Fortresses and fragments: How political, landscape and climate change force us to think of new cross-disciplinary conservation solutions

Background/Question/Methods

Most research on parks-people relationships in sub-Saharan Africa derives from savanna regions and areas of low population density.  Expulsion, exclusion, and imposition of external control are dominant themes in reported responses to parks, seen as hard-edged “fortress conservation.”  Our research around a forest park in Uganda found a counter-narrative, wherein despite “fortress” features, most people view Kibale National Park favorably.  A growing, dense, intensive agricultural population surrounds Kibale, leading to enormous pressure on unprotected forest fragments and wetlands to provide resources or to convert to agriculture.  Contemporaneous with successful government decentralization and legislated devolution of rights and responsibilities of natural resource management to the local level, mandated regulations instituted by the central government remain ignored or unheard of at a local scale.  Usufruct rights of forests and wetlands thus largely depend on local circumstances.  We examine landscape change and diminishing resource pools in the context of increasing populations and potential climate change using satellite imagery and place the results within the social context of western Uganda and fortress conservation. 

Results/Conclusions

Park boundaries have remained relatively intact since 1984, while the domesticated landscape has become increasingly fragmented, with forests and wetlands shrinking, becoming more isolated, and suffering lowered productivity and crop raiding remains a large problem.  Based on a geographically random sample in two agricultural areas neighboring the park, results from household surveys indicate that most households perceive benefits from Kibale, and only a few cited negative impacts.  The benefits most commonly noted by respondents can be characterized as ecosystem services rather than direct material or economic returns.  While locals depend on Kibale and surrounding forests and wetlands, there is confusion among residents and village leaders with regards to legislated access and use leading to a “tragedy of the commons” situation. Local scale heterogeneity provides the context for the social and ecological interface, which are overlaid with large scale trends such as climate change and population increase, giving us potential realizations of future scenarios at a regional scale. Quantifying landscape responses to both local scale anthropogenic (agricultural conversion) and regional nonlinear climate impacts (prolonged rainy seasons, arrested vegetation succession) is essential to developing frameworks of complex islandized park landscape interactions.   Linking the feedbacks of local scale ecosystem benefits and political process to regional-level impacts on livelihoods and top-down national level legislation is essential to effective implementation of appropriate regulation – natural, economic and political -  in this biodiversity and politically rich hotspot.