Delivering socio-economic and environmental returns through rewilding

26 June 2026

The South African game reserve that’s turned 35,000 acres of over farmed land into a success story for people and nature

In the wake of the publication of the government’s new Land Use Framework for England, which aims to guide decisions about agriculture, nature restoration and development, the Planet Possible podcast explores how rewilding can deliver positive outcomes for local communities and the economy.

Joining its host, Niki Roach, is Jim Tan, CEO of Kuzuko Private Game Reserve in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, who explains how Kuzuko transformed 35,000 acres of uneconomic farmland into a flourishing reserve where elephants, buffalo and lions roam after being absent for more than 150 years.

If you’d like to listen along, you can find the podcast episode here, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or your favourite platform. Follow the podcast to stay updated on its weekly deep dives into pressing environmental challenges.

Now, over to Niki and Jim…

--

Niki Roach: Tell us a little bit about Kuzuko Lodge and why rewilding is so important to you.

Jim Tan: Kuzuko Lodge started 25 years ago this year, back in 2001. What's a bit different about Kuzuko compared to other conservation projects, I guess, is a lot of conservation projects have got a social aspect as well, but Kuzuko actually started the other way around. Initially it was a social project which then turned into a rewilding project.

We're in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, which is a really incredible thicket biome. There are 1,500 different plant species there – 20% of those are endemic to the region. It's like a little tiny forest which has been adapted to the arid biome that we have here. It was originally a subtropical forest and some of the species that we have here are over 280 million years old – they date back to the time of Gondwana [a southern hemisphere supercontinent that millions of years ago split into the regions including present-day Africa].

But over the years, the land has been degraded through goat farming. Goats came to the area in 1838. They're really well adapted to the arid environment that we have here, and they were really useful for their mohair. Mohair is a lot like merino wool, so it's non-allergenic and very breathable. So it's a fantastic fibre. But unfortunately, the land here is quite susceptible to overgrazing – when you have more animals than the land can sustain, and it quickly gets degraded. So what's happened in the last 100 years is, unfortunately there have just been too many goats on the land. The land gets desertified – once the vegetation cover is gone, because we've got such hot summers, the land just gets baked hard, then the water can't penetrate, and nothing else can grow. Over time, a lot of the land in the area has been degraded, and across the whole thicket biome in the Eastern Cape, 70% has been lost, about a million hectares.

The idea really was to restore that land. We put together 22 different farms back in 2001, removed all the internal fences, removed all the old farm buildings, and put them together into one large area. Because there's going to be wildlife on the land, we had to have what's called a certificate of adequate enclosure. So that's a 70-kilometre fence which goes the whole way around the property. It's got an 8,000-volt electric fence which is enough to deter an elephant, but definitely not to stop one if it's really determined.

And then after that, we brought back a lot of different species, so 18 different mammal species, many of which have not been seen on the land for over 150 years. Things like elephants, rhinos, lions have been gone for a long, long time. That's been a really exciting project which has grown a lot over the last 25 years and what's really nice is that we are now starting to see species like the red-billed oxpecker, which is a really good indicator species. They're very susceptible to pesticides or insecticides, so seeing them back on the land is a really good indication of the ecosystem health. I was speaking to one of our neighbouring farmers who told me they've been living here for 30 years and hadn't seen a red-billed oxpecker and they saw their first one a couple of months ago. We've had them on the property. We see them every day on the giraffe and we've had them back here for the last five or six years. So it's really nice to see that they've found a place; that the ecosystem is healthy enough for them and now they're starting to spread elsewhere. There's some really nice indications of how the land is recovering.

Community impact

NR: I'd like to understand a little bit more about why Kuzuko started as a social project and then became an environmental one.

JT: Kuzuko was founded by my dad, and he has a real passion for development. One of the things that he really strongly believes in is the role of enterprise, small businesses, particularly in creating sustainable economies. He grew up in Malaysia, born in the 1950s, so he saw the post-colonial transition in Malaysia into the economy it is today. A big part of that, the backbone of that, was often small businesses and enterprises. So that's something that he really believed in as a way to create change.

So at the time, back in 2001 in South Africa, the Eastern Cape in particular had particularly high unemployment. It still does. And particularly in the rural areas, it can often be well over 50% unemployment. So really, he was looking for a business which could create sustainable jobs. It wasn't his first goal to create a conservation project. What's really nice in this area is it's a genuine win-win. It really is the most economic use of the land. Unfortunately, with [the rise of] synthetic fibre, the Angora goat industry has collapsed a little bit. And once the land gets degraded, farming the area is often just not economical. So for us at the lodge, we can support 12 times more jobs per hectare through ecotourism than you could through goat farming. So that's really where it came about as a social enterprise, but it's really grown into a rewilding project on top of that as well, which has been really cool to see.

NR: You said you bought lots of local farms, but you've obviously still got neighbours as you just talked about. What's the response been from your neighbours and the local community generally to this? It's quite a significant shift in land use, and you're bringing in tourists that I guess weren't previously coming, so what's the reaction been to it all?

JT: It's been a very positive reaction. I think there is a small amount of tension because of the sensitivity around the idea of farmers who see themselves as custodians having degraded the farmland. But the reality is that the farms that we bought, they were all very willing sellers for the simple reason that it's such an incredibly hard place to make a living. We are a 35,000-acre reserve now and there's a farm across from us which is the same size and it’s struggling to support a family of five. It's really not economically viable in many cases anymore, particularly not in any small units. You need a massive area to be able to make a living.

It's not seen, I don't think, as really taking over farmland. It's certainly not taking over viable food-producing farmland. That tension doesn't exist. And in terms of local community, although it's owned by non-locals, really we see our main goal is creating a platform for the local community. So what's really nice is when you go and speak to the managers in the lodge, there’s a sense of ‘this is really our lodge’. In that sense, it is part of the community and run by the community. So there's not a kind of separation, which is really nice.

Ecosystem management

NR: You talked a little bit about some of the species that you have reintroduced. But when it comes to a reintroduction of the bigger stuff, the stuff that we might be a bit more familiar with, is there a carrying capacity of the land? How do you manage that interface between plants and mammals and everything else that you've reintroduced?

JT: The land definitely has a carrying capacity, and it's not a simple thing to work out, particularly here because it's so arid. It is very sensitive to overstocking, to having more animals on the land than it can cope with. Our goal is really to create a balance between your predator and your prey species, so that we have as much as possible a balanced ecosystem. The way we do that is we start with something called the ‘livestock unit’ (LSU), which is from agriculture basically. They work out roughly how many animals this land can cope with, and then they come up with a number. So for us, it's 14 hectares per LSU: you need 14 hectares to support one livestock unit. We use that as a basis, but after that, you then need to look at your different vegetation types and look at how those different animals use them. So whether they're browsers or grazers – whether they're more likely to eat grasses or bushes and shrubs – and then you have to work out how much of that you have on your property and then roughly how many animals you can have.

But that's very much a baseline, and then the way we have to manage it is with adaptive management. So every year we’re monitoring the veld and looking at the condition of it and then assessing whether it's improving or whether there's signs of overgrazing or whether you've got other issues. And it is a challenge because there's such variation in environmental conditions. From 2012 to 2019, we had a long period of exceptionally low rainfall. And because we have to be fenced because the elephants and lions would cause problems on neighbouring farms, that means that we have to have a lot more awareness and management of what we have on the property. We have to make sure we take a very conservative approach. We would like to be under carrying capacity, essentially, to make sure that there is room for that environmental variability.

NR: And from a water perspective, you must have natural sources on the land, I'm assuming. We're not talking about a zoo here. We're talking about a reserve where you're trying to make minimal interventions, is my understanding. So when you're in a period of drought, how do you manage that? How do you get that balance right between ensuring you don't lose stuff because you fenced it in, but also that you've got sufficient places for them to find water naturally?

JT: There are natural springs on the land. Then we have a lot of surface dams. A lot of them are from the farms that were here previously that we've just maintained to ensure that we can retain more water on the land. And then also, it's just a very well adapted landscape. So a lot of the species that we have can get a lot of their water needs from the vegetation itself. The succulent vegetation here is beautifully adapted for this environment,so it's very good at retaining moisture. It's very good at surviving through those long dry periods. So as long as you are not overstocking your land, it's very possible for it to be resilient through those long periods of drought.

Restoring nature

NR: What have you got now, Jim, that you didn't have before? What have you reintroduced from a mammal perspective? And then also, have you had to reintroduce plant species, or have they just naturally started to come back? I'm interested in that transition from pretty arid, bare, substandard conditions. What does it look like now, if we can try and paint a picture of Kuzuko for our listeners?

JT: So in terms of wildlife, quite a few species are here which have not been here for a long time. So you've got elephants wandering through the landscape, elephants, lions, Cape mountain zebra which were highly endangered. We've got cheetah, and then a lot of different buck species: springbok, kudu. Some of those were still on the land already, like the kudu, they were quite prevalent.

In terms of vegetation, because it's such a dry area – and unlike some of the rewilding projects in the UK, for example, the Knepp Estate, where they've seen that just by withdrawing from farming practices, they see a lot of nature coming back – what we found over 25 years is that those areas where the land is so dried out and capped that the plant species can't grow, it's so hard to go back. That nature does need a bit of a helping hand. So one of the main things we've been doing is replanting spekboom. It’s an incredible species which is an important part of the thicket biome. It's actually a tree, although it doesn't get that high. It's what we call an ecosystem engineer. So what they've found is it's very adaptable. It can be spread by elephants anyway, just by breaking off a bit of the branch. And if they drop it along the way, it will root in the ground and grow naturally that way.

So what we're really doing is taking that natural process and accelerating it by taking lots of cuttings and planting them across the landscape. Once those cuttings have established, they create a little microclimate around them: so they create shade where their leaves drop; they will create nutrients in the soil; and they allow water to percolate through along their stems. And what they've found is that a lot of the other thicket species which they try and plant, they don't survive because of the harsh conditions, but spekboom can. And once they establish and create that little microclimate, then the other species come back. Al the seed stock is still there in the soil and once the spekboom is established, then the other species come back, which is fantastic. We've been partnering with a group called AfriCarbon and a company in France to help replant a large area of our reserve. Over the last three years, we've planted 30 million cuttings across 5,000 hectares. It's a very slow process, so it's something we won't see fully restored for probably another 50 years. It's kickstarting the process, which is really exciting.

NR: You're reintroducing species. Did you have to do anything from a vegetation perspective to enable those species to survive? Or was there sufficient already there, even on that degraded farmland, that you could reintroduce zebra and lions and so on? Because for me, that's really interesting. It sounded like a really desertified landscape, but there are quite large mammals surviving there at the moment, even before this reintroduction of new vegetation. How does that work?

JT: Across the 22 farms, you can see there was definitely a variation in how they were managed and how they were stocked. So there was a real mixture: a lot of farms which are almost in pristine thicket condition and then some areas where it was highly degraded. So there was plenty of vegetation already there, and what we're doing is just really repairing the particularly damaged areas. So nothing was needed before we introduced [large mammals]. We just needed to be careful about the rate in which we reintroduced them.

NR: It sounds like a really positive story from both a social and an environmental perspective. What are the trade-offs, if there have been any?

JT: I think what's really nice and what feels quite rare about Kuzuko is it is really a win-win. It quite simply is the most economic use of the land for this to be an ecotourism project. In that sense, as a rewilding project, there were no real trade-offs in terms of losing productive farmland. Sadly a lot of the farming community had already left so that you weren't damaging a community that was there before. You're actually restoring the land and creating opportunities and bringing more people back onto land than were here before.

For me, the biggest tension is that because it has to be fenced, you have to manage your desire to have this really natural balanced ecosystem, which is totally doing its own thing. The reality is that you’ve got a fence around it so animals can't migrate in and out. It is in places degraded, so you need to intervene and plant. So it's that thing of how you balance your ideal against the reality. I think that would be the biggest one for me.

NR: And are there other projects similar to this? I mean, is there a long-term view that you think could we create a corridor, or are you a bit of an island at the moment in the Eastern Cape?

JT: Oh no, absolutely. I think the Eastern Cape is actually a really exciting place to be for conservation at the moment. There's a lot of other reserves doing really good work doing similar things. Addo Elephant National Park, which is the third largest national park in South Africa, is our neighbour, so we have a joined boundary. And what's quite exciting is the South African government has a commitment to have 30% protected area by 2030. And if you look at all the other protected areas in South Africa, a lot of them are very constrained because they're right up against the boundary with communities. There's nowhere else for them to go. Whereas if you look around Addo, there is a lot of farmland which they can expand into. So it's a real focus area for the South African government. And there's some really exciting maps and initiatives of linking corridors between all the different reserves in the Eastern Cape and the national parks. There's huge potential for expansion, which is rare to see. We could be part of a much, much bigger conservation area in the future.

NR: It's wonderful to hear such positivity. What are your big lessons for UK rewilding? What can others learn from your experience, Jim?

JT: I think one of the biggest lessons is the time it takes and the patience it needs. I think particularly somewhere like we are now, we have a very low rainfall so that the time it takes to see change, is an incredibly long time. It’s a bit like a forester being happy to plant something which you know you won't see come to fruition, so you're expecting it to be for the next generation. The spekboom that you plant now will turn into a thicket in 50 years' time. So having the patience and the long-term view is a really important part of it and being okay with that.

Beyond Kuzuko

NR: What's next? If we were here in 25 years' time, what would you hope to have achieved at Kuzuko? What are the big plans?

JT: The biggest and most exciting plan for us is that Kuzuko is owned by someone called Inqo Investments, which is an impact investment company. It's really part of a much bigger vision that my dad had to try and use business to create change. Kuzuko was really a proving ground for that model. We're just opening a lodge in Uganda at the moment which has the same ethos. It's in Budongo Forest in Uganda, where one of the populations of chimpanzees has the same goal of creating jobs in order to help protect the forest and create an alternative livelihood.

There's so much more interest now in ethical investment. It's moved on from in the 1980s when we were just looking to divest away from investments that do harm, like fossil fuels or tobacco. People now are really looking for investments which create positive change. So knowing that their money really is having a positive impact. But there's not necessarily so many of those investments around that are really available to people. So there's a lot in green energy or sectors like that. But the idea was to create an investment that was open to retail investors where they could know that their money was going to a project which had a really high positive social and environmental impact. Just for example, the UK pension market is worth £2 trillion. If you could get even 1% of that market, that would be £20 billion. If you could ask people to put their money into an investment like Kuzuko, where you're not necessarily going to make a huge amount of money, but hopefully you won't lose money – and that's something we've been able to prove now – if you could secure just 1% of that market, that's thousands and thousands of Kuzukos that you could replicate around the world and the impact that could have is incredible. So that's really the big goal for us.

NR: What an extraordinary story. Jim, thank you so much for sharing what you're doing and I wish you every success.

--

Find the audio version of the podcast here, or search for Planet Possible in your favourite podcast app. Subscribe so as not to miss the latest episode.

Stay up-to-date with our free monthly The Environment newsletter – sign up here.