4 min read conservation

Paper summary: Defining pathways towards African Ecological Futures

Back in 2021, a small team of us published a paper on the process of imagining and defining African Ecological Futures, here's a short summary.
Paper summary: Defining pathways towards African Ecological Futures

A few months ago, back in 2021, a small team of us published a paper in the journal sustainability (A journal of the MDPI family - but that's a story for another day!) on the process of imagining and defining African Ecological Futures.

Essentially, we wanted to synthesize some of the key learnings from the African Ecological Futures project, a collaboration between the African Development Bank and the Worldwide Fund for Nature. One of the key achievements of this process, were a series of participatory scenario planning exercises held with a number of different stakeholders. The goal in these scenario planning exercises was firstly to understand the pressures and drivers in Africa's ecological futures. This then laid the foundations for four plausible future scenarios that fit on a continuum between governance (centralised vs. decentralised) and the drivers of economic production (driven by global export vs. regional demand). The scenarios are shown in the figure below: "good neighbours," "going global," "all in together," and "helping hands."

These scenarios then provided a lens for us to reflect on the key pressures on the natural environment using a well-established framework, DPSIR (drivers, pressures, state, impacts, and responses). These are all summarised in this pretty dense figure!

Drivers, Pressures, State, Impacts and Responses for the scenarios proposed by participants of the African Ecological Futures Workshops

We then wanted to take this process a step further, and discuss what the potential opportunities to reorient Africa’s development trajectories towards a sustainable path. These opportunities fall under the broad categories of “effective natural resource governance”, “strategic planning capabilities”, “investment safeguards and frameworks”, and “new partnership models”. Underpinning all these opportunities are “data, management information, and decision support frameworks”. Interestingly, even before we started writing this paper, Peter Tyrrell and I had already identified this last opportunity as a gap that we felt we, together with lots of other incredibly talented people in Africa, could make a small contribution towards (that's one of the key goals of our work).

Response Opportunities to reorient Africa's development trajectories.

To give a couple of illustration about what all of this might mean in practice, we also shared two case studies, that of Green Infrastructure and Green Cities, and Sustainable Agriculture.

Overall, we felt that the scenarios process could be a valuable tool for analysing trade-offs and guiding discussions of what is an extremely complex system. However, we also acknowledged the limitations of what was an expert-based review and scenario development process. So, although efforts were made to consider local stakeholders and the role of local governance in this work, the work is nevertheless "top-down." In future, ecological futures and scenario planning must include the knowledge and wisdom of other voices, including but not limited to: rural and urban land owners, communities, and citizens. Furthermore, the scenarios derived from the African Ecological Futures process should not be seen as an end-result, but rather to instigate further discussion and hopefully, action!

The overall imperative of development across the continent, coupled with increased access to information, new decision support and planning tools, emerging new technologies, and an increasing interest in nature and sustainability provide a unique opportunity to redefine the continent’s future.

This was just a quick summary of the paper, but as you can imagine, there's plenty more depth, discussion and justification in the full text, so if that piqued your interest, check out the full text, it's free!

Thank you to all my co-authors: Peter Scheren, Peter Tyrrell, James Allan, Jessica Thorn, Tendai Chinho, Yemi Katerere, Vanessa Ushie and Jeffrey S. Worden.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it with others who might be interested too. If you want to connect, I'm always happy to chat, so get in touch!

For those who might be interested, here are some recent publications:

  • Coexistence in an African pastoral landscape: Evidence that livestock and wildlife temporally partition water resources. African Journal of Ecology Connolly, E. et al. 2021
  • Defining Pathways towards African Ecological Futures. Sustainability Scheren, P. et al. 2021
  • Conserving Africa's wildlife and wildlands through the COVID-19 crisis and beyond. Nature Ecology & Evolution Lindsey, P. et al. 2020
  • Incorporating social-ecological complexities into conservation policy. Biological Conservation Brehony, P. et al. 2020
  • Conservation from the inside-out: winning space and a place for wildlife in working landscapes. People and Nature Western, D. et al. 2020

You might also like...

Jun
21
Synopsis: our chapter on "Land Tenure, Livelihoods, and Conservation: Perspectives on Priorities in Tanzania’s Tarangire Ecosystem"

Synopsis: our chapter on "Land Tenure, Livelihoods, and Conservation: Perspectives on Priorities in Tanzania’s Tarangire Ecosystem"

We highlight approaches being taken in Tarangire which combine access to secure land rights with landscape scale access to resources that livestock (and wildlife) need to be productive and resilient.
4 min read
Mar
19
Compromise and collaboration - my experience writing our paper on "Conserving Africa’s wildlife and wildlands through the COVID-19 crisis and beyond"

Compromise and collaboration - my experience writing our paper on "Conserving Africa’s wildlife and wildlands through the COVID-19 crisis and beyond"

My favourite part of this paper was highlighting some of the systemic flaws in contemporary conservation and identifying some opportunities to restructure for greater resilience.
4 min read
Jan
27
Current Conservation Special Issue on African conservation today - our small contribution on livestock and wildlife

Current Conservation Special Issue on African conservation today - our small contribution on livestock and wildlife

Healthy rangelands for people and their livestock can mean healthy rangelands for all.
2 min read
Oct
27
Trophy hunting bans imperil biodiversity - a signatory's tale

Trophy hunting bans imperil biodiversity - a signatory's tale

A couple of years ago Amy Dickman and a few other colleagues circulated an idea they had to publish a
3 min read
Oct
22
Coexistence in an African pastoral landscape: Evidence that livestock and wildlife temporally partition water resources

Coexistence in an African pastoral landscape: Evidence that livestock and wildlife temporally partition water resources

Earlier this year (2021), research that we began several years back (2013) with James Allan was finally published in the
5 min read