The Potentials and Challenges of Achieving Sustainability through Charcoal Producer Associations in Kenya: A Missed Opportunity?

Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. The charcoal industry, specifically charcoal production, is tremendously valuable to Kenya for its contribution to economic, social and environmental nexus. Considering the degradation of ecosystems and charcoal production’s critical role, the government established the Forest (charcoal) rules of 2009, assigning commercial charcoal production under Charcoal Producer Associations (CPAs). Identifying numerous bans in the recent past, this paper sets out to understand CPAs’ potentials and challenges in attaining sustainability within the sector. Using focus group discussions with CPA members from Tana River and Kitui counties, the paper outlines analysed data within the functionality, governance and policy implications parameters of operation. The findings show high economic value for the members and an in-depth environmental significance to the communities within which these CPAs exist. Thus, we propose a schematic to enhance charcoal production processes to achieve sustainable ecosystems and livelihoods. There is high potential within the CPAs for the sector’s sustainability through monitoring platforms, restoration plans, adopting sustainable practices, knowledge dissemination and societal advancement. To advance this untapped potential of these associations, we recommend building their technical, business and governance skills, exploring various restoration schemes, financial and regulatory support in implementation, and policy support.Forest, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) Program of the CGIA

Destructive harvesting of wild honey in Miombo woodlands affects keystone elements in the ecosystem

Protected areas cover 13% of the world's terrestrial surface. With increasing demands on land and with challenges of land degradation and climate change, conflicts between conservation and use are on the rise, particularly in developing countries. Effective management of these conflicts requires viable livelihood options for local land users which are in line with nature conservation goals. Consolidation of nature conservation guidelines with local land use practices may be particularly challenging where keystone species are affected or where land uses have the potential for leading to ecosystem changes. This can be an issue even in ecosystems like savannahs, where fire largely defines ecosystem structure. The Miombo woodlands, covering around 2.4 million km2 of land, harbour important diversity and are crucial for livelihoods of around 75 million people in southern Africa. As a result of various pressures, cover and biomass of Miombo woodlands are declining throughout their range. Honey harvesting is an important land use in Miombo areas, both economically and culturally. Wild bees use cavities in trees for their colonies. Harvesting practices in some places include felling of trees with honeycombs to collect the honey and setting fire for pacifying bees. This leads to starvation and death of bee colonies. Given that most tree species are bee pollinated, trees with cavities colonised by wild bees can be classified as keystone elements in these ecosystems. Although ecologically far reaching, the effects of this harvesting practice on tree population structures in Miombo woodlands have seldom been studied. We characterised the ecological effects of destructive harvesting of wild honey on tree population structure and tree species distribution in Miombo woodlands in the Niassa wildlife reserve in Mozambique. The results show that forest structure and tree diversity differed along honey harvesting intensity gradients, with the highest number of fire tolerant tree species in areas with high honey harvesting intensity, which also showed the lowest tree regeneration density and Shannon diversity. Options for reconciling livelihoods with ecosystem maintenance do exist and include non-destructive harvesting based on climbing trees with locally produced ropes and leaving larval combs behind so the colony could continue to grow

Soil water regime under rotational fallow and alternating hedgerows on an Ultisol in southern Cameroon

Article purchasedSoil moisture depletion during dry seasons by planted hedgerows to lower levels than under natural fallow, would reduce drainage and nutrient losses in the following rainy season when food crops are grown. The volumetric water content of the 0–150 cm soil profile was measured under planted hedgerows (alternating Leucaena leucocephala and Gliricidia sepium) and natural fallow, both either annually cropped to sole maize or in a two-year crop/two-year fallow rotation, in the humid forest zone (annual rainfall 1700 mm) of southern Cameroon during the 1995–1996 and 1996–1997 dry seasons. Hedgerows were cut to 0.05 m height, largely eliminating trees’ water consumption during cropping phases. Differences in total soil water content at 0–150 cm depth, between systems, occurred only in the early phases of the 1996–1997 dry season. In both dry seasons, differences between systems in water content were found in some soil layers, all within 0–60 cm depth, yet, without consistent advantage of any system in exploiting the topsoil water resources. Soil water content was lower under L. leucocephala than G. sepium at 20–40 cm depth only. Below 60 cm depth, no differences in water regimes between systems were found. Under southern Cameroonian conditions it is unlikely that any of the systems has an advantage in accessing or recovering water and thus, if available, nutrients from the sub-soil. None of the systems examined was capable of delaying drainage and thus it appears unlikely that downward displacement of nutrients is delayed after the start of the rains

Relearning traditional knowledge to achieve sustainability: honey gathering in the miombo woodlands of northern Mozambique

Mozambique’s Niassa Reserve contains Africa’s best preserved miombo woodlands. Half of the households there gather wild honey from natural hives for consumption and income. However, most collectors used destructive techniques: setting fire to the grasses under the hive tree to create smoke and then felling the tree. Cutting trees to obtain honey was the principal source of tree mortality. Trees grow very slowly, about 0.25 cm diameter [dbh]/yr, meaning an average hive tree was nearly 200 years old. Furthermore, of the trees > 20 cm dbh of species important for nectar and hives, only about 15% had cavities. Although fire is intrinsic to miombo woodlands, the increased frequency resulting from anthropogenic sources impedes regeneration of some tree species as well as affecting bees, other wildlife and villages. A few people in the reserve had learned from earlier generations how to gather honey in a nondestructive way, using certain plant species to keep bees from stinging and climbing the trees using ropes to take the honey combs out of the hives. Traditional practices included leaving the larval combs behind so the colony continued to grow. Previously, the older men who had this knowledge had not been willing to share it with younger men. The project arranged for one of the traditional honey hunters to participate in an international conference on honey collection with other indigenous collectors from around the world. This helped him recognize the value of his knowledge. The project team then arranged for him to demonstrate these traditional techniques to groups of honey hunters in nine communities within the Reserve. A yearlater, monitoring revealed that many collectors had adopted these nondestructive techniques. They found them less time consuming, and appreciated that they allowed collectors to return to the same trees repeatedly to obtain honey. Sharing traditional knowledge made honey hunting compatible with the conservation of miombo woodlands

Climate change adaptation in and through agroforestry: four decades of research initiated by Peter Huxley

Agroforestry (AF)-based adaptation to global climate change can consist of (1) reversal of negative trends in diverse tree cover as generic portfolio risk management strategy; (2) targeted, strategic, shift in resource capture (e.g. light, water) to adjust to changing conditions (e.g. lower or more variable rainfall, higher temperatures); (3) vegetation-based influences on rainfall patterns; or (4) adaptive, tactical, management of tree-crop interactions based on weather forecasts for the (next) growing season. Forty years ago, a tree physiological research tradition in aboveground and belowground resource capture was established with questions and methods on climate-tree-soil-crop interactions in space and time that are still relevant for today’s challenges. After summarising early research contributions, we review recent literature to assess current levels of uncertainty in climate adaptation assessments in and through AF. Quantification of microclimate within and around tree canopies showed a gap between standard climate station data (designed to avoid tree influences) and the actual climate in which crop and tree meristems or livestock operates in real-world AF. Where global scenario modelling of ‘macroclimate’ change in mean annual rainfall and temperature extrapolates from climate station conditions in past decades, it ignores microclimate effects of trees. There still is a shortage of long-term phenology records to analyse tree biological responses across a wide range of species to climate variability, especially where flowering and pollination matter. Physiological understanding can complement farmer knowledge and help guide policy decisions that allow AF solutions to emerge and tree germplasm to be adjusted for the growing conditions expected over the lifetime of a tree.</p

From Tree Planting to Tree Growing: Rethinking Ecosystem Restoration Through Tree

Every year, millions of dollars are spent on tree-based landscape restoration activities. Over the last five decades, there are few success stories of such interventions and even those do not match the anticipated objectives for which the resources were spent. News articles that announce planting campaigns of millions of seedlings are common. Despite all this, in many countries, vegetation cover has not improved due to poor seedling survival rate. This makes the return on investment low. The objective of this paper is to highlight the main underlying challenges that need to be tackled to make restoration through tree-based interventions successful. Numerous challenges hamper the success of project-supported public tree growing schemes. 1) Often tree planting is stated as the ultimate objective of the intervention; when that objective should instead be tree growing. Performance indicators are often the number of trees planted or area planted, not the number of trees grown, or the area of land covered with grown trees. 2) Most projects operate on a short time frame (1-3 years) while many tree species (e.g. native trees in many African countries) need more time to sufficiently grow. 3) Emphasis on the right trees, for the right place and the right purposes, is very weak. 4) Even in projects of adequate duration emphasis on after-planting management is often limited. 5) There is lack of tree tenure to formally transfer the management of planted trees to local communities who reside in the landscapes over a long period of time. Tackling these challenges and changing mindsets is crucial if restoration through tree-based interventions is to yield the intended outcomes of reversing ecosystem degradation

Culex pipiens development is greatly influenced by native bacteria and exogenous yeast

Culex pipiens is the most cosmopolitan mosquito of the Pipiens Assemblage. By studying the nature of interactions between this species and microorganisms common to its breeding environment we can unravel important pitfalls encountered during development. We tested the survival rate of larval stages, pupae and adults of a Cx. pipiens colony exposed to a variety of microorganisms in laboratory conditions and assessed the transmission to offspring (F1) by those organisms that secured development up to adulthood. Three complementary experiments were designed to: 1) explore the nutritional value of yeasts and other microorganisms during Cx. pipiens development; 2) elucidate the transstadial transmission of yeast to the host offspring; and 3) to examine the relevance of all these microorganisms in female choice for oviposition-substratum. The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae proved to be the most nutritional diet, but despite showing the highest survival rates, vertical transmission to F1 was never confirmed. In addition, during the oviposition trials, none of the gravid females was attracted to the yeast substratum. Notably, the two native bacterial strains, Klebsiella sp. and Aeromonas sp., were the preferred oviposition media, the same two bacteria that managed to feed neonates until molting into 2nd instar larvae. Our results not only suggest that Klebsiella sp. or Aeromonas sp. serve as attractants for oviposition habitat selection, but also nurture the most fragile instar, L1, to assure molting into a more resilient stage, L2, while yeast proves to be the most supportive diet for completing development. These experiments unearthed survival traits that might be considered in the future development of strategies of Cx. pipiens control. These studies can be extended to other members of the Pipiens Assemblag

Biophysical interactions in tropical agroforestry systems

sequential systems, simultaneous systems Abstract. The rate and extent to which biophysical resources are captured and utilized by the components of an agroforestry system are determined by the nature and intensity of interac-tions between the components. The net effect of these interactions is often determined by the influence of the tree component on the other component(s) and/or on the overall system, and is expressed in terms of such quantifiable responses as soil fertility changes, microclimate modification, resource (water, nutrients, and light) availability and utilization, pest and disease incidence, and allelopathy. The paper reviews such manifestations of biophysical interactions in major simultaneous (e.g., hedgerow intercropping and trees on croplands) and sequential (e.g., planted tree fallows) agroforestry systems. In hedgerow intercropping (HI), the hedge/crop interactions are dominated by soil fertility improvement and competition for growth resources. Higher crop yields in HI than in sole cropping are noted mostly in inherently fertile soils in humid and subhumid tropics, and are caused by large fertility improvement relative to the effects of competition. But, yield increases are rare in semiarid tropics and infertile acid soils because fertility improvement does not offse