Indigenous fire stewardship omitted from savanna burning emissions abatement schemes in East and Southern African savanna-protected areas

Abstract

Background Late dry-season wildfires in Sub-Saharan Africa’s savanna-protected areas are intensifying, increasing carbon emissions, and threatening ecosystem functioning. Addressing these challenges requires local community engagement and support for wildfire policy. Savanna burning emissions abatement schemes first implemented in Northern Australia have been proposed as a communitybased fire management strategy for East and Southern Africa’s (ESA) protected areas. Here we critically examine the application of savanna burning emissions abatement schemes in ESA, characterizing their contextual and implementation challenges. We argue that the effective transfer of the Northern Australian fire management model in ESA savannas is limited by political and institutional barriers, and hindered by the region’s recent colonial history, population growth, and consequences of rapid climatic change. Results We show that the application of Northern Australian savanna burning methodologies in ESA tend to adopt centrally determined objectives and market-based approaches, prescribe early dry season burns, and assume biodiversity co-benefits. These features restrict opportunities for indigenous leadership in fire management and income generation through carbon trading, and present multiple biogeophysical inconsistencies that jeopardize emissions mitigation potential. We suggest that future feasibility and scoping assessments address asymmetries between policy-relevant institutions and local land governance systems, explicitly acknowledging colonial legacies in institutional arrangements across protected areas and hierarchies in agrarian politics that threaten processes of equitable decentralisation in natural resource management. Conclusions To provide a community-based strategy, savanna burning schemes need to establish context specific legal frameworks and implement free, prior, and informed consent to safeguard the roles and responsibilities of indigenous and local peoples and their distribution of carbon benefits.