Ai-Ais Hot Springs Game Park is a 6,100 km2 desert reserve in southern Namibia managed directly by the Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism. It protects the Fish River Canyon and a section of the Succulent Karoo biome, one of two wholly arid global biodiversity hotspots, as the Namibian half of a transfrontier park with South Africa.
Ten dimensions, each scored 1 to 5. Tier 1 dimensions carry more weight than tier 2. The composite is the weighted result, not a simple mean of this column.
| Dimension | Score | Tier |
|---|---|---|
| Biodiversity protection | 3 | Tier 1 |
| Ecosystem services (carbon and water) | 3 | Tier 1 |
| Security and anti-poaching | 2 | Tier 2 |
| Governance and accountability | 3 | Tier 2 |
| Ecotourism infrastructure | 3 | Tier 1 |
| Ecotourism revenues | 2 | Tier 2 |
| Community development | 3 | Tier 1 |
| Political and community leadership | 3 | Tier 2 |
| Budget | 2 | Tier 1 |
| Fundraising performance | 2 | Tier 1 |
PACE rates how well a protected area is actually run, not how important it is or how much wildlife it holds. A 5 on a dimension means that part of the operation is working. A 1 means it is not. Across the 200 areas Canopy rates, composites run from 1.23 to 4.29, so a 3 is a middling park and not a bad one.
The composite hides variation and that is the point of the table. An area can hold a respectable composite while failing on security or on budget, and those two failures need completely different responses. Anyone using this to make a decision should be reading the dimension, not the headline.
Small gaps are not differences. PACE has been reliability-tested once, on 20 areas, and the composite came back at 0.86 with a 95% interval from 0.61 to 0.97. That is a wide interval on a small sample. Two areas within a few tenths of each other should be treated as the same area until something else separates them.
Whether to fund this area. Canopy does not make that call. The score separates questions rather than ranking answers: a low budget dimension and a low security dimension point at different instruments and different diligence.
What is happening on the ground this week. PACE is a periodic assessment, last scored 2026-10-01. It is not a monitoring feed and it does not move when something changes on site.
How thin the evidence behind it is. This area carries a Medium evidence confidence tier, defined above. 182 of the 200 areas sit there, so it is the norm across the set rather than a mark against this area.
Whether money can reach Ai-Ais Hot Springs is a separate question from how well it is run, and it is answered at the country level. Namibia scores 3.30 of 5 on C-RISK. Read the Namibia profile for the risk dimensions and the estimated cost of running the country’s protected areas.
| Score date | 2026-10-01 |
|---|---|
| Scoring version | pace-v1.1 |
| Model run | 2026-10-01 |
| Schema version | 1 |
| Evidence confidence | Medium |
| Boundary and area source | WDPA-Apr2026 |
| Operator | Namibia Ministry of Environment and Tourism |
| Operator type | State |
| Canonical URL | https://canopyconservation.com/park/ai-ais |
Each dimension is scored against a written rubric, with the limits Canopy puts on it and what PACE has been tested against, including where it came back null: the method is available to signed-in readers; ask for access.
Boundaries and area come from the World Database on Protected Areas, WDPA-Apr2026. Operator reporting is read as-of-2026-07-01 (incl. African Parks 2025). Scores are set against Canopy’s rubric, pace-rubric-v1.1.
UNEP-WCMC and IUCN (2026), Protected Planet: The World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) [April 2026], Cambridge, UK: UNEP-WCMC and IUCN. Available at: www.protectedplanet.net.
Canopy builds its scores from publicly available information: official registries, government and operator reports, research, satellite records and the press. It publishes them to encourage transparent reporting of protected-area performance and to help raise the bar across all protected areas. Where a park publishes little, the score reflects that, so a low score can mean thin disclosure as well as weak performance.
If you manage or work with this protected area and something here is wrong or out of date, tell us. Every correction is reviewed, and the record is updated where the evidence supports it.
Everything here is free to use. The one condition is attribution.
Canopy (2026). Ai-Ais Hot Springs, Namibia: PACE conservation effectiveness 2.67 of 5. Canopy Conservation, pace-v1.1. Retrieved from https://canopyconservation.com/park/ai-ais
https://canopyconservation.com/park/ai-ais
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Reuse, redistribute and build on this, commercially or not, as long as Canopy is credited and the licence is named.