Zimbabwe is endowed with vast tracts of protected areas — parks, nature reserves and other natural areas — accounting for nearly 20% of the country’s land area.
These assist in reducing deforestation, habitat and species loss and support the livelihoods of millions countrywide, whereas globally, forests assist over one billion people, while containing 15% of the world’s carbon stock.
Sadly, over 700 000 hectares of protected areas have been destroyed this year alone around Zimbabwe by forest fires ignited by people hunting for mice or game. Pastures have also been destroyed for selfish reasons, resulting in livestock and wildlife starving due to loss of pasturage.
This is unfortunate given that the country prides itself as an agriculture-based economy, (but) where a sizeable population has no regard for the environment.
This is why protected areas such as Save Valley and Midlands conservancies must be jealously guarded for future generations. No one individual should benefit at the expense of the public really.
However, protected areas must be placed under local communities control to increase their incomes and sustainability.
To increase the income of many of the billion forest-dependent people worldwide, the current conservation model for investment in forests/wildlife must be turned on its head.
An initiative of unprecedented scale, led by The Forests Dialogue (TFD), IUCN and the Growing Forests Partnerships (GFP), has also found that optimising the benefits and productivity of forests requires moving from a “resource-led” model to a “rights-based” system of “locally controlled forestry”, that places local control of forests/wildlife at the heart of the investment process.
Over the last three years, TFD, partnering with IUCN, organised a series of country level dialogues engaging over 400 forest owners, investors, NGOs, governments and intergovernmental agencies. The resulting report, “Investing in Locally Controlled Forestry”, launched last week at IUCN World Conservation Congress in Jeju South Korea (WCC), shows that with the right processes in place, and under the right conditions, almost any individual or group can build a successful forest enterprise.
“A first step is to recognise that many forests and landscapes are inhabited by people with some form of land rights,” says Chris Buss, Senior Programme Officer for IUCN’s Global Forest and Climate change Programme “Investors are increasingly aware they must respect these rights through recognised processes, although the practical implications of such processes have until now received less attention.”
The learning from this initiative demonstrates that these processes often result simply in compensation for loss of access to land or resources, rather than a genuine shared enterprise. In contrast, a “rights-based” system places local control at the heart of the process. Under this system, the people who own or have rights over the forest are the ones who seek investors and partnerships for managing their natural resource assets.
The rights-based approach will recognise local people’s autonomy and their rights to determine the land’s destiny and to gain income from its effective management. Hence, empowering local people to make decisions on commercial forest management and land with secure tenure rights, the ability to build their own organisations and access to markets and technology can be a highly effective way of raising incomes and protecting forestry resources. Communities, governments and investors, according to the report, all stand to gain from investing in locally controlled forestry.
However, launching a commercially viable enterprise is not without its own challenges and requires adjustments to conventional investment approaches.
Ironically, the ugly public spat between Environment minister Francis Nhema and Tourism Minister Walter Mzembi became the highlight at the WCC albeit for the wrong reasons. In terms of conservation, Zimbabwe is viewed as a leader globally given its sustainable development policy advocating for sustainable utilisation of the wildlife resource — perhaps through safari hunting, eco-tourism and Campfire programmes.
Apparently, it is the Campfire programme that put Zimbabwe on the world map resulting in the establishment of conservation areas such as the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park linking the country’s second largest national park Gorezhou, South Africa’s Kruger and Mozambique’s Gaza Coutada 16. The country was to establish another conservation area Kaza linking Zambezi National Park in Victoria Falls, Zambia, Namibia, Chobe in Botswana and Angola.
These are great initiatives by a country now under siege for botching up the wildlife-based land reform programme in Save Valley. *millenniumzimbabwe@gmail.com/millenniumzimbabwe@yahoo.com
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