NEWS
Realizing the potential of
Africa’s rangelands
Jack Durrell
Reprinted From: http://bit.ly/2KbxCaX
N
AIROBI (Lansdcape News) —
Rangelands cover some 43 per-
cent of Africa’s land area – ap-
proximately 5.1 million square miles.
These vast shrub and grass lands are
an important source of income for local
pastoral communities and play a critical
role in climate change mitigation as car-
bon sinks.
However, they are being degraded at
a rapid rate and are host to rising con-
flicts, which put pastoralists against ag-
riculture, mining, and other extractive
industries. The result: instability, increas-
ing poverty and more degradation.
The solution is an integrated landscape
approach to rangeland management
that brings together multiple stakehold-
ers to balance competing needs and
interests and implement sustainable
management strategies.
Implementing integrated approaches
But, awareness of integrated landscape
approaches in Africa remains limited.
How to reverse this was the subject of
a side-event held at the Global Land-
scapes Forum (GLF) Nairobi 2018 – an
initiative to connect, learn about, and
share successful restoration stories in
Africa in an effort to foster political and
community commitments to land reha-
bilitation.
The event – “Bringing Rangelands into
the Sustainable Landscapes Agenda”
– shared successes from Africa and be-
yond to provide a framework and les-
sons learned that could inspire similar
initiatives across the continent.
placed local communities and pastoral-
ists at the very center of decision-mak-
ing and program design. “Participatory
approaches enable pastoralists to be-
come custodians of rangelands,” ar-
gued Stewart Maginnis of Nature-based
Solutions at the International Union for
Conservation of Nature (IUCN). “They
recognize their rights, empower their
agency, and strengthen their voice.”
Initiatives in Mongolia and Iran, for in-
stance, involved pastoral communities
in the definition of challenges, range-
land boundaries, and solutions. They
also established local and national pas-
toralist institutions to support effective
dialogues with government agencies
and other stakeholders. In Kenya and
Tanzania, pastoralists contributed to the
development of zonal grazing systems,
and in the latter, pastoralists also led
the development of village-based land
use plans.
Addressing knowledge gaps
As African countries seek to learn from
these initiatives, however, and shift from
sectoral to multi-sectoral and integrat-
ed approaches, they will encounter a
significant obstacle: the lack of reliable
evidence to scale-up successes.
While there have been some recent ef-
forts to raise the importance of range-
lands and their restoration – most no-
tably by Kenya and Uganda who have
pushed for an International Year of
Rangelands at the U.N. level – the chal-
lenges facing these marginal areas con-
tinue to be neglected in policy and re-
search forums.
This was largely attributed to the fact
that rangelands are home to mostly
poor and marginalized populations, but
it means that degradation will continue,
and the economic and climate change
mitigation potential of these vast lands
will remain unrealized.
There continues to be insufficient in-
formation on the technical support and
strategies needed to reverse degrada-
tion in rangeland areas. “What we have
at the minute, generally around land
use and particularly around rangeland
management, is piecemeal informa-
tion,” Maginnis complained. “And with
piecemeal information we can only
have disjointed solutions.”
However, there are encouraging moves to
address this knowledge gap. Abdelkader
Bensader, programme management of-
ficer at UN Environment, spoke about
an assessment near finalization, for in-
stance, which will provide a more thor-
ough and detailed knowledge base on
rangelands. “We are trying to focus on
what has already been done and what
needs to be done to address knowl-
edge gaps,” he said.
Again, it is pastoralist communities
themselves who can play a decisive role
in the collection and dissemination of
new knowledge: “One of the options
for closing knowledge gaps is the appli-
cation of bottom-up planning processes
which can draw on local and
indigenous knowledge and
then feed this knowledge
upwards,”
concluded
Maginnis.
The examples offered informative in-
sights into participatory
approaches that
Figure 1: Bringing Rangelands into the Sustainable Landscapes Agenda panel. Global Landscapes Forum in Nairobi. GLF photo
17
Grassroots
Vol 18
No 4
December 2018