Turning forest conservation and landscape restoration into livelihood opportunities: a consultation on incentives in the upper Omo–Ghibe Basin in Southwest Ethiopia
The conservation and protection of forests, as well as restoration of degraded landscapes, require substantial resources. Such initiatives are also said to restrict the access of forest-dependent communities to their resources.
- Community engagement
- Ethiopia
- Forest landscape restoration
- Livelihoods
- Multifunctional Landscapes
Turning forest conservation and landscape restoration into livelihood opportunities: a consultation on incentives in the upper Omo–Ghibe Basin in Southwest Ethiopia
The conservation and protection of forests, as well as restoration of degraded landscapes, require substantial resources. Such initiatives are also said to restrict the access of forest-dependent communities to their resources.
Such a contradiction is a risky case for the Omo-Ghibe basin, one of the living landscapes, under the multifunctional landscape science program. The basin has a critical significance for realizing Ethiopia’s major development agendas, especially in large-scale irrigation agriculture, hydropower generation, and large-scale agro-industrial developments. These landscapes are also the most sensitive to realizing Ethiopia’s climate change commitments, considering most of Ethiopia’s forests and biodiversity resources fall within this basin and associated systems. However, compensation for conservation, restoration, and sustainable livelihoods rarely materialized.
The Alliance Bioversity International and CIAT convened consultations with relevant stakeholders operating in the Upper Omo-Ghibe basin to co-identify easily investable livelihoods that have positive interactions with forest conservation and protection as well as land restoration efforts. In doing so, the workshops explored how pressure on natural resources can be reduced, while simultaneously improving the wellbeing of forest-dependent communities, which would reduce the trade-off between development, restoration, and conservation interests.