Changing fire regimes in East and Southern Africa's savanna-protected areas: opportunities and challenges for indigenous-led savanna burning emissions abatement schemes
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Croker, Abigail
Woods, Jeremy
Kountouris, Yiannis
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Background
Late dry-season wildfires in sub-Saharan Africa’s savanna-protected areas are intensifying, increasing carbon emissions, and threatening ecosystem functioning. Addressing these challenges requires active local community engagement and support for wildfire policy. Savanna burning emissions abatement schemes first implemented in Northern Australia have been proposed as a community-based fire management strategy for East and Southern Africa’s protected areas to deliver win–win-win climate, social, and biodiversity benefits. Here, we review and critically examine the literature exploring the design and application of savanna burning emissions abatement schemes in this region, characterizing their contextual and implementation challenges.
Results
We show that the application of Northern Australian savanna burning methodologies in East and Southern Africa tends to adopt centrally determined objectives and market-based approaches that prioritize carbon revenue generation at the national level. The exclusive prescription of early-dry season burns in African mesic savannas prone to woody thickening can compromise savanna burning objectives to mitigate late-dry season wildfires and their greenhouse gas emissions in the long-term, as well as present multiple biodiversity trade-offs in the absence of formal metrics monitoring species’ responses to changes in fire regime. These features restrict indigenous participation and leadership in fire management, creating uncertainties over the opportunities for local income generation through carbon trading. Findings suggest that future savanna burning applications will need to address asymmetries between formal institutions and local land governance systems, explicitly acknowledging colonial legacies in institutional arrangements across protected areas and hierarchies in agrarian politics that threaten processes of equitable decentralization in natural resource management.
Conclusion
We argue that the effective transfer of the Northern Australian fire management model is limited by a lack of long-term ecological and emissions data and political and institutional barriers, and is hindered by the region’s recent colonial history, population growth, and consequences of rapid climatic change. To provide a community-based strategy, savanna burning schemes need to establish context-specific legal frameworks and implement Free, Prior, and Informed Consent to safeguard the roles and responsibilities of indigenous and local people and their distribution of carbon benefits.
Late dry-season wildfires in sub-Saharan Africa’s savanna-protected areas are intensifying, increasing carbon emissions, and threatening ecosystem functioning. Addressing these challenges requires active local community engagement and support for wildfire policy. Savanna burning emissions abatement schemes first implemented in Northern Australia have been proposed as a community-based fire management strategy for East and Southern Africa’s protected areas to deliver win–win-win climate, social, and biodiversity benefits. Here, we review and critically examine the literature exploring the design and application of savanna burning emissions abatement schemes in this region, characterizing their contextual and implementation challenges.
Results
We show that the application of Northern Australian savanna burning methodologies in East and Southern Africa tends to adopt centrally determined objectives and market-based approaches that prioritize carbon revenue generation at the national level. The exclusive prescription of early-dry season burns in African mesic savannas prone to woody thickening can compromise savanna burning objectives to mitigate late-dry season wildfires and their greenhouse gas emissions in the long-term, as well as present multiple biodiversity trade-offs in the absence of formal metrics monitoring species’ responses to changes in fire regime. These features restrict indigenous participation and leadership in fire management, creating uncertainties over the opportunities for local income generation through carbon trading. Findings suggest that future savanna burning applications will need to address asymmetries between formal institutions and local land governance systems, explicitly acknowledging colonial legacies in institutional arrangements across protected areas and hierarchies in agrarian politics that threaten processes of equitable decentralization in natural resource management.
Conclusion
We argue that the effective transfer of the Northern Australian fire management model is limited by a lack of long-term ecological and emissions data and political and institutional barriers, and is hindered by the region’s recent colonial history, population growth, and consequences of rapid climatic change. To provide a community-based strategy, savanna burning schemes need to establish context-specific legal frameworks and implement Free, Prior, and Informed Consent to safeguard the roles and responsibilities of indigenous and local people and their distribution of carbon benefits.
Date Issued
2023-10-23
Date Acceptance
2023-08-24
Citation
Fire Ecology, 2023, 19
ISSN
1933-9747
Publisher
SpringerOpen
Journal / Book Title
Fire Ecology
Volume
19
Issue
1
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2023. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
License URL
Subjects
BIODIVERSITY
CARBON
Carbon market
CLIMATE
Community-based fire management
CONSERVATION
DETERMINANTS
Ecology
Environmental Sciences & Ecology
Fire management
Forestry
IMPACTS
Indigenous knowledge
Kyoto Protocol
Life Sciences & Biomedicine
LIVELIHOODS
MADAGASCAR
MANAGEMENT
Prescribed burning
Savanna burning
Science & Technology
WOODY ENCROACHMENT
Woody thickening
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
63
Date Publish Online
2023-10-23