social responsibility to protect the public from exposure to harm, when scientific investigation has found a plausible risk or if a potential plausible risk has been identified.
See precautionary principle_apa_ldr_eca_sua | IPBES secretariat
https://emsfoundation.org.za/submission-on-the-draft-national-leopard-conservation-strategy-and-action-plan-2026/
Image Credit: Brian Abrahamson
