The mountains and forests of Ethiopia’s Bale Eco-Region (BER) support a unique and diverse flora and fauna. Incorporating the Bale Mountains National Park, the BER is home to almost half the total population of Ethiopian wolves, along with vast forest areas that yield significant amounts of wild coffee and honey. Moreover, the whole region is a vast carbon store, providing ecosystem services that sustain the environment and people alike.
Some 1.6 million people live in the BER, many of them subsistence farmers who depend on the area’s natural resources for their livelihoods. Rapid population growth and increasing numbers of cattle are raising competition for natural resources and prompting the unsustainable use of forests, land and water. Climate change makes the problem worse, heightening the risk of conflicts and humanitarian disasters.
Sustainable landscape management
Since 2014, IWMI has collaborated with Farm Africa, SOS Sahel Ethiopia, Frankfurt Zoological Society and Population, Health and Environment Ethiopia Consortium (PHEEC) on the Supporting Horn of Africa Resilience (SHARE) initiative. By working with communities to pilot solutions, the project´s interdisciplinary team aims to help BER’s farmers manage resources more sustainably and become more resilient. This should also benefit people living downstream from the area.
“The project is unique in that it’s very wide ranging, addressing aspects from sustainable land use and family planning to water availability and livestock issues,” explains Daniel Van Rooijen, SHARE-BER project coordinator for IWMI. “The aim is to enhance sustainable management of the region’s natural resources and ecosystem services by building the capacity of local communities and strengthening governance. Before the project ends in 2017, we will produce a set of guidelines for sustainable management of the entire Bale Eco-Region, which can be applied in other regions as well.”
There are three agro-ecological zones in the BER: uplands, supporting mixed crop and livestock farming; mid-altitude forests, from which farmers harvest wild coffee and honey; and lowlands, where pastoralism dominates. Biodiversity loss, soil erosion, erratic rainfall, seasonal flooding, droughts and groundwater depletion make life increasingly difficult for BER’s farmers. Meanwhile, unsustainable farming practices, such as cultivating on steep slopes and overgrazing pastures, make matters worse.
Mobilizing students for research
IWMI is coordinating research associated with SHARE-BER in collaboration with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and Ethiopia’s Water and Land Resource Centre (WLRC). The research encompasses hydrology and hydrometeorological monitoring; socioeconomic aspects of BER; trade-offs and the optimal allocation of development assistance; payment for ecosystem services; and access to and demand for family planning versus natural resource management and livelihood planning.
Nine master’s degree students from Addis Adaba, Arba Minch, Hawassa and Madda Walabu Universities have received financial support from the project, along with supervision from IWMI and review of their theses in 2016. With data in short supply in Ethiopia, hydrological and hydrometeorological monitoring has been fundamental to the project. For this purpose, IWMI and WLRC installed a weather station and cross-section in each of the three agro-ecological zones in the BER. Scientists from the Institute, assisted by the master’s degree students, are now monitoring weather patterns, water flow and sediment load.
Maps that make a difference
The Institute is also working with WLRC to produce watershed development maps, indicating where pastures might be better fenced off and left to grow, which areas would benefit from being forested and where it might be beneficial for farmers to grow, in particular, climate-smart crops.
Project partners take these maps to communities to discuss potential actions they can take to enhance the environment. The hope is that, as farmers learn to adopt more sustainable farming practices and forest degradation is reversed, IWMI will detect a corresponding fall in sediment loads, a rise in dry-season flows and an attenuation of peak flows in the wet season, reflecting the positive change in practices.
With the 40 springs and five major transboundary rivers that emerge in the BER providing water to an estimated 12 million people in Ethiopia, northern Kenya and the Republic of Somalia, even small improvements could have a big impact. “SHARE-BER is a pilot project, and the idea is to scale up the lessons learned from the BER to other regions of Ethiopia and other countries in the Horn of Africa,” says Van Rooijen.
