The Shire River Basin Management Programme (SRBMP) is an initiative funded by a World Bank grant to the Malawi Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water Development. Its goal is to assist Malawi to develop a long-term vision and institutional mechanisms for the sustainable use of the natural resources of the Shire Basin. The Shire River provides water for domestic consumption, irrigated agriculture, hydropower, and fisheries for millions of people in southern Malawi. Recognizing that natural habitats and land uses affect the hydrological services of the Shire, the Global Environment Facility funded a small component of the SRBMP called “Strengthening the Information Base of Natural Habitats, Biodiversity and Environmental Services.” This component is a vehicle for bringing updated scientific knowledge about the relationships between biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and ecosystem services to bear on the goals of the SRBMP. In the first two years of this three-year project, studies on globally-rare plants, vegetation types, birds, butterflies, large mammals, and the regeneration potential of tropical deciduous (miombo) woodlands have been conducted. The final year of the project will focus on translating this scientific information into management recommendations for a range of SRMBP actors and stakeholders.
Results/Conclusions
Narrowly-endemic and globally-rare plants are concentrated mainly in evergreen moist forests on mountain peaks and the belts of miombo woodlands on the slopes that surround them. Butterfly and bird endemism is concentrated in these same habitats. These natural habitats, nominally protected in five national forest reserves of the upper Shire Basin, play a critical ecohydrological role in supplying water to downstream users. They capture and hold precipitation, recharge groundwater, prevent soil erosion, and stabilize downstream flows. In many places these forests and woodlands are being rapidly degraded, and at many sites they are not regenerating naturally under current pressures of exploitation. Many water managers are trained as engineers or economists, and often focus on downstream uses and users. Educating them about the ecohydrological role of upstream forests is challenging. Without protecting and managing the water-harvesting forest reserves at the top of the Shire’s watersheds, however, investment in water development downstream may well be wasted. In the final year of this project, materials such as manuals, posters, and scientific reports are being developed to effectively communicate this message to a wide range of target audiences, from national water and forest managers to poor, forest-dependent farming communities.