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Natural Resource Management
The world's greatest concentration of biological wealth is found in tropical developing countries including Africa that are beset by acute poverty. In these regions, the loss of biodiversity is accelerating as poverty is increasing. African tropical forests represent one of the world's great remnant blocks of closed canopy habitat. This forest is under increasing pressure from population growth, unsustainable resource use, hotter and drier climate, poor management, and other problems related to poverty, scarce financial resources and political instability. Other factors of forestry degradation include unsustainable timber exploitation, shifting cultivation, urban expansion, and other human activities, which are posing increasing threats to this globally-significant tropical forest resource.
African countries rich in natural resources and biological diversity are witnessing high deforestation rates and loss of their biodiversity. Search for short-term economic gains and poverty of the populations living in areas rich in biodiversity are at the root of environmentally harmful behaviour. Well known examples are slash-and-burn practices, excessive commercial logging and clearing of natural habitats for agriculture and urban expansion.
Biological diversity comprises countless plants that feed and heal people, many crop varieties and aquatic species with specific nutritional characteristics, livestock species adapted to harsh environments, insects that pollinate fields and micro-organisms that regenerate agricultural soils. Biodiversity, essential for agriculture and food production, is threatened by urbanization, deforestation, pollution and the conversion of wetlands. Biodiversity is very important to food security for the very poor in Africa. A diversity of cultivated species and varieties of crops, trees, livestock and fish help poor farmers to spread risks, especially in marginal environments. In Africa, environmentalists have focused on the conservation of endangered animals, plants and trees taking little account of the needs of the poor people and time and again well-intentioned conservation efforts on protected area systems have been resisted by local people whose livelihoods have been jeopardised. People can be allies of the conservationists, but for this to come about we have to focus much more on sustainable use, rather than on conservation for its own sake.
CAF development, advocacy and public awareness activities will emphasize the importance of biodiversity for agriculture, food security, nutrition, sanitation and rural livelihoods, and especially for those populations living in marginal and harsh environments.
In addition CAF will:
- promote new and traditional approaches to increasing food production without losing on-farm biodiversity;
- develop capacity and learning process to allow local communities to influence the formulation of national and international plans and policies;
- disseminate bets practices and available technologies among CBOs and NGOs and other stakeholders.
- What are the key environmental and natural resource management issues confronting Africa?
- Where are people addressing these issues in innovative and effective ways?
- What factors helped people achieve this progress?
- What will it take to achieve broad-based changes in the management of the environment and natural resources, which are required to support environmental conservation in Africa?
- To create awareness about the conservation of medicinal and food plants and the economic potential that medicinal and food plants represent for sustainable development in Africa.
- To encourage community groups, traditional healer's associations and individuals to run conservation programmes, especially for endangered species of medicinal and food plants.
- To advocate for bio-prospecting contractual relations among stakeholders to ensure direct compensation for the benefit of indigenous people and biodiversity-rich countries in the commercial use and relating to traditional knowledge of medicinal and food plants.
Forests play a crucial role in the economies of many African countries, providing timber and industrial material as well as contributing to tourism, recreation and cottage industry. Tropical forests help regulate global climate through the absorption of carbon dioxide. Deforestation and forest degradation continue to occur in the region due to a variety of causes, including demographic pressures, poverty, production and consumption patterns, land tenure patterns and land speculation. Other important factors that contribute to deforestation and forest degradation include, illegal logging, grazing pressures, illegal cultivation, the demand for fuelwood and charcoal, refugee-related problems, oil and mining exploitation, natural climatic events and forest fires. FAO data indicate that the annual rate of deforestation in Africa was 0.7 per cent between 1990 and 1995, with the highest rates being recorded in the moist western parts of the continent. The data also indicate that the rate of afforestation is far less than that of deforestation.
In Africa there are many ingenious and effective ways through which indigenous and other local communities are rising to these challenges. Unfortunately, their innovations remain largely unknown. Whether for food, medicine, or income generation, these groups are using their biological resources in a sustainable way to improve livelihoods. This programme will empower local communities and non-governmental organisations to promote local initiatives for natural resource management, which involve for example tree planting, nurseries development, and other means of generating income that do not harm wildlife or the environment. Communities sustainable development programmes focus on activities that conserve and protect the local environment and that contribute to alleviate poverty ( e.g. activities for ex that increase natural resource base for food security, that generate income through sustainable use of resources, or that can promote healthy status of the poor( e.g water and nutrition, etc.).
CAF will highlight the key environmental challenges related natural resources management and sustainable use and conservation through the following:
The UN Conference on Environment and Development in 1992 catalysed the interest in the contribution of indigenous knowledge to a better understanding of sustainable development. UNCED highlighted the urgent need for developing mechanisms to protect the earth's biological diversity through local knowledge. Many of the documents signed at UNCED reflected the need to conserve the knowledge of the environment that is being lost in communities.
Similarly, the World Conference on Science (Budapest, 1999) recommended that scientific and traditional knowledge be integrated in interdisciplinary projects dealing with links between culture, environment and development in areas such as the conservation of biological diversity, management of natural resources, understanding of natural hazards and mitigation of their impact. Local communities and other relevant players should be involved in these projects. Development professionals consider indigenous knowledge as an invaluable and under-utilised knowledge reservoir, which presents developing countries with a powerful asset.
Over the years, the World Health Assembly has adopted a number of resolutions drawing attention to the fact that most of the populations in various developing countries around the world depend on traditional medicine for primary health care, that the work force represented by practitioners of traditional medicine is a potentially important resource for the delivery of health care and that medicinal and food plants are of great importance to the health of individuals and communities.
Africa is endowed with rich and highly diverse biological resources. These resources provide a wide range of natural products such as those derived from bio-prospecting, intermediate products (e.g. natural dyes, colorants, oils, biochemical compounds, medicinal and food extracts, etc) and final products (e.g. timber, handicrafts, nuts, fruits, perfumes, medicines, etc). Many of these products are collected for subsistence use. Some of them have served as an important source of innovation for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, cosmetic and agrochemical industries.
The development of traditional knowledge systems, covering all aspects of life, including management of the natural environment, has been a matter of survival to the local communities who generated these systems. The oral and rural nature of traditional knowledge has made it largely invisible to the development community and to modern science. Indigenous knowledge has often been dismissed as unsystematic. As a consequence, it has not been captured and stored in a systematic way, with the implicit danger it may become extinct.
"Traditional medicine" refers to ways of protecting and restoring health that existed before the arrival of modern medicine. As the term implies, these approaches to health belong to the traditions of each country, and have been handed down from generation to generation. Traditional systems in general have had to meet the needs of the local communities for many centuries, e.g. in relation to health needs. Humans throughout the ages have relied on plants as the source of food, clothing construction materials, cosmetics and medicines.
African traditional knowledge is unique to a given African community, culture or society. It is seen to contrast with the knowledge generated within the modern learning system. Traditional knowledge is used at the local level by communities in Africa as the basis for decision-making pertaining to food security, human and animal health, education, natural resource management, and other vital activities.
Programme Objectives