People Livestock and Environment

Peter Thorne has joined ILRI as a crop livestock systems scientist. He is part of the People Livestock and Environment theme based in Addis Ababa and is expected to relocate to Zimbabwe in mid-2012.

Peter was until his appointment with ILRI, responsible for the national dairy benchmarking service in Britain. He has had a long career in international agriculture since conducting his Ph.D research at the Universities of Nottingham and in the Philippines at Los Banos.

He has been involved in livestock production systems research, particularly in the areas of crop livestock interactions, feed evaluation and the development of novel approaches to information delivery.

‘ We are working with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and national partners to develop a project that will contribute to improved food security in Zimbabwe. The project aims to promote more efficient crop-livestock integration’, he said in an interview.

The widely-travelled father of three looks forward to relocating to Zimbabwe after living for 20 years in North Wales, United Kingdom. His wife Clare and their teen-age children daughter Shona and son Seumas (pronounced Shamaus) will join him in Zimbabwe before settling in to a new school term in August. Their eldest daughter Hanna is studying for her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at Manchester University, UK.

Peter enjoys mountaineering, cycling and outdoor pursuits in general while Clare loves horses. ‘I wonder whether she will bring some down to Harare or she will buy one when we get there’, he says rather pensively.

Didier Zida, a post-doctoral scientist has returned to Burkina Faso following a six- month stint with ILRI’s People, Livestock and Environment theme in Nairobi.

Zida is also working with PLE to implement the Livelihood diversifying potential of livestock based carbon sequestration options in pastoral and agro pastoral systems in Africa project. He said at the farewell party that the opportunity given to him by ILRI along with other collaborators to undertake his post-doctoral research within the ILRI scientific community was immeasurable.

He came to ILRI knowing nothing about geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing, yet his research demanded dealing with these two methods endlessly. As he left ILRI, Zida was a GIS and remote sensing specialist, and that expertise will certainly benefit his future research work.

In spite of limited time, he was able to apply himself to his work and to forge good relationships with other ILRI members.

‘I believe these networks are a basis for future collaboration. I look forward to collaborating with the PLE team while implementing the livelihood diversification project’, he said.

He hopes that the collaboration between ILRI and the institution he is affiliated to (the Institute of Environment and Agricultural Research – INERA) and such exchange training programs will continue in the future.

Wildlife conservancies will today come under scrutiny in a workshop to discuss wildlife tourism as a response to climate change. The workshop is organized under the auspices of the Enabling livestock based economies in Kenya to adapt to climate change: A Review of payment for ecosystem services from wildlife tourism as a climate change adaptation option.

It will examine through an analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) the viability of emerging conservancies within and around the protected parks in arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs). Participants will also discuss policy options that either support or regress the development of conservancies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Pastoral societies are vulnerable to climate change because they inhabit drylands with repetitive drought and often have an insufficient financial buffer to absorb the shocks that droughts create. Conservancies are seen as one way to adapt to this climate variability as they provide diversification of the income portfolio into activities less prone to drought. This source of income may potentially increase the resilience of pastoral societies to climate change.

In addition, in some instances, conservancies also allow for the maintenance of open rangelands under a changing land tenure system that leads to fragmentation. Open rangelands are critical for mobility for pastoralists and their livestock especially during drought periods.

Recently, in many parts of Kenya community based conservancies have been developed, where land is managed by pastoralists to promote both wildlife and livestock to attract tourists and generate revenue.

The community based conservancy model is often highlighted for its potential to strengthen resilience of pastoral communities to climate change. However, it is unclear what the effect is on household income, and how the income generated affects the resilience to climate change. Resilience of household income to climate change also depends on equitable distribution of PES revenue, yet, there is little insight on the equity of access to benefits derived.

The study which has brought together researchers with expertise in development economics and ecosystem services respectively from ILRI, the University of Hohenheim (Stuttgart) and the Leibniz-Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) in Müncheberg will today be complemented by practitioners including government workers, non-governmental agency workers, private partners knowledgeable about conservancies and representatives of pastoral communities based around the conservancies.

This project is sponsored by the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany and was officially launched by Chancellor Angela Merkel, when she visited ILRI in 2011.

More ASALs policy briefs click here for ILRI/EU Decision Support tool and here for ILRI/ASARECA Biodiversity case studies

The Permanent Secretary in Kenya’s Ministry of Environment and Mineral Resources, Mr Ali Mohammed (EBS) will on Tuesday 14th February 2012 give the opening address at a policy workshop hosted by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).

Mr Mohammed was recently elected as Vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The IPBES is a mechanism being set up to further strengthen the science-policy interface on biodiversity and ecosystem services. It is expected to enhance the existing processes that aim at ensuring that decisions are made on the basis of the best available scientific information on conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and ecosystem services.

The main aim of the workshop is to engage stakeholders from grassroots users through to national and international policymakers/practitioners, entrepreneurs, and scientists working on issues related to the Biodiversity, Ecosystem services, Social sustainability and Tipping points in African Dry lands (BEST) project. It is managed in collaboration with The African Technology Policy Studies Network, the Institute of Zoology, London, University College London, UCL, Anthropology (East African dry lands societies, livelihoods and NRM institutions) will host a one-day Policymaker, Practitioner and Community User Workshop. BEST is run by the People Livestock and Environment (PLE) theme in ILRI.

BEST targets to provide awareness into the poverty and environment impacts of different policies on tenure and natural resources management, as is incorporated at household decisions. The outcomes are intended to be used by national and international policymakers at all levels who have responsibility for planning and budgeting, climate change adaptation programmes, and donor-funded interventions. The stakeholders comprise of national and international interest groups (including responsible investors). The envisioned beneficiaries are the local users who are mostly the residents in the dry lands; BEST has the intentions to improve their livelihoods and environments and also make them more resilient and sustainable.

The workshop will be held at ILRI, Nairobi on 14 February 2012. BEST researchers will present project aims and approach, preliminary work completed to date, and plans for subsequent work, soliciting feedback on all elements of the project during the workshop.

The BEST research collaboration brings together international partners, social and natural scientists; specialists in ecology, economics and anthropology, in geographic information systems (GIS) and in modelling. Others are communications and research management experts, to help create an integrated approach to addressing central issues in African dry lands ecosystem services and poverty alleviation.

Project partners include TAWIRI, ASARECA, ESRC-STEPS and many others contributing data and insights, sharing and enhancing the networking potential in both consultation/feedback and dissemination of findings.

Warmer temperatures and drier weather conditions have significantly affected the composition of wildlife in Kenya’s Lake Nakuru National Park, situated in the heart of the Rift Valley, states a new study published on January 28, 2012. The Nakuru region has experienced perhaps one of the fastest warming rates in the region in the past half a century.

This, associated with human encroachment around Kenya’s first fully fenced-protected park, has seen the numbers of two wildlife species plummet to levels that now threaten their future population viability in the park although, surprisingly, the park continues to hold a high level of biodiversity including the world famous flamingos.

The trends of nine (9) most common herbivore species were studied in the 41 years from 1970 to 2011. The study found that the waterbuck, once a flagship species whose population density in the park was the highest known anywhere until the mid 1990s, has lost its position of dominance to buffalo and zebra, while Grant’s gazelle and impala at first increased and then gradually declined. Both the waterbuck and warthog decreased in numbers to levels that now threaten their very survival in the park while the buffalo, zebra and Thomson’s gazelle continued to thrive. Populations of the other three common species were relatively stable.

The crash of the waterbuck population following the 1990 drought is attributed to competition for forage between waterbuck, on the one hand, and buffalo and zebra, on the other. There are extensive overlaps in the forage consumed by the three species but waterbuck select a diet far richer in crude protein and thus requires plenty of water to excrete the nitrogenous waste in urine. It therefore has a much higher minimum requirement of water than most African ungulates.

Waterbuck crashes, duickers disappear

Consequently, as more animals seek to feed around the lake shore during dry periods, the forage gets depleted faster and selective feeders like the waterbuck suffer the most. Thomson’s gazelle, impala and waterbuck that are the most strongly dependent on the lakeshore grasslands that become more extensively exposed under dry conditions when the lake level recedes, have to compete more intensely with the expanding buffalo and zebra populations. Zebra and buffalo have a competitive edge over these smaller grazers on the lake shore grasslands, as well as on grasslands around the artificial water points dispersed all over the park in the dry season, when food supply is lowest elsewhere. This is because both buffalo and zebra can tolerate low-quality grasses because of their bulk-feeding style due to their large body sizes and also because zebra is a non-ruminant grazer able to rapidly process large quantities of low-quality forage.

It is not only the common smaller species that are bearing the brunt of the increase in numbers of the larger species in the park. The small and rare species are facing even harder times. So for example, the mountain reedbuck that was once the fourth most abundant species in the park during 1970-1971 and the common and blue duikers have all but virtually disappeared from the park due to the loss of their favoured habitats of tall grasslands and shoreline vegetation due to grazing by the expanding numbers of the large-sized grazers.

The lack of a water outlet and the small size of Lake Nakuru make it very vulnerable to habitat degradation and changing land use in its 1800 Km2 catchment basin. The massive destruction of forests in the catchment basin and the alteration of the catchment hydrology have destroyed most of the wildlife that previously existed in the region; described by early European explorers as the richest found anywhere in East Africa. As a result of these changes, populations of elephant, Jackson’s hartebeest, Masai and Rothschild giraffes, white rhinoceros, and eland became locally extinct. A once spectacular migration of zebra and Thomson’s gazelles between Lake Baringo and the Lake Nakuru-Elementaita region also disappeared.

Being located right next to Nakuru town, the park is gradually being adversely affected by water pollution due to industrialisation and the lake level has dropped from 2.5 m (in 1925-1979) to 1.01 m during 1992-2002 and now stands at 0.756 m (2003 to 2011), reflecting high siltation rates.
Water quality in the streams supplying water to the lake is also deteriorating exposing animals to potentially dangerous agro chemicals and heavy metals.

It is indeed very striking that this small park has been able to support such large numbers of a diverse large mammal assemblage for over four decades, despite wide climatic variation and major land use changes in its surroundings. However, although the long-term consequences of the population expansion and increasing isolation of the park are uncertain at present, when the expanding populations reach their carrying capacity in the park, they may become more vulnerable to rainfall, temperature and lake level influences on their food resources and large predators, with ramifying and unforeseen adverse consequences for the other species.

The study titled Dynamics of ungulates in relation to climatic and land use changes in an insularized African savannah ecosystem, was published in Biodiversity and Conservation journal by Joseph Ogutu, a senior statistician in the Bioinformatics unit of the University of Hohenheim, Germany. He conducted the study with colleagues there and at the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya, where he initially served under the People, Livestock and Environment theme.

Masai Mara National Reserve

Ogutu previously published extensive studies on the world famous Masai Mara National Reserve (2011 and 2009). The 2011 study published in the Journal of Zoology indicated that the populations of wildlife species in the world-renowned Masai Mara reserve in Kenya have crashed in the past three decades by as much as 70%.

Fewer survive beyond the reserve in the wider Mara, where buffalo and wild dogs have all but disappeared, while huge numbers of wildebeest no longer pass through the region on their epic migration.
However, numbers of cattle grazing in the reserve have increased by more than 1100% per cent, although it is illegal for them to so do. This explosion in the numbers of domestic livestock grazing in the Mara region, including within the Masai Mara national reserve, is one of the principal reasons wildlife has disappeared, the scientists said.

‘The status of Masai Mara as a prime conservation area and premier tourist draw card in Kenya may soon be in jeopardy’ Ogutu’, said at the time.

By Jane Gitau