Kimberley’s most famous landmark is not only a monument to what was found. It is a warning about what was left.

Between 1871 and 1914, miners removed 22.5 million tonnes of earth from what became the Big Hole and recovered 2,722 kilograms of diamonds. Extraordinary value travelled out of this landscape. A vast hole remained.

Standing near its edge after speaking at the launch of a new Global Environment Facility programme, I found myself returning to one question: when value comes out of a place, how much wealth stays with the people who live there?

That question is larger than mining. It belongs wherever people are asked to protect wildlife, restore land, host energy infrastructure, conserve water or supply a natural product. When a project ends, what income, business or asset will remain because we were there? If we cannot answer, the work is not finished.

This is also where institutions matter. The new GEF-supported initiative, delivered through a partnership between UNDP and the South African National Biodiversity Institute, or SANBI, is designed to expand conservation while strengthening local economies in Limpopo and the Northern Cape. It gives us a practical opportunity to test a different model: conservation that leaves communities not only with benefits, but with greater earning power.

Rich in assets, short of income

The Northern Cape makes the paradox hard to ignore. It holds diamonds, iron ore, manganese, wildlife, remarkable cultural heritage, immense spaces and some of the world’s strongest solar resources. On solar, as on everything else here, the right question is the same: ownership and jobs, not only rent. Yet its official unemployment rate was 28.7 percent in the second quarter of 2026. Natural wealth and household wealth are not the same thing.

A family cannot pay school fees with a wildlife count, however healthy that wildlife is. Nor can it build a future from a mining royalty that disappears into annual consumption. Conservation success matters. Revenue matters too. The harder question is whether revenue becomes durable local capability: enterprises, skills, equipment, savings, ownership and assets that can keep producing value.

This is why I believe we need to widen our lens. South Africa’s biodiversity economy is an important frame. The wildlife economy has also been central to my own work. Both have moved nature closer to the centre of economic policy. But either can mislead us if it becomes a silo. Wildlife is one source of value. Biodiversity is a broad asset class containing many sub-assets. Communities live in whole landscapes, not in policy categories.

From wildlife economy to landscape economy

The better unit of analysis is the landscape: its wildlife, water, carbon, sun, soil, minerals, plants, culture, knowledge, people and infrastructure. A landscape economy asks how these assets can support several compatible livelihoods without exhausting the ecological base on which they depend.

Think of a household that survives through a salary, a garden and a room rented out. Land can work in the same way. I call this a revenue stack. In plain English, do not ask the land to earn only once.

In a Northern Cape landscape, the stack might include visitor income, locally processed devil’s claw, paid restoration work, carbon or biodiversity payments, a community stake in renewable energy and, where communities choose it and the necessary safeguards are met, regulated hunting. Each stream has its own buyer, price and risk. Not every stream belongs everywhere, and some will be ecologically incompatible. The task is to identify a locally legitimate combination and design the streams so that they reinforce, rather than undermine, one another.

A landscape economy does not prescribe hunting. Some communities may choose it and others may reject it. Where it occurs, it must be lawful, scientifically justified, community-authorised and transparent about both revenue and conservation outcomes. The principle is not hunting. It is community choice within ecological limits.

None of this is hypothetical. In the Western Cape, clearing invasive trees from water catchments has recovered more than fifteen billion litres of water a year and created hundreds of paid jobs restoring, rather than extracting from, the land. Healthy land is infrastructure. Maintaining it can be its own line of business.

Diversification is not an optional flourish. It is the basis of resilience. Tourism can collapse during a pandemic. Hunting quotas can fall. Commodity prices can turn. Carbon prices can disappoint. A business that dies when one revenue stream shrinks was never truly sustainable. It was exposed.

Turn revenue into things that last

A revenue stack is only the beginning. The deeper shift is from sharing proceeds to building ownership.

Rwanda offers one visible model. Ten percent of park tourism revenue is channelled to neighbouring communities for projects such as schools, health centres and roads. The Royal Bafokeng Nation in South Africa offers another lesson: royalties from platinum were converted into a diversified investment portfolio and community assets. Different histories, different institutions, but a common principle: current income should help create future earning power.

That means every revenue agreement should answer two questions. What reaches households now? And what productive asset will the community own when the contract, concession, mine or donor project ends? A guesthouse, processing facility, community trust, equity stake, water system, transport business, digital marketplace or skilled workforce can keep generating returns. A once-off cheque cannot.

The point is not to romanticise every model. Benefit-sharing arrangements can be captured by elites. Royalties can be badly governed. Carbon contracts can lock communities into long obligations they do not fully understand. Hunting can only be considered where science, law, ethics and community consent provide firm boundaries. A landscape economy must be measured by who holds rights, who makes decisions, who carries risk and who receives value.

Rights before rails

Investors often begin with infrastructure: roads, transmission lines, lodges, processing plants and trading platforms. These matter. But rails laid across uncertain or unjust rights can accelerate extraction rather than development.

Rights must come first. Communities need recognised tenure or resource rights, the authority to say yes or no, clear benefit-sharing rules, access to independent advice and contracts written in language people understand. They also need a real place in governance after the ribbon is cut. Consultation is not ownership, and a meeting is not consent.

Only then should the rails follow: finance, infrastructure, buyers, standards, logistics and technology. This sequence is both fairer and more investable. Clear rights reduce conflict. Transparent rules reduce uncertainty. Local stakes create incentives to protect the underlying asset.

Technology can make the landscape legible

Technology creates new possibilities, but only if it serves people rather than bypassing them. Satellite imagery and sensors can show changes in vegetation, water and wildlife. Digital registries can record rights and reduce disputes. Traceability systems can connect an indigenous product to its origin and prove that it was harvested lawfully. Mobile payments can show what revenue reached which household. Online marketplaces can shorten the distance between a producer in the Kalahari and a buyer in Cape Town, Kigali or Copenhagen.

Consider devil’s claw, the medicinal root that San harvesters dig, dry and sell across the Kalahari. By one estimate, harvesters and traders together keep under one percent of what the plant is eventually worth on a pharmacy shelf abroad. The plant did not lose value between the desert and the shelf. The harvester simply had no way to prove where it came from, meet a buyer’s standard or reach the buyer directly. Closing that gap, not replacing the harvester, is what good technology should do.

This matters because communities often own or steward valuable assets that markets cannot see clearly. When an asset is invisible, buyers discount it, lenders ignore it and intermediaries capture the margin. Good data can make value visible. But a digital map cannot confer rights that the law withholds, and a blockchain cannot repair an unfair contract. Technology is a rail. Rights still come first.

Partnerships can create a different kind of wealth.

UNDP, SANBI and the GEF can help engender this approach to wealth creation. Their value is not only funding. It is connecting institutions that rarely sit around the same table: communities, local authorities, scientists, businesses and buyers.

The new project is already pointed this way. Across landscapes and seascapes in Limpopo and the Northern Cape, it aims to expand the conservation estate, identify livelihood and business opportunities, strengthen value chains and make community benefits visible, with indigenous peoples, government, civil society and the private sector at the table.

That also sets a demanding test. Success should not be judged only by hectares conserved, institutions trained or policies completed, but by what income streams have become viable, which local businesses have entered a real market, what assets communities now own, and whether women and young people have gained a meaningful stake.

This is how partners move from funding activities to building economic systems. Grants can secure rights, organise producers and absorb early risk. Public institutions set fair rules. Private firms bring buyers, technology and investment. Communities hold decision-making power and a negotiated share of value. Each does what it is best placed to do; together they build one functioning local economy.

UNDP’s emerging Investment Accelerator could help provide the next bridge. Its role would not be to create another fund or parallel structure, but to identify promising landscape enterprises, diagnose what prevents them from reaching capital, and connect them to buyers, finance, technical expertise and catalytic support. Projects such as this one can help build that pipeline, turning conservation activity into investable local businesses without weakening community rights or ecological safeguards.

The next logical step for CBNRM

Community-based natural resource management, or CBNRM, established a powerful principle in Southern Africa: people who live with wildlife should have a real say in its management and a fair share of its benefits. Its next logical development is building a landscape economy, not simply managing a resource.

This does not abandon conservation; it makes conservation more durable. When nature pays several honest incomes, it becomes part of the local economy rather than a cost imposed from elsewhere, and communities become economic partners rather than project beneficiaries.

For governments, funders and development partners, the practical test is simple. Select a manageable number of landscapes. Map the full asset base with communities. Confirm rights before inviting deals. Build at least three compatible revenue streams. Connect local enterprises to real buyers and suitable finance. Publish the benefit-sharing rules. Use technology to track ecological outcomes and money flows. Then measure what remains in household incomes, businesses and community balance sheets, not only what appears in project reports. UNDP and SANBI, with GEF support, can begin demonstrating that model here.

What we choose to leave

The Big Hole can be read as a story about diamonds. I think it asks a more enduring question about development itself.

Will a child born near a valuable landscape inherit only a memory of what it once contained? Or will that child inherit a healthy ecosystem, a recognised right, a viable business and a stake in an asset that is still producing value?

The best legacy is not a project that lasted five years. It is an economy that can stand after the project leaves: one healthy landscape, several honest incomes and local ownership that compounds across generations. That is the opportunity now before UNDP, SANBI, GEF and the communities and institutions leading this work.

Let us stop asking only what nature can earn. Let us ask who will own the earning power, how many times the landscape can create value without being depleted, and what will still be working when we are gone.

The hole is already there. Our only real choice now is whether it is the only thing we leave behind.

Sources and further reading

• The Big Hole official history: Mining dates, earth excavated and diamonds recovered.

• Statistics South Africa Quarterly Labour Force Survey Q2 2026: Provincial and national labour market figures.

• South Africa National Biodiversity Economy Strategy: National policy framing for an inclusive, transformed biodiversity economy.

• Rwanda Development Board tourism revenue sharing: Ten percent revenue-sharing policy and examples of community projects.

• Visit Rwanda gorilla tracking: Current permit information and the community revenue share.

• Royal Bafokeng Archive: Conversion of platinum royalties into a diversified investment portfolio.

• World Bank Wildlife Conservation Bond: Structure of the US$150 million outcome-linked Rhino Bond.

• IIED Community management of natural resources in Africa: Evidence and lessons from community natural-resource governance.

• The Nature Conservancy, Greater Cape Town Water Fund: Hectares of invasive trees cleared and litres of water a year recovered.

• Herbal Reality, The sustainability of devil’s claw: Share of final retail value captured by harvesters and traders.

• UNDP-SANBI GEF project results framework presented at the programme launch in Kimberley on 10 September 2026: Project objective, components, outcomes and planned outputs in Limpopo and the Northern Cape.