Recon Africa, a Canadian Oil and Gas Company, recently announced plans to start drilling oil and gas wells along the banks of the Kavango River in Q4 2020. The proposed site sits between Namibia and Botswana, an environmentally protected area that supplies water to the Okavango Delta in Africa.

Although, hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” has revolutionized drilling for oil and gas across the world, it has some serious negative effects on water, environment, and wildlife. Each fracking effort requires millions of gallons of water - which means two things - highly polluted leftover water and less water for fish and wildlife.

The produced water from fracking is so toxic that it will kill anything that drinks it, and it is often left on the ground or poorly disposed of, according to the US National Wildlife Federation.

The after-effects of fracking to human health such as contaminated drinking water, earthquakes, flammable faucets have been researched and spoken about many a time but the consequences to wildlife have so far been left out of the international conversation. These consequences are very real for animals, birds, fish and wildlife ecosystems. In some places wildlife is destroyed when their habitat suffers and in others water is sucked away or polluted, and fish and birds die as a result of it. Some species of birds can’t take the traffic, noise and dust that accompany extraction.

In 2006 a spill of close to 1 million gallons of fracking wastewater into the Yellowstone River resulted in a mass die off of fish and plants. Clean-up of that spill is still ongoing. - Source: The Revelator

The primary objective of ReconAfrica's initial three well drilling program, scheduled for Q4 of 2020, is to confirm a thick, active, petroleum system throughout the deep Kavango basin. Specifically, the wells are designed to test organic rich shales and more shallow conventional structures throughout the sedimentary basin as mentioned in their press release.

“Studies show that there are multiple pathways to wildlife being harmed,” says ecologist Sandra Steingraber, a scholar in residence at Ithaca College who has worked for a decade compiling research on the health effects of fracking. “Biodiversity is a determinant of public health — without these wild animals doing ecosystem services for us, we can’t survive.” Source: The Revelator

As companies get drilling permits to drill in environmentally sensitive areas, vital wildlife habitat is altered and lost in surrounding/adjacent areas as well. The potential damage to the environment and wildlife ecosystems should not be ignored.

In one study, published in Biological Conservation in 2016, researchers examined the effects of unconventional gas drilling on forest habits and populations of birds in an area of West Virginia overlaying the Marcellus and Utica shales. The area has been at the center of the shale gas boom, with the number of unconventional wells in central Appalachia jumping from 111 in 2005 to 14,022 by the end of 2015. The study found that shale-gas development there during that period resulted in a 12.4 percent loss of core forest and increased edge habitat by more than 50 percent — and that, in turn, changed the communities of birds found in the forest. Source: The Revelator

Fracking uses a lot of water and much of the contaminated, polluted water returns to the surface loaded with toxic chemicals, radioactive substances, and high levels of salinity and in turn harms humans, wildlife and aquatic ecosystems.