The Contribution of 21<sup>st</sup>Century Pastoralists to Biodiversity Conservation and Emerging Bioeconomies

French, Katherine E.

doi:10.2993/0278-0771-37.3.514

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 34 publications

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“…National laws in ESA mostly do not recognise the customary rights of pastoralist groups, and enduring colonial legacies of exclusion and scepticism towards local fire use, coupled with increasing trends of migration and conflict (Eriksen, 2007;Elhadary and Abdelatti, 2016), have prevented indigenous peoples from acquiring formal land ownership titles or secure tenure rights across PA landscapes (Kull, 2002;Laris and Wardell, 2006;Mistry and Bizerril, 2011). These tensions are predicted to intensify under the UN Convention on Biodiversity's new Global Deal for Nature which aims to protect 30% of the terrestrial planet by 2030, and 50% by 2050 (Dinerstein et al 2019), further limiting the range available to pastoralists and reducing opportunities for indigenous land ownership (French, 2017;Fletcher et al 2021).…”

Section: Human Environmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Croker

Woods

Kountouris

2023

Preprint

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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.

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