Posts in category: News & Updates

Family planning is giving individuals a choice to decide if and/or when they would want to have children. This choice is made possible through the use of contraceptives. However, according to World Health Organization, 214 million women of reproductive age in developing countries who want to avoid pregnancy are not using a modern contraceptive method.

The role that contraception plays on conservation and the challenges to implementation of its use in Tanzania were explained by Guilia Besana, Family Planning Advisor, The Nature Conservancy – Arusha, Tanzania. Guilia was speaking at an Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group’s speaker series event held on June 20, 2019 at The Nature Conservancy in Washington DC.

While people and the planet are interconnected, there has been an imbalance on what nature gives and what humans take. This imbalance is mainly contributed by population growth, said Guilia. As population growth increases, the demand for land and water increases.

Family Planning as the solution

A report by United Nations on World Contraception Day indicates that worldwide, more than 41% of all pregnancies that occur each year are unintended and nearly half of these unplanned pregnancies end in abortion. Voluntary family planning goes a long way in helping women and men secure their rights to decide freely, and for themselves, whether, when, and how many children they want to have, said Guilia. Its impact on the quality of life of women include avoiding health risks, nutritional depletion as well as contributing to the empowerment of women. By controlling population growth, the use of contraception contributes to poverty reduction and improve nutritional outcomes as well as preventing further HIV/AIDS transmission. On infants, it helps alleviate malnutrition by increasing the likelihood of being breastfed as well as increases their chances of being educated, explained Guilia.

With the increase in pressure on environment, contraception can be a solution to sustainable access to water and other natural resources without much competition. It also helps in mitigating unhealthy interaction with the nature hence contributes in curbing deforestation. This sums up to a contribution in addressing climate change.

Challenges in implementation

While family planning offers a range of solutions to different issues, there has been major challenges in the implementation of the same. Nearly half of the land in Tanzania is covered by forest and woodlands of which 1/3 of it is protected, explained Guilia. Over 80% of the country’s economy depends on the environment.

Current Tanzania population is at 60 million of which 62% of the population is under 24 years of age with 70% of the population living in rural areas where access to contraception is limited. With unmet need for family planning stagnating between 24-26% from 1999, the contraceptive prevalence rate among married women is 32% with a total fertility rate of 5.2 in 2006, explained Gulia.

Major resistance to adoption occur as a result of conflicting messaging majorly because of fragmented government support. This is usually due to limited/lack of a uniform framework for implementation between local governments and the national government. Competing priorities is another challenge to implementation that comes as a result of limited resources hence the need to address immediate health needs such as HIV/AIDS and maternal health.

Other challenges include, traditional beliefs and social norms such as early marriage and the number of children a woman is expected to bear, myths and misconceptions such as pills can cause cancer and infertility, stock out of the commodities which can cause discontinuation, and prioritization of lifesaving drugs by the community and shortages of health care professionals.

For in-depth information,

Click to download the slide presentation>

Click to listen to the webinar recording>

Speaker bio
Giulia Besana, Family Planning Advisor, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) – Arusha, Tanzania
Giulia’s passion lies in improving the lives of mothers and children starting with Eastern Africa where she was born and brought up. She holds an MSc in Reproductive and Sexual Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and has over ten years of experience working in the reproductive health sphere.
She first started her career with Pathfinder International in Tanzania. She has also worked for Jhpiego, Oxford Policy Management, President’s Malaria Initiative, Impact and other smaller organizations in the area of monitoring and evaluation, research, capacity building, program planning and fundraising. Prior to her position with TNC, Giulia co-founded Toto health Tanzania, a social enterprise with the mission of making motherhood a safe and joyful experience for mothers, parents, and caregivers. Giulia joined TNC in February 2019 and is very excited to be part of TNC’s efforts to bridge the gap between family planning and conservation.

The highlights of our include implementation milestones and inspiring success stories from our five thematic working groups:

1. Land and Resource Tenure Rights
2. Land Use Management
3. Managing Global Change Impacts
4. Global Health Linkages to Conservation: Population Health and Environment; Water Sanitation and Hygiene
5. Emerging Issues

These stories demonstrate how through collective learning and action, we can arrive at practical solutions to advance conservation practice in order to ensure lasting benefits for people and nature. The lessons learned presented in this report offer us opportunities to reflect and adjust our approach. We hope that they will be useful in efforts to improve, scale and replicate best practices.

Read these success stories in our recent blog series: Nature Protected and Lives Impacted: ABCG Success Stories

Note: this is the 5th part of the series, Nature Protected and Lives Impacted, on ABCG’s Success Stories

Compiled by Chris Zganjar, The Nature Conservancy

^{Construction of wells and water tanks help communities maintain water supplies in times of drought, Kenya. Photo credit: Nikhil Advani, WWF}

Rural communities in developing countries are on the front lines – the first to face the real impacts of climate change. Benefiting from the bounty that nature provides and coping with the times when nature takes back, defines the life of millions living in Sub-Saharan Africa. For generations this delicate balance was predictable, manageable, but in recent years, climate changes have become more abrupt and more extreme.

With these changes, key questions need to be asked. How is climate change affecting farmers, pastoralists and fishing communities? How is it impacting their way of life, their ability to feed their families or generate income? What must they do differently to maintain their way of life? And what is the fate of biodiversity in the face of these changes?

From 2015-2017, ABCG’s seven member organizations and partners went to communities to find out how climate change is affecting their lives. Over 600 interviews in communities engaged in farming, fishing and pastoralism across 19 different sites in 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa (Cameroon, Gabon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Namibia, Madagascar, Mozambique and Uganda) were conducted. 

One farmer in Southern Kenya reported that, “Water used to be everywhere… we didn’t have to look hard for it. Now there is much less. Now our cattle drink from still water which can make them sick”. The story was same in 20 different communities in nine countries in Africa. Community members shared on how they are coping with these impacts and how local biodiversity is impacted.

In August 2018, ABCG brought together 36 stakeholders consisting of members of the surveyed communities, government officials, academics, and members of global environmental organizations in Nairobi, Kenya, to present the survey findings of the adaptation responses and how those responses impact biodiversity.

Results of the community surveys on how people respond to climate change and how those responses may impact biodiversity, along with an overview of the observed trends in climate throughout the surveyed countries were presented. Overall, the survey results show that about 35 percent of the adaptation responses identified through 652 surveys have potentially negative impacts on biodiversity, whereas only 12 percent have potential positive impacts.

Participants of this meeting discussed alternative adaptation responses to help farmers and fishermen adapt to climate change in ways that do not negatively affect biodiversity. Building on this knowledge and their own experiences, participants developed project ideas that could be implemented to help farmers and fisherman adapt to perceived climate threats that do not negatively impact biodiversity.

Through this activity, ABCG has been fostering a greater understanding and dialogue on emerging coping strategies already being adopted while exploring how those strategies can be improved upon. ABCG is building a knowledge base that will advance communities’ capacity to learn about climate threats and impacts, and approaches to address these challenges. Further, ABCG is developing strategies to address climate-driven issues on livestock, agriculture productivity, and fishing resources.The data collected from these interviews is available on World Wildlife Fund’s Climate Crowd website.

Read other blogs in this series: 

• Preserving Madagascar’s Rich Biodiversity: How Land Use Planning Multi-sector Engagement is Turning the Tide

• Alleviating Malnutrition through Local Food Solutions and a Healthy Environment
   
• Empowering Communities to Protect Forest Ecosystems

• Delivering Safe and Reliable Water Supply: Spring Rehabilitation in South Africa’s Eastern Cape

Law enforcement and reducing the demand for wildlife products were for a long time the first line of defense against illegal wildlife trade. Engaging local communities is an important aspect that was missing in this process, stated Holly Dublin.

Dublin, Senior Associate at the International Institute for Environment and Development, and Senior Advisor to International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Regional Office for Eastern and Southern Africa, together with Akshay Vishwanath, Senior Programme Officer, IUCN Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office presented at an Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group speaker series event on June 3, 2019 in Nairobi, titled Local Communities: First Line of Defense Against Illegal Wildlife Trade (FLoD).

In response to this, IUCN Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group (SULi), International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), and partners drafted a Beyond Enforcement Theory of Change that sought to involve communities in fighting illegal wildlife trade. Beyond Enforcement later changed to First Line of Defence Against Illegal Wildlife Trade (FLoD), which employs an ‘Action Research’ approach to test and investigate the theory of change. The approach deeply interrogates assumptions, perceptions, and logic flows of illegal wildlife trade project designs by comparing and contrasting with the assumptions of local communities.

Engaging local communities in combating illegal wildlife trade has a firm recognition by the UN General Assembly, explained Dublin. The policy aspects of this issue were first discussed in 2013 in Botswana at the African Elephant Summit, and featured in the London Declaration of 2018. It is because of this recognition that many governments and projects have embraced engaging local communities in fighting illegal wildlife trade. However, their efforts have often failed due to lack of a clear framework that ensures that communities’ engagement remains at the heart of the discussion.

To address this, the FLoD methodology was designed to provide a framework that interrogates assumptions at multiple levels in the baseline theory of change. The baseline theory of change is divided into 4 distinct categories; increased cost of participating in illegal wildlife trade, which includes cost of scouts and prosecutors, increased incentives for stewardship, such as access to natural resources and governance, decreased cost of living with wildlife by managing human wildlife conflict, and increased non-wildlife based livelihoods, such as businesses that are not wildlife related.

FLoD employs the use of focus group discussions in the local community using tools that are more interactive to allow participation by both the literate and the illiterate. Once inputs are collected, they are replayed back to the community where synergies and divergent assumptions are discussed and addressed. The community is also given the autonomy to prioritize on the assumptions and work on issues more central to them, explained Akshay.

FLoD’s methodologies play a role in highlighting the use of theories of change used by donors and intervention planners that are sometimes inconsistent and divergent from the reality on the ground. That is in addition to its role in empowering communities by strengthening collaborations and helping in designing more effective interventions to combat illegal wildlife trade with community engagement.

Lessons learned in the application of FLoD can be found on People Not Poaching. 

Click below for an in-depth explanation on the FLoD tool and its methodology, as well as an informative Q&A session>

Speaker Bios

Holly Dublin has worked as a practitioner in the field of sustainability – linking the inherent values of biodiversity and ecosystem services to human livelihoods and well-being for more than three decades. She began as an African systems ecologist and over the course of her career has become a global expert in community-based conservation, governance and collaborative management approaches; the international trade and use of wild species of animals and plants; long-term ecological monitoring; measuring and valuing corporate impacts and dependencies on natural and social capital; strategic planning, programme implementation and evaluation in the conservation and development sectors. She has mentored young professionals across the developing world throughout her career. Holly is currently a Senior Associate at the International Institute for Environment and Development and a Senior Advisor to IUCN’s Regional Office for Eastern and Southern Africa. She is also on the Steering Committee of IUCN’s Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group, having served as the Chair of the IUCN African Elephant Specialist Group for 26 years and on the Governing Council of IUCN as the elected Chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission. She participated in the development of the “Beyond Enforcement” initiative and is one of the designers and implementers of the “Local Communities: First Line of Defence Against Illegal Wildlife Trade” (FLoD) approach. As an active proponent for building community voice, Holly has been deeply engaged in helping establish the Rural Communities Working Group of CITES and is one of the authors of “Wild Life Wild Livelihoods”.

Akshay Vishwanath is a Senior Programme Officer with the Conservation Areas and Species Programme of IUCN’s Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office. Akshay has over 10 years of wide-ranging experience in sustainable development, biodiversity, environmental awareness, community conservation and natural resource management, particularly in Eastern and Southern Africa. Akshay strives to find solutions to environmental challenges that are both socio-economically viable and beneficial to ecosystem health and biodiversity.

Note: this is the 4th part of the series, Nature Protected and Lives Impacted, on ABCG’s Success Stories

Compiled by Mzingisi, Nathi Xulu and Caroline Rose, Conservation South Africa

Being a headman in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province is not easy, just ask Nosolani Mantshule. He must balance the growing need for clean water for his community with the revegetation of rangelands, essential for securing water resources and conserving more than 2,000 plant and animal species. Livelihoods and traditional ways of life are under threat due to overgrazing, erosion and landscape degradation.

Most people in Nosolani’s village of Msukeni, along with other near-by villages, don’t have reliable access to clean water. The once lush rangelands and mountains are increasingly infested with alien invasive vegetation, mainly black and silver wattle. This wattle consumes significant amounts of water, negatively impacting communities, livestock and the surrounding indigenous rangeland vegetation. Initially, Conservation South Africa (CSA) worked with the government funded Working for Water program, to support volunteers to clear wattle from the landscape, and returning much needed water into the ecosystem. More recently, CSA added the One Health Program, part of a larger USAID-supported initiative of the Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group. One Health links freshwater ecosystem conservation with Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) programming to ensure the supply of clean water for communities and the environment. After the intensive work of removing wattle, the mountain springs have begun to flow again.

In May 2018, the CSA One Health team, and 14 community volunteers turned their attention to rehabilitating one of these restored springs to deliver a safe, reliable water supply. Accessing the spring was a challenge, as it was located 1,600m uphill from the community. When the wattle directly above and below this spring was cleared, there was a significant increase in water flow, sufficient to fill a two-liter container in 30 seconds.

Since this spring was so far from the community, it was vulnerable to contamination by trash, silt, human and animal waste. To protect the water on its journey from the spring to Msukeni village, a solution needed to be found. Together with the community, the One Health team put in place a piping structure to bring water down the hill to an existing 2,500 liter plastic reservoir tank.

Nosolani sees how these efforts help his community. “CSA’s activities have helped to reduce poverty, by improving our livelihoods, as a community, because we will now be able to grow vegetables, such as spinach, all year round. This, in turn will have the impact of improving individual health because the occurrence of diseases will decrease”.

Read other blogs in this series: 

• Preserving Madagascar’s Rich Biodiversity: How Land Use Planning Multi-sector Engagement is Turning the Tide

• Alleviating Malnutrition through Local Food Solutions and a Healthy Environment
   
• Empowering Communities to Protect Forest Ecosystems

Note: this is the 3rd part of the series, Nature Protected and Lives Impacted, on ABCG’s Success Stories

Based on an article published by the National Geographic

In eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Batwa people have played a critical role in preserving the integrity of the intact forests of the Kabobo Massif, which is the source of fresh water and associated electrical power for hundreds of thousands of people.

In recent years, however, violent civil conflict has undermined the Batwa’s stewardship, leading to large-scale population movement and poor local governance. In response, local people— supported by the provincial government and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS)—have worked for a decade to re-establish local control of the area through the creation of protected area and community forestry concessions. Over the last three years, the Land and Resource Tenure Rights (LRTR) working group of the Africa Biodiversity Consultative Group (ABCG) contributed to this effort. LRTR develops and tests various strategies that place greater land and resource management authority in the hands of local resource users, thus creating incentives for them to exercise their power in ways that are consistent with biodiversity conservation and sustainable use of renewable resources.

“In the absence of clear rights to land and resources, local people saw creating a protected area as a way to block the appropriation of areas of intact forest ecosystems that are the basis of their quality of life, and provide critical services to neighboring populations.” Michael Painter, Senior Technical Advisor, WCS

Central Africa boasts the second largest expanse of tropical forest on the planet. The largest part of this vast forest, in the DRC, covers 160 million hectares, about 60 percent of which is ecologically intact. The DRC’s forests provide the primary source of food, shelter and income for some 40 million people.

Forest dwellers are a complex patchwork of ethnic groups — including both Bantu farmers and hunter-gatherers of the Efe and Mbuti groups, who share the forests with some of the world’s most iconic wildlife. Because about 80 percent of the DRC’s ecologically intact forests lie outside of formally designated protected areas, the participation of local people in developing and implementing approaches for conservation is essential.

However, the integrity of these forests is increasingly challenged by poor governance and the daily needs of a population still struggling to emerge from decades of civil war amidst continuing insecurity and armed conflict. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the vast lowland forests, montane rainforest, and savannah woodlands of the Kabobo Massif—a 100-kilometer mountain range at the eastern edge of the Congo Basin that is one of Africa’s most biodiverse places.

More than 300,000 people rely on these forest landscapes, which extend across four million hectares, for their future livelihoods and safety. They provide a critical source of freshwater around Lake Tanganyika and play a key role in sustaining the health of the lake’s fisheries. Nevertheless, the Kabobo region faces significant threats including mining, increased local charcoal and timber demands, a growing local population driven by migration from nearby conflict zones, and decreasing government oversight.

Illegal and illegitimate taking of land and natural resources has had an especially severe impact on the Batwa—indigenous forest hunters and foragers that number approximately 6,000 people. The Batwa account for about 20 percent of the population of the Kabobo Massif and are locally renowned for their ecological knowledge.Their active stewardship of the forest has been an important factor in maintaining the integrity of the area’s natural ecosystems, but they are also especially vulnerable to land and resource grabbing because their way of life depends heavily on the direct use of natural resources. Despite their claims to the territories they historically and currently use, the state rarely, if ever, recognizes their legitimacy when more powerful interests seek out these areas.

To address the issue of poor governance, WCS supported a 10-year process led by the government to create the 150,000-hectare Kabobo Wildlife Reserve. Participating as an equal partner, the Batwa were empowered to protect the intact forest ecosystems on which they depend, help define reserve boundaries, and establish a structure governing use of resources. ABCG has played a critical role turning the results of this long consultative process into action, by supporting the drafting and review by local people and government agencies of the by-laws, regulations and agreements between political authorities that will constitute the formal framework for governance of the protected area going forward.

In 2016, the DRC passed a new forestry law that provides a legal framework for community tenure and management of forested lands, based on the creation of community forests.

Looking ahead, WCS and partners hope to replicate the successful participatory approach used to create the Kabobo Wildlife Reserve, and thereby extend community forest management across other important landscapes in DRC. And as other conservation organizations and funders have expressed interest to scale this work to other protected areas in DRC, ABCG can refocus its attention to other innovative conservation approaches.

Read the article at National Geographic, Securing Intact Forests and Indigenous Livelihoods in DR Congo, September 10, 2018

Read other blogs in this series: 

• Preserving Madagascar’s Rich Biodiversity: How Land Use Planning Multi-sector Engagement is Turning the Tide

• Alleviating Malnutrition through Local Food Solutions and a Healthy Environment

There are about 25,000 rhinos in all of Africa today. This number becomes more meaningful — and painful — when you consider rhinos’ former strength on the continent. Black rhinos once numbered in the hundreds of thousands, while southern white rhinos were widespread in their range south of the Zambezi river.

Though concerted anti-poaching efforts have reduced the overall number of rhinos killed since the start of the crisis in 2008, the rate of illegal rhino killings has remained high for the last nine years with South Africa losing 1,028 rhinos in 2017. The stakes of rhino protection continue to escalate as poaching operations grow more sophisticated and habitat loss spreads across large wildlife-rich landscapes.

The Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group (ABCG) hosted a private screening of the award-winning short film, Sides of a Horn on May 14, 2019 at the African Wildlife Foundation’s offices in Washington DC. The film tells the story of Africa’s rhino poaching war from both sides of the fence. It paints an unbiased portrait of a modern war that is tearing communities apart and driving prehistoric species to the verge of extinction. The screening was followed by a panel discussion on innovative approaches to rhino conservation featuring Kathleen H. Fitzgerald, Africa Sustainable Ecosystems Division Lead – Conservation Capital, Ed Sayer, Country Director – Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS) Zambia and Programme Manager – North Luangwa Conservation Programme, and Philip Muruthi, Vice President, Species Protection – African Wildlife Foundation.

Philip highlighted that the major challenge to conserving viable rhino stock is their small fragmented population. This poses issues for biological management of rhinos, such as the ability to minimize inbreeding and maintain healthy population growth. According to Philip, the high cost of rhino management has seen two rhino sanctuaries in Kenya give rhinos back to the state. Rhino conservation requires specialized capacity that includes highly targeted training and equipping, knowledge of rhino behavior, and habitat management. He acknowledged the improvement in rhino population made in the period between 2015-2017 and added that in order to further improve the status of rhinos, there is need for high level political support.

Ed explained that FZS started reintroduction of black rhinos to Zambia from South Africa in 2001 in an effort to increase rhino population. Due to longer procedures and consultations with governments, only 25 rhinos were introduced from South Africa over a period of seven years as compared to the projected period of two years. This reintroduction was faced by adaptation challenges due to a change in geography. He further explained that in an effort to recover rhino population, FZS has been engaged in ranger motivation through high level training of scouts on new technology, as well as a focus on long-term incentives by building permanent housing for scouts’ families, and investing in rhino monitoring technology. The revitalization of the Intelligence Investigation Unit and the use of detection dogs has also become an integral part of FZS’s effort in dealing with wildlife crime.

In her presentation, Kathleen stressed that conservation goals should not only protect rhinos, but also grow their population. This has however been challenged by availability of short term and limited funds. To address this challenge, she suggests a shift from traditional donor support to impact investors through bonds, such as the Rhino Impact Bond (RIB).

The Rhino Impact Bond is a 5-year bond designed to address the issue of unlimited funds and to grow rhino population. The short term vision of RIB is to deliver better value for funders through verifiable and cost effective outcomes, while the long-term vision is to ensure protected areas are well managed. A Rhino Growth Theory of Change that assesses the requirements for the ability to grow rhino population in five years has been developed by the Rhino Impact Bond team. The document gives an in-depth analysis of five key areas of focus; habitat management, range availability, containment and counter poaching, rhino population management, and enabling conditions.

The Rhino Impact Bond addresses three challenges of traditional rhino conservation model; funding without success, short funding cycles and increased funding gaps, says Kathleen.

Click below to watch the webinar recording for more in-depth information:

Panelist’s bios

Kathleen Fitzgerald, leads Conservation Capital’s Sustainable Ecosystems Africa division. She has more than 25 years of experience in integrated large landscape conservation programmes in Africa and North America. Kathleen was a senior staff member of the African Wildlife Foundation for 11 years, most recently serving as Vice President for its East and Southern Africa portfolio. She has helped create new conservation areas, improve management of existing protected areas, established co-management arrangements and designed innovative models for community conservation. She has completed dozens of land transactions in North America and worked extensively on increasing conservation finance for protected areas. Kathleen is widely published and has an undergraduate in Environmental Studies and Government and a Master of Science. Kathleen is based in Nairobi, Kenya.

Ed Sayer, is Zambia Country Director for the Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS) and also manages FZS’s North Luangwa Conservation Program. Headquartered in North Luangwa National Park, the project provides technical assistance to the Department of National Parks and Wildlife (DNPW) in the park and across the broader ecosystem, ranging from the implementation of training needs, set up of management systems, and facilitation of all aspects of operations through daily supervision and interaction with DNPW personnel from the Senior Provincial Warden down to the lowest ranked officer. Ed is also a pilot with over 2,500 hours flying the FZS aerial surveillance aircraft. Prior to this, Ed was Wildlife Manager for the Grumeti Fund in Tanzania, Operations Manager for the South Luangwa Conservation Society, and a Walking Safari Guide in the Luangwa Valley. He has a BSc in Land Economics and is obtaining his MBA.

Dr. Philip Muruthi, Vice President, Species Protection has worked with African Wildlife Foundation for more than 20 years, faces conservation challenges from a broad perspective. His role is to deliver strong and appropriate conservation science inputs to AWF’s integrated conservation strategies that take into account landscape-level approaches, social issues, and economic issues. He is responsible for issues as varied as the kind of endangerment classification a species should receive, or how resources should be allocated and oversees AWF’s species program. In addition, Philip represents AWF in the international conservation dialogue, such as at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Conservation Congress. He is also a member of the Task Force on Kenya’s Migratory Corridors and Dispersal Areas as well as Kenya’s National Giraffe Conservation Task Force. Philip’s educational qualifications are extensive, including both an M.S. and Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Princeton University, and numerous publications.

Moderator:

Rebecca Goodman, Director, Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group, leads ABCG’s efforts to identify, analyze, and develop responses to emerging and high priority issues affecting biodiversity conservation in sub-Saharan Africa. She manages the multiple work flows of the ABCG Secretariat, ranging from internal coordination to strategy development, donor engagement, program management, communications and external representation to key stakeholders in the US and Africa. She previously led program strategy and partnership development in Senegal, Mali, and Cameroon as West Africa Regional Director at Trees for the Future. As Technical Advisor for the US Forest Service’s Program for Environmental Governance in Guinea, she mobilized local government and communities to implement a forest co-management model. She has prior experience at Rainforest Alliance advancing the sustainable management of community farm and forest operations by securing government and multilateral grants. Rebecca earned a M.A. in International Environmental Policy from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, CA through the Peace Corps Master’s International Program. She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali where she trained farmers in agroforestry extension techniques. She holds bachelors’ degrees in Biology and French.

Human activities have in the past, and still continue to transform the natural landscape. Population growth, over-exploitation of resources, and economic development are some of the causes for this transformation that have resulted in over depletion of natural resources in many parts of the world. Land use management is a key aspect in environment management. It supports to ensure that various parcels of land are put into proper use to ensure that both people and nature thrive.

Defining present and projecting future conditions of the land is an important activity in ensuring that measures are put in place that would see activities carried out in manner that would result in net gain in environmental management.

In order to identify how to incorporate equitable and climate-smart alternatives into land use decisions for conservation, ABCG has been developing methodological approaches for scenario analysis in land use planning, and guidelines for its application in Africa. Scenarios can be possible strategies that achieve land use planning objectives through tools like prioritization. Scenario analysis and planning focuses on developing alternative futures to identify favorable land uses by evaluating scenarios against landscape objectives.

               Gabon rainforest 

Here are eight prioritization steps to apply in land use planning. ABCG applied these steps within four African countries: Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, and Madagascar to support the incorporation of biodiversity conservation into land use planning. This methodological approach for scenario analysis, and guidelines for its application in Africa, is available in this report: Four African Case Studies Exploring How to Incorporate Biodiversity into Land Use Planning Using Spatial Prioritization and Scenario Analysis

Step 1 – Planning Issues, Drivers and Actors of Land Use Change

This step aims to understand the drivers and actors causing land use change and implications for informing landscape goals, i.e., vision of the future. This sometimes also helps identify what business as usual looks like (i.e., “current trends” scenario) as a baseline for the future to more ideal scenarios. It can also be used to strategically target vulnerable areas for land use change as potential conservation areas. Assessment of trends and likely trajectories of key drivers of landscape change might include direct drivers (e.g., agricultural land use expansion and resource extraction); and indirect drivers (e.g., demographic change, and economic development). Some estimation of how these might affect key conservation values including land cover, at least qualitatively, is useful.

Step 2 – Vision and Planning Goals Identified

It can be useful to start the process with a visioning exercise to identify different stakeholder visions for the landscape and its land uses. For alternative visions, a “storyline” approach can be useful to characterize qualitatively different world-views. From here planning goals can be identified on what the outcome of planning should achieve, then it is easier to start delving deeper into what specific more quantitative objectives can be identified for land use strategies. Goals are very important to identify and typically drive land use planning.

Step 3 – Landscape Characterization

The next step is to gather data to characterize the landscape in the context of current land use and other necessary data that will feed into the remaining steps. Key datasets include the: Current land use system, including the protected area network. Also important, where possible, is understanding the future potential of new or existing land uses. This might include the suitability of the landscape for different crops or areas suitable for extraction of natural resources; identification of key conservation values and their distributions; infrastructure, particularly roads (current distribution, plans); population data and town/village locations; land ownership; current management interventions (including incentives like REDD+).

Step 4 – Potential Land Use Planning Strategies and Their Objectives

Developing land use planning scenarios is most useful when the specific management strategies and their objectives are used as a basis for the analysis. This step requires stakeholders to identify the potential land use strategies that can be used through the next steps of the planning process, and then identifying where these are going to be most useful.

Step 5 – Spatial Prioritization and Scenarios of Land Use Strategies

There are various types of scenario analysis. For land use planning the most useful are ones prioritizing new land use strategies that achieve planning objectives. This is through the application of spatial prioritization analysis to find where potential new land use interventions might be most useful. Spatial prioritization analysis can help identify the best places to achieve one or more objectives. Prioritizations can focus on one land use (e.g., protected areas, agriculture) or multiple land uses simultaneously, and can optimize across multiple objectives and identify trade-offs where objectives cannot easily be met. Land use strategies include alternative forms of management within the same tenure systems, for example less intensive logging, set-asides within concessions, and alternative cropping systems.

Step 6 – Assess Scenarios with Landscape Performance Metrics

Once scenarios are developed based on the objectives, existing or new metrics can be used to evaluate scenario outcomes (i.e., landscape performance). Ideally metrics are linked to conservation objectives and targets. For example, one metric might measure the extent of change in a conservation feature’s distribution compared to the target. For each scenario the benefits and likely the trade-offs between conflicting objectives can be measured where useful. Scenario outcomes, including maps and associated landscape performance metrics, can be presented to stakeholders typically during a workshop. Preferable and plausible scenarios are chosen from the range of explored scenarios to develop final land use planning recommendations in the final steps.

Step 7 – Summarize Findings

It is important that for any technical analysis that findings are summarized in a way that make it easier for decision-makers and stakeholders to understand and use these recommendations. This means summarizing the key findings around which land use strategies might be best where, what are the trade-offs, how are targets being met.

Step 8 – Make Key Recommendations

Finally, even though the findings might be summarized in step 7, a final set of key recommendations are made that can be presented quickly and easily to decision-makers and stakeholders. Doing this well can help ensure that all the technical work can easily be digested and be more likely to have impacts on the ground.

Download the report here: Four African Case Studies Exploring How to Incorporate Biodiversity into Land Use Planning Using Spatial Prioritization and Scenario Analysis

On May 22-24, 2019, 28 youth delegates from 22 African countries, converged at the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) for an African Youth summit organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in partnership with the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF). The summit dubbed #IAm4Nature was aimed at enabling youth in conservation work collectively to come up with an action plan for driving conservation action in Africa region.

The delegates represented various youth networks which included World Organization of the scouts, Global Youth Biodiversity Network, Young Men Christian Associations, community members, climate change activists, wildlife and environmental advocates among others.

While officially welcoming the delegates, Kaddu Sebunya, Chief Executive Officer, AWF, stated that the youth have a war they have not chosen, the conservation war. He however encouraged them to get engaged in conservation as they are a generation of Africans who are most educated, most exposed and technically savvy.

Main highlight of the conference was the vital need to engage the youth in nature conservation issues such as policy formulation, grassroots action and sustainable social entrepreneurship such as bee keeping, and Integrated Farming Systems. The common voice was that the youth have to be involved in policy formulation and implementation because policies provide frameworks and guidelines that inform action.

The youth were also challenged to find their way into politics in order to influence the political sphere by being involved in decision making as political goodwill is important for any conservation engagement.

“We have an imperative to restore nature as it underpins our development, and the youth are at the heart of this action,” said Fred Kwame, WWF’s Africa Regional Director, he further encouraged the youth to voice their solution. He added that the trick is not in working alone but in creating synergies and collaborations among the youth to bring change. 

The outcome of the conference was an African Youth Declaration on Nature through which the Youth seek to champion conservation of nature and promote sustainable livelihoods. They also committed “to harness the natural and human resources of our continent for the total advancement of our peoples in spheres of human endeavor” as stipulated in the Charter of the Organization of African Unity.

Note: this is the 2nd part of the series, Nature Protected and Lives Impacted, on ABCG’s Success Stories

Gaby (extreme left) supports a soy-enriched porridge cooking demonstration with women focal points as part of their training. Photo credit: Olivier Njounan Tegomo, WWF, Cameroon

“Gaby” is the abbreviation of the name Gabriel. This affectionate nickname was very kindly given to the head of the Catholic health center of Moloundou in southeast Cameroon by his patients. Gaby is a hardworking man with a big heart, who has been taking care of the people of Moloundou for years through his actions in the health center.

ABCG’s Population, Health and Environment (PHE) task activity in the periphery of Lobeke National Park, southeast Cameroon consists of implementing activities to link sustainable agriculture, nutrition, and food security. In this population, health and environment integrated approach to gather lessons and best practices, WWF collaborated with the government health partner, including the district health services staff to implement interventions relating to the fight against malnutrition. In addressing the high rates of malnutrition in the project area, WWF has been promoting sustainable agriculture as part of the PHE project, this component is integrated into food security and linked to nutrition.

In engaging the government health partner to take part in the nutrition and food security interventions, Gaby used local foods to create a nutritious complementary food/rehabilitation food mixture to alleviate malnutrition in children, mildly to moderately malnourished. Since the start of ABCG’s PHE activities, the health center staff have benefitted from the support of the project to conduct anthropometric measurements (measures that assess body parameters to indicate nutritional status), as part of routine screening campaigns for children in villages in the project area. Based on results obtained from the baseline survey conducted at the start of the ABCG pilot activities, the project suggested using an approach to rehabilitating malnourished children that would be more sustainable in the long run than the mechanisms that have been used in the area in the past, which rely on ready-to-use costly therapeutic food.

Gaby’s miracle porridge

This is how Gaby, one of the PHE champions in the community, got to work and developed this nutritious porridge recipe from locally available foods, that is now known as “Gaby’s miracle porridge”! This ABCG PHE pilot activity contributed to the success of the nutrition and food security component, mainly due to Gaby’s key involvement in training women focal points to become peer educators. They then organized educational sessions for over 500 mothers in the project area, who took part in cooking demonstrations and received practical information on feeding practices to prevent malnutrition and rehabilitate malnourished children with local foods. This initiative also included capacity building and practical sessions on developing family and community gardens and orchards to improve dietary diversity and to provide the right types of nutritious food required to make “Gaby’s miracle porridge”. Through this activity, there has been an increase in the frequency of meals fed to children under the age of 5 years, from 2.28 meals/day at the onset of the project to 3.5 meals/day at the end of the project.

Gaby’s dedication to his work combined with the support provided by these pilot activities, has contributed to improve the wellbeing of the people in the project area. He is now seen as a PHE champion and is a great advocate of sustainable use of resources for the benefit and health of the people.

This video explains the activities that ABCG has been carrying out with the communities to advance a vision that incorporates health outcomes into biodiversity conservation and sustainable development insub-Saharan Africa

.