Agroforestry and livestock: adaptation / mitigation strategies in agro-pastoral farming systems of Eastern Africa

In the mid-1980s the landscape of Shinyanga region in Western Tanzania was declared the desert of Tanzania by thelate President Mwl. Julius K Nyerere due to severe deforestation and degradation. The region covers 5.4% of the totalland area in Tanzania and carries over 20% of the ruminant national herd making it the most overstocked region in thecountry (MLD 2005). The inhabitants mainly of the Wasukuma ethnic group are agro-pastoralists and over 80% of thepopulation derive their livelihoods from livestock kept on extensive grazing systems. The region is semi-arid witherratic unimodal rainfall of 600 to 800mm.The severity of the land degradation problem brought national and international development agencies to implement along term natural resource management programme, which was launched in 1986 with a major thrust on afforestationand agroforestry. Successes have been recorded and the biggest of them was in blending local knowledge and modernscience to reclaim degraded land and generate various socio-economic and environmental benefits (Monela 2004).Revival of Ngitili the traditional land use system in which large areas of land are set aside by communities andindividuals to ensure that forage is available in the dry season was used to rest the land and introduce interventions thatincreased tree density, vegetation cover, soil productivity and consequently more biomass production (Barrow andMulenge 2003; Monela 2004).In 2002 these initiatives received international recognition by the UN Equator Prize 2002 for the outstanding localefforts for poverty reduction and environment conservation. A major criticism has been lack of baseline data for a moreobjective assessment of the impact. Furthermore emerging global challenges of climate vulnerability and povertyreported by the three major global studies i.e. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment of 2005, Mapping vulnerability andpoverty in Africa, the United Nations Livestock long shadow and more recently the Stern Review on economics ofclimate change give such initiatives new dimensions.The livestock sector is in the spotlight again as one of the top two or three most significant contributors toserious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. In the global warming context livestockis more damaging than all the vehicles in the world and also a major source of land and water degradation(FAO 2006). The sector accounts for 9, 37, 65 and 64 percent of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide andammonia global emissions, respectively. The largest share of emissions come from extensive systems, wherepoor livestock keepers, >100 million in East and Southern Africa, extract marginal livelihoods fromdwindling natural resources and have a very low capacity to invest in change. Recent developments inagroforestry science provide adaptation/mitigation options that can reduce or reverse adverse effects of thislivestockpovertyenvironment enigma. In this presentation we assess one of the agroforestry – livestockinnovations introduced by the project in relation to dry season climate adaptation and mitigation strategies.

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