Coping with El Nino in Tanzania: Differentiated local impacts and household-level responses

El Niño is a climatic phenomenon linked to warming of the ocean surface in the eastern Pacific that causes unusual weather patterns across many parts of the tropics and further afield. In Tanzania, El Niño events typically lead to heavier rain and flooding in northern parts of the country while southern parts experience less rainfall than normal. These environmental changes can have severe consequences for the livelihoods of local people, leading to crop failure and outbreaks of disease affecting humans and livestock and causing significant hardship and loss of life. "Natural" disasters such as these arise when society fails to respond adequately to changes in the environment, but the role human behaviour plays in shaping the outcomes of environmental change is complex and poorly understood.

The impacts of El Niño are most serious in poor rural parts of the world, where households decisions about how to respond are vital if they are to minimise the harm they suffer. These decisions commonly involve changes to their livelihood activities, selling property or increasing their use of natural resources and are often referred to as coping strategies. The set of possible coping strategies a household can use depends upon the resources they can call upon, and these can in turn be affected by their environment and the existence of relevant institutions. Together these three factors - household level differences and institutional and environmental context - are important determinants of local scale impacts of environmental shocks.

In this project, we examine how Wildlife Management Areas - a specific form of community-based natural resource management institution - affect the ability of local communities to respond to El Niño. In theory WMAs could lessen El Niño's impacts if they improve the condition or availability of natural resources at key times, or lessen conflict. However, they could also have a negative effect if they impose restrictions on natural resource use that reduce the set of coping strategies a household can call on.

We will investigate this interaction using survey data collected from more than 1,200 households across Tanzania, comparing El Niño's impacts in the differing environments of the north and the south and in areas with and without WMAs. In addition, we will examine whether impacts vary between different types of individuals or households within a community (e.g. men and women, richer and poorer households, households relying more or less on natural resources). Our results will provide valuable new insights into the reasons why some households and communities are more seriously affected by environmental change and help communities to become more resilient in the future.

The project's intended beneficiaries include:

(1) Local people in the case study sites, many of whom suffer multi-dimensional poverty. WMAs affect more than one million people across rural Tanzania, and planned new WMAs would ultimately affect a further 1.5 million rural Tanzanians. The insights we produce for Tanzania will also be generalizable to the many comparable CBNRM initiatives that are underway in East Africa and beyond.

(2) The WMA Authorised Association Consortium, an umbrella organisation for the individual Authorised Associations of each WMA

(3) Implementing organizations: a wide range of international NGOs including WWF, AWF, Africare, and FZS are involved in the implementation of WMAs and will benefit from insights which make them more sustainable in the long term

(4) Researchers interested in the impacts of environmental change on household and community resilience and/or community-based natural resource management

(5) National and international policy-makers, practitioners and funding agencies focussing on development, livelihoods, conservation and resource management

At the local scale, the immediate primary beneficiaries of the research will be poor people belonging to the local communities within our study sites in both northern and southern Tanzania, who will benefit through the creation of robust, scientific evidence about the impacts of El Niño events on household level livelihoods, natural resource use and wellbeing and the ways in which local institutions facilitate or undermine coping strategies.

At the national scale, the Tanzanian Government and NGOs involved in the establishment and implementation of WMAs (e.g. WWF, AWF, FZS) are planned users of our research, who will benefit from detailed new understanding of how El Niño affects the lives of poor, rural Tanzanians. New insight into the beneficial or negative effects of WMAs on household and community responses to environmental change will point the way towards possible changes to their implementation that can improve outcomes. Our work will also be of direct relevance to the Authorised Associations Consortium (AAC), an umbrella organisation for the groups charged with the management of individual WMAs (known as Authorised Associations). Through the AAC the lessons learned from our focal sites can be shared with, and benefit, WMA communities throughout the country. Furthermore, there are also plans to expand the WMA model to new areas of the country, increasing the total number of WMAs from 19 at present to a possible 38. This would bring ~7% of Tanzania's land surface area under WMA management, affecting in excess of one million rural Tanzanians who stand to benefit from resulting improvements in WMA implementation which help to buffer communities against environmental shocks.

At the global scale, our work on WMAs will provide a case study for the broader question of how CBNRM affects community resilience in the face of El Nino events and other forms of environmental change. CBNRM is at the forefront of international conservation efforts and plays an important role in fulfilling the Convention on Biological Diversity's Aichi Target 11 commitment to increasing global coverage of protected areas which explicitly recognise the need for them to "be established and managed in close collaboration with, and through equitable processes that recognize and respect the rights of indigenous and local communities, and vulnerable populations." Our findings therefore have considerable potential to inform CBNRM policy and practice outside of Tanzania.