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Participatory development: the case of land degradation in southern Africa
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Participatory development: the case of land degradation in southern Africa
- Participatory Development: the case of land degradation in southern Africa
- What is land degradation?
- What is desertification?
- “ Our most significant non-renewable geo resource is fertile land and soil. Nevertheless each year, an estimated 24 billion tons of fertile soil are lost. Arable land loss is estimated at 30 to 35 times the historical rate. In the drylands, due to drought and desertification 12 million ha are transformed in new man-made deserts each year. The world has continued building towards 'a soil peak' which will have far-worse consequences than the current 'oil peak’” Luc Gnacadja, Executive Secretary, United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (2011)
- Challenges
- 1. The nature of land degradation: multi-dimensional, contextual and dynamic
- 2. The methods we have can’t cope with this
- N GLASOD map
- Non-degraded Light Moderate Severe Very Severe Degradation Severity: N New expert map
- N Cattle productivity trends 1980-1998
- N Remote sensing
- Makgadikgadi Pans Okavango Delta Gaborone N NDVI Grazing Potential Map
- Community Map
- 3. Communities don’t participate
- How can we develop degradation indicators that can empower non-specialists to accurately detect change, and point them to potential solutions?
- Reed et al. (2011) Land Degradation & Development
- Yr 1 Thorny bush encroachment
- Yr 10
- Yr 20
- 1 10 20 yrs
- Holistic: vegetation, livestock, wild animal and socio-economic indicators + soil indicators Site 1 Site 2 Site 3
- Qualitative evaluation of indicators
- Quantitative evaluation of indicators
- Overlap and adaptation of technical indicators
- Meaningful participation and scientific rigour
- Literature
- Local ideas
- Ideas combined and discussed
- Global Application: DESIRE Desertification Mitigation and Remediation of Land a global approach for local solutions
- Future Degradation Assessment Multi-source, multi-scale assessment is possible
- Break
- Vulnerability to the interactive effects of land degradation & climate change
- Vulnerability (or fragility): a system’s exposure, sensitivity and capacity to adapt to stress or perturbation (based on Kasperson et al., 1995 and IPCC, 2001) The Concepts
- Exposure: the magnitude of stress or perturbation a system is exposed to Sensitivity (or susceptibility): the degree of system (or system component) change associated with a given degree of stress or perturbation Adaptive capacity: the ability (often measured in the time it takes) for a system to change its structure to support basic system functions in response to perturbation The Concepts
- Future climate change will hit the poor hardest Dougill et al., 2010
- Reading Reed MS et al. (2011) Cross-scale monitoring and assessment of land degradation and sustainable land management: a methodological framework for knowledge management. Land Degradation & Development Reed MS, Dougill AJ (2010) Linking Degradation Assessment to Sustainable Land Management: a decision support system for Kalahari pastoralists. Journal of Arid Environments 74: 149–155 Dougill AJ, Fraser EDG, Reed MS (2010) Anticipating vulnerability in food systems to climate variability and change: challenges of using dynamic systems approaches and the case of pastoral systems in Botswana. Ecology & Society 15(2): 17 Stringer LC, Reed MS, Dougill AJ, Twyman C (2009) Local adaptations to climate change, drought and desertification: insights to enhance policy in southern Africa. Environmental Science & Policy Reed MS, Dougill AJ & Baker T (2008) Participatory indicator development: what can ecologists and local communities learn from each other? Ecological Applications 18: 1253–1269
- Staying in an area too long is like wearing the same dress for years; it gets worn out. Female farmer, age 65, Six Mile Cattle Post It is not possible to be a cattle farmer in a place like this: you have to be a grass farmer. Male Farmer, age 74, Hereford Farm For more publications and resources Google “Mark Reed”
Editor's Notes
- Thanks very much. I’ll be speaking on behalf of my co-author, Andy Dougill, who couldn’t join us today, and I’ll be attempting to briefly summarise 6 years worth of research that, as you can see, has been funded by a range of organisations. That’s quite a tall order, so I’ve put a pile of reading packs at the front that you’re welcome to pick up during the coffee break
- Thanks very much. I’ll be speaking on behalf of my co-author, Andy Dougill, who couldn’t join us today, and I’ll be attempting to briefly summarise 6 years worth of research that, as you can see, has been funded by a range of organisations. That’s quite a tall order, so I’ve put a pile of reading packs at the front that you’re welcome to pick up during the coffee break
- Considering we all agree that land degradation is one of the world’s most pressing environmental problems, it is perhaps surprising that so few of us can agree on the extent and severity of dryland degradation in the world today Why is this? I’m going to suggest three reasons…
- Firstly, it is because land degradation is so multi-dimensional and so dynamic. To quote Andrew Warren, “land degradation is contextual”. What I perceive as degradation, you may perceive as an opportunity, depending on our differing objectives and context – and this time next year, we may have very different perceptions again. A great example is bush encroachment: thorn bushes are a cattle farmer’s degradation but a goat farmer’s fodder resource.
- Secondly, the methods we have for assessing land degradation struggle to capture this complexity and dynamism There are plenty of methods available, but they tend to focus on single components of the problem, like the soil, or the vegetation or even the economics These different methods are rarely integrated to get a more holistic view of what’s going on
- Take Botswana for example… This is the GLASOD assessment that appears in UNEP’s World Atlas of Desertification, based on expert opinion in 1990
- Here’s a repeat I did of the GLASOD approach with a panel of experts 3 years ago Like the original GLASOD map, it identifies the east of the country as a particular problem, but differs in a number of other respects
- On the other hand, if we take UNEP’s definition of land degradation as a “reduction in the resource potential of the land”, then you can do an economic assessment of land degradation – in this case I’ve mapped cattle trends over time. The results of this approach contrast strongly with both the expert maps
- Alternatively, remote sensing has been used to examine the extent of bush encroachment in Kalahari rangelands
- And it has been used to produce grazing potential maps like this one, using NDVI readings Alternatively, if I zoom in on the south-west corner of the country here…
- You can see the results of some participatory mapping I did to elicit community perspectives on land degradation Each method produces a different map… My message: given its complex and dynamic nature, no single method can reliably capture land degradation alone
- And the third reason that so few of us can agree on the extent and severity of dryland degradation is that The local communities who are actually affected by land degradation rarely participate in its assessment. And they rarely derive results that can improve the sustainability of their land management So we end up in a situation where assessments of land degradation sit on shelves gathering both dust and mistrust
- Sustainability and land degradation indicators offer one solution to this problem. They can be used by a wide range of stakeholders, to derive multi-disciplinary information that can be used to both monitor and respond to environmental change However, it is increasingly claimed that existing indicators provide few benefits to land managers who, as a consequence, rarely use them Partly this is because most indicators are developed by researchers for use by researchers, and require too much specialists training and resources for them to be used by the people who actually manage the land If we can develop land degradation indicators that accurately reflect the status of the land, but that can be used easily by the people who manage that land, then we can go beyond simply assessing land degradation. We can empower the communities who are affected most by land degradation to respond effectively to protect their land and their livelihoods
- But is this really possible?
- I’d like to spend most of the rest of my time telling you about our experience developing and refining this process in Botswana This map shows the three study sites I’ve worked in The video was taken just down the road from Study Site 3, in the southwest corner of the map, and will hopefully give you a bit of a feel for the kind of environment I’m talking about Since the 1970s, the Botswana government has progressively opened up the Kalahari for livestock grazing through the provision of boreholes to access groundwater. Although you can’t see it clearly in this photo, this rangeland contains a diverse array of mainly palatable grasses, with the odd bush and tree. As grazing pressure increases, you see a shift towards less palatable species such as this ( Schmitia kalahariensis ) Gradually, you begin to see more and more thorn bushes, like this Acacia mellifera bush with its mean hooked barbs Eventually, the bushes coalesce and form inpenetrable thickets, that are inedible to the cattle who are so highly valued in Tswana culture
- Despite the wealth of knowledge about degradation indicators as a community (84 indicators were suggested in one site), this knowledge was thinly spread across community members (most people typically knew 5 or 6) By testing and disseminating this information, the research was able to build upon and share valuable local knowledge among pastoralists
- This knowledge was more holistic than many published indicator lists for monitoring rangelands, encompassing vegetation, livestock, wild animal and socio-economic indicators in addition to the soil-based indicators that have traditionally been favoured by researchers Interestingly, people’s preference for vegetation and livestock indicators match recent shifts in ecological theory suggesting livestock populations may reach equilibrium with key forage resources in semi-arid environments
- Once we’d got this list of potential indicators, we went through the learning process to evaluate the indicators that were suggested by the communities First, we shared the community’s knowledge through focus groups where we asked them to evaluate their knowledge, telling us which indicators they thought were most accurate and easy for them to use
- We then took the shortlist that came out of this process and evaluated it using field-based research. We found evidence for the majority of indicators that had been suggested and presented these results back to communities who evaluated our work, sometimes challenging it, sometimes providing explanations for our results Using all this information, the researchers and communities were then able to jointly negotiate a final list of the most useful indicators I need to emphasise that this was not simply a case of scientists validating local knowledge – it was a two way process in which local and scientific knowledge was evaluated on equal terms to stimulate learning between researchers and communities
- Many overlapped with scientific literature, but there were also some that were not found in the literature In addition to this, some of the more technical indicators from the literature were being used in adapted forms by the communities. For example, Rain Use Efficiency is used routinely by researchers as a land degradation indicator. I’ve worked with researchers who use this, and they literatally bring trailer-loads of equipment to do the job. A plant leaf is put into the machine, and you get a readout. However some Kalahari pastoralists were using a simple version of this to monitor land degradation in their rangelands. They defined it as “the rapidity and vigour with which plants responded to rainfall”. Although qualitative, this was sufficient to inform management decisions
- Unlike existing indicators developed by researchers in southern Africa, by building on local knowledge, the indicators we developed were highly familiar to pastoralists who had the capacity to apply them without any need for specialist training or equipment Some researchers have suggested that getting communities involved in degradation assessment necessarily involves a trade-off between meaningful participation and scientific rigour . Our research challenges this, and suggests that by combining local and scientific knowledge in this way, it may be possible to assess land degradation in ways that are far more effective than either group could achieve alone
- Its all very well monitoring land degradation, but what do you do when you’ve identified a problem? We wanted to link our indicators to management options that could help pastoralists prevent, reduce, adapt or even reverse degradation
- To do this, we first identified current practice and possible management options from the literature
- Next, we identified local ideas about how to reduce and adapt to land degradation
- Then these options were combined with the ideas we’d got from the literature and discussed and evaluated with pastoralists in focus groups
- Finally, the outputs from these focus groups were used to produce rangeland assessment guides for each region that provided management options agreed to be locally relevant by both scientists and local stakeholders. I’ll hand a copy of each round for anyone who’s interested
- The approach is now being rolled out in a new EC-funded project worth 8 million euros over the next 5 years, called “DESIRE”: Desertification Mitigation and Remediation of Land The project involves 28 partner institutions from around the world working in desertification hotspots in every continent
- The project aims to establish promising alternative land use and management strategies based on close collaboration between scientists and stakeholders
- I would like to conclude by giving you a vision for future global land degradation assessment based on the findings of this research Our work has shown that reliable degradation assessment must be multi-source and multi-scale Remote sensing and expert knowledge is a useful broad-brush approach that can be used to prioritise degradation hotspots for further investigation But only through a combination of methods including participatory research, can we begin to understand the extent and severity of degradation within these hotspots Our work has also shown that it is possible to achieve effective integration of local and scientific knowledge without sacrificing objectivity or rigour By involving local communities in degradation assessment, it is possible to go beyond simply measuring degradation. It is possible to empower communities to both recognise and respond to degradation to protect the environment and their livelihoods I don’t want to be accused of making grandiose proposals that could never be put into action Involving communities may be more costly than relying on remote sensing or expert opinion, but using a streamlined “quick and dirty” version of our approach it was possible to complete the process in 3 weeks per hotspot in the Kalahari This is a vision that could be achieved if were genuinely committed to implementing a UNCCD that has the affected people at its heart. I’ll finish now with some words from the people I’ve been so privileged to work with over the last 6 years
- Although this appears to paint a rather gloomy picture, I’m an optimist. These impacts are by no means inevitable Terrestrial ecosystems are being exposed to the sorts of drivers that you’ve identified, but not all systems are vulnerable to these drivers But what makes one system vulnerable and another not? I think that you can work this out by answering 3 simple questions. As a conservationist, these three questions are therefore increadibly powerful tools. Given their importance, I’m going to spend a bit of time explaining the questions, and the terms I’ve used in them How sensitive is the system? If it is not sensitive, then it is not vulnerable. For example climate change is driving sea level rise around the world that could lead to disastrous flooding during storm events in sensitive cities. Despite being within a meter or two of sea-level, most coastal towns in East Anglia are so well defended that they are not sensitive to these changes, whereas Bangladesh is highly sensitive to sea level rise due to its lack of defences. If a system is not sensitive, then its not vulnerable. But if it is, then we need to ask the next question: How adaptable is the system? If a system is sensitive to the drivers of change, but can adapt effectively to those changes, then it is not vulnerable. For example, the British tourism industry is likely to adapt to future climate change – although we’ll lose skiing resorts, beach resorts will likely boom, so as a whole, the tourism industry is not vulnerable. But the tourism industry in small island states that dissapear beneath rising sea-levels can do little to adapt to climate change. If a system can’t adapt, then you have to ask my final question: How resilient is the system? If it can quickly and fully recover its structure and functions after an impact, then its not vulnerable. For example Kalahari rangelands experience regular and severe droughts, but when the rains fall again, the system almost immediately bounces back to the way it was before the drought. This is an increadibly resilient system, and there is little reason to believe that it would be vulnerable to increased droughts under climate change. As long as it still rains, the system is likely to bounce back. But overgrazing during drought can reduce the resilience of the system, with cattle uprooting perennial grasses in the search for food and eating all the seed sources for the next generation of grasses. Such a system might not bounce back after the rain, with fewer and less palatable plants growing back, sending the system into a downward spiral. If the system is sensitive to an impact, has no capacity to adapt to it and lacks the capacity to bounce back from it, then it is vulnerable.
- Although this appears to paint a rather gloomy picture, I’m an optimist. These impacts are by no means inevitable Terrestrial ecosystems are being exposed to the sorts of drivers that you’ve identified, but not all systems are vulnerable to these drivers But what makes one system vulnerable and another not? I think that you can work this out by answering 3 simple questions. As a conservationist, these three questions are therefore increadibly powerful tools. Given their importance, I’m going to spend a bit of time explaining the questions, and the terms I’ve used in them How sensitive is the system? If it is not sensitive, then it is not vulnerable. For example climate change is driving sea level rise around the world that could lead to disastrous flooding during storm events in sensitive cities. Despite being within a meter or two of sea-level, most coastal towns in East Anglia are so well defended that they are not sensitive to these changes, whereas Bangladesh is highly sensitive to sea level rise due to its lack of defences. If a system is not sensitive, then its not vulnerable. But if it is, then we need to ask the next question: How adaptable is the system? If a system is sensitive to the drivers of change, but can adapt effectively to those changes, then it is not vulnerable. For example, the British tourism industry is likely to adapt to future climate change – although we’ll lose skiing resorts, beach resorts will likely boom, so as a whole, the tourism industry is not vulnerable. But the tourism industry in small island states that dissapear beneath rising sea-levels can do little to adapt to climate change. If a system can’t adapt, then you have to ask my final question: How resilient is the system? If it can quickly and fully recover its structure and functions after an impact, then its not vulnerable. For example Kalahari rangelands experience regular and severe droughts, but when the rains fall again, the system almost immediately bounces back to the way it was before the drought. This is an increadibly resilient system, and there is little reason to believe that it would be vulnerable to increased droughts under climate change. As long as it still rains, the system is likely to bounce back. But overgrazing during drought can reduce the resilience of the system, with cattle uprooting perennial grasses in the search for food and eating all the seed sources for the next generation of grasses. Such a system might not bounce back after the rain, with fewer and less palatable plants growing back, sending the system into a downward spiral. If the system is sensitive to an impact, has no capacity to adapt to it and lacks the capacity to bounce back from it, then it is vulnerable.
- The main drivers of change in the Kalahari are: Our appetite for Botswana beef – we buy most of Botswana’s beef, although you don’t see it in the supermarkets This has stimulated a massive expansion of the cattle industry through the provision of boreholes to access ground water In an attempt to limit damage to the land, the government has introduced a number of changes to land tenure that have worsened the situation: 1. 1960-70s: Common property to open access 2. 1970s-present: open access to private
- Is this system sensitive to these drivers of change? It is not sensitive to sustainable stocking levels of mixed species e.g. cattle, goats and sheep – this is very similar to the wildlife system that preceeded the livestock system, and as you can see from the national parks, the system is not sensitive to this kind of treatment However, it is sensitive to overgrazing by a single species (cattle) over long periods of time. Large numbers of cattle selecting the species that are palatable to them soon leads to a big change in the system
- So the rangeland system is sensitive to the current livestock grazing regime, but can it adapt to this hammering? Well, it turns out that goats can use the results of overgrazing by cattle (bush encroachment) as a valuable browse resource. So in theory, if you adapt by simply switching to goats, then you have a productive rangeland system once again But in reality, people prefer cattle to goats. Story of UNHCR director. So unless cultural values change, this system is unlikely to adapt
- So Kalahari rangelands are currently vulnerable to land degradation. The impacts of this are that: In one of the places I worked, bush encroachment was cited as a major livelihood constraint by 67% pastoralists When drought hits, as it inevitably does, there are no grazing reserves to fall back on and livestock die unless suplementary feeds are purchased There’s a loss of biodiversity, particularly in bush encroached systems Wind erosion and dune activity has become a problem in some areas
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