"African governments are showing leadership in protecting freshwater habitats as a source of clean water to people and nature. It is especially important for water-scarce northern and southern Africa," WWF freshwater spokesman Jamie Eittock told AFP at the fifth World Parks Congress under way in South Africa.

The ecology group announced the new environmentally protected areas in Africa, covering 11 million hectares of freshwater sites in seven different countries, at the 10-day event in the eastern port city of Durban.

The conference, hosted by the World Conservation Union, earlier this week publicised an updated list of more than 100,000 protected areas, but noted that freshwater and marine sites lagged far behind land surfaces.

Eittock said between three and six percent of the world's freshwater surfaces were currently protected, but at least 12 percent needed to be protected to ensure long-term sustainability of water habitats across the globe.

In Africa, an estimated 20 percent of freshwater areas are now protected.

Its new conserved areas include about two fifths of Lake Niassa in Mozambique, which is part of the huge Lake Malawi in Malawi that also straddles Tanzania.

"We are also in the first stages of negotiating an agreement between all three those countries to make the whole lake a protected area," Eittock said.

"With the latest drought, people have relied more on fishing for a living. The lake's fish resources have been declining and the land surface surrounding the lake has been degrading. That means habitat from the lake such as rocks are being eroded with soil."

Eittock said efforts were under way to involve local fishing communities living near the lake in the management of the new protected area.

"We have spoken to local fishermen and they are concerned bacause they see there is only little fish left, all the big ones have been removed," he said.

Other new protected areas include a part of the Zambezi River Delta in Mozambique, a 700,000 hectare (1.7 million acre) area in Madagascar, a seperate wetland in Algeria and sites in Chad, Niger, Zambia and Morocco.

TERRA.WIRE