In the forests of Central Africa, indigenous peoples and local communities hunt wildlife, and ‘bushmeat’ plays a major role in food, cultural and economic security.
However, in many landscapes, hunting management based on traditional governance systems is in decline or no longer exists. In addition, logging contributes to factors such as urban demand for bushmeat and hunting by non-local actors, thereby exerting a negative influence on the sustainability of hunting. Hunting hence often becomes unsustainable, threatening both biodiversity and the well-being of rural populations. Despite great efforts to reduce overhunting, management exercised only by the central government has several pragmatic and ethical weaknesses.
To improve the sustainability of hunting, promotion of a local and participatory approach is increasing within international environmental policies such as the Global Biodiversity Framework. Our consortium – which groups together the University of Lausanne (UNIL), the Research Institute for Tropical Ecology (IRET), and the Nsombou Abalghe-Dzal Association (NADA) – is working in Gabon, where there is a political goal of producing, by 2030, a revised legal framework for hunting which will ensure the rights of the Gabonese as well as the sustainability of hunting.
We have previously established and tested a para-ecological monitoring system in northeastern Gabon, where local community members collect data themselves in their own villages and collectively conduct analyses using participatory tools. As part of the RESSAC 2 programme, we are going to use and further develop this method to facilitate and study community management and governance of hunting.
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