Trends in land use and land cover change in the protected and communal areas of the Zambezi Region, Namibia
- Authors: Kamwi, Jonathan , Kaetsch, Christoph , Graz, Patrick , Chirwa, Paxie , Manda, Samuel
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Vol. 189, no. 5 (2017), p. 1-18
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- Description: Land management decisions have extensively modified land use and land cover in the Zambezi Region. These decisions are influenced by land tenure classifications, legislation, and livelihoods. Land use and land cover change is an important indicator for quantifying the effectiveness of different land management strategies. However, there has been no evidence on whether protected or communal land tenure is more affected by land use and land cover changes in southern Africa and particularly Namibia. Our study attempted to fill this gap by analyzing the relationship between land use and land cover change and land tenure regimes stratified according to protected and communal area in the Zambezi Region. Multi-temporal Landsat TM and ETM+ imagery were used to determine the temporal dynamics of land use and land cover change from 1984 to 2010. The landscape showed distinctive modifications over the study period; broad trends include the increase in forest land after 1991. However, changes were not uniform across the study areas. Two landscape development stages were deduced: (1) 1984–1991 represented high deforestation and gradual increase in shrub land; (2) 1991–2000 and 2000–2010 represented lower deforestation and slower agropastoral expansion. The results further show clear patterns of the dynamics, magnitude, and direction of land use and land cover change by tenure regime. The study concluded that land tenure has a direct impact on land use and land cover, since it may restrict some activities carried out on the land in the Zambezi Region. © 2017, Springer International Publishing Switzerland.
Livelihoods, land use and land cover change in the Zambezi Region, Namibia
- Authors: Kamwi, Jonathan , Chirwa, Paxie , Manda, Samuel , Graz, Patrick , Katsch, Christoph
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Population and Environment Vol. 37, no. 2 (2015), p. 207-230
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- Description: This paper examines the socio-economic drivers of land use and land cover change and assesses the impacts of such changes to rural livelihoods in the Zambezi region of northern Namibia. We carried out a longitudinal analysis of Landsat imagery of land use and land cover. The analysis revealed that the amount of land in the region covered by forest increased significantly in the period from 1991 to 2010 whilst crop/grass land decreased. Focus group meetings, key informant interviews and semi-structured interviews covering 424 households stratified by gender were used. The results show that natural resource uses are vitally important in the rural livelihoods. The drivers of land use and land cover change are agricultural expansion, population increase and illegal logging. Livelihood coping strategies include piecework, food aid, borrowing from relatives and wild food collection. By gender stratification, piecework contributed 37 and 63 % while agriculture contributed 29 and 71 % of the income of male- and female-headed households. Logistic regression analysis showed knowledge of regulations, age group and species availability significantly (p < 0.05) influenced the choice of a household's livelihood coping strategy. The study concludes that the changes in coping strategies influenced by a variety of factors have led to the diminished use of natural resources. For policy purposes, this suggests that state interventions can play a significant role in promoting more sustainable natural resource usage. This analysis enables effective decision-making to reconcile the efforts of sustainable development and natural resource management. © 2015, Springer Science+Business Media New York.