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~Executive Summary~ |
1. Introduction
This brief chapter outlines the purpose and scope of the Malawi Environmental Monitoring Program (MEMP) that was sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and implemented through a partnership between the University of Arizona (UA) and Clark University (CU).
1.1 The purpose of MEMP
As initially conceived and finally realized, MEMP was intended to establish capacity within the Government of Malawi (GOM) that would allow them to do two things:
1.2 The purpose of Nature
Nature was envisioned as an effort that would complement MEMP by focusing on policy issues and addressing them at the highest levels of government. It was intended to:
2. Approach
There were three possible approaches that might have been adopted in developing MEMP. One would be to provide expatriate staff to perform all the tasks described. A second would be to establish monitoring and analysis capacity in a number of disciplinary areas within the Environmental Affairs Division (EAD) of the Ministry of National Parks and Forestry. Instead of these, a third option was pursued in which MEMP sought to build and strengthen environmental monitoring and analysis capacity within the appropriate GOM ministries. These ministries were already mandated to perform many of the required tasks, but many faced problems in performing them. Thus, the intent was to build their capacity so that they could fulfill their respective mandates while also providing MEMP with the information it required. This was pursued in several ways, including:
3. Scope
3.1 MEMP
The broad goals of MEMP outlined above (see 1.1) remained largely unchanged for the course of the project. However, the roles and responsibilities EAD (within which MEMP was located) changed dramatically over time. This was due, in part, to the changing status of EAD from an advisory body within the Office of the President, to a free standing ministry, to a division within another ministry. The primary responsibilities of MEMP have gradually unfolded to include:
3.2 Added dimensions
The original scope of the project was limited to MEMP and the string of related tasks that in came to include (see above). However, with time other more-or-less freestanding activities were added. These included:
On the whole, MEMP and its components were concerned with establishing what was happening to the physical and biological environment of Malawi. NATURE and PLUS served more as direct links to national policy planning.
Nature: the concept
USAID/Malawi’s Strategic Objective No.2 (SO2) and the purpose of the Nature Program are the same, and are defined in the 1995-2000 Country Program Strategic Plan:
"to increase the sustainable use, conservation and management of Malawi’s renewable natural resources"
Malawi’s problems in natural resource management (NRM) had been amply described prior to the design of the Nature Program. The opportunities to be captured, as viewed in 1995, included
Nature was to build on the NEAP’s participatory approach:
"The extensive participation of stakeholder groups in defining Malawi’s natural resource priorities and actions has instructed the policy and institutional reform agenda contained in the Nature Program. … There are no models to determine which institutional structures are appropriate for environmentally sustainable development. Therefore, Nature does not attempt to impose upon the GoM any specific solutions to its environmental challenges; rather, the program seeks to rationalize and impose a time-frame on the reform process while also providing technical and budgetary support, where necessary."
Themes common to both the NEAP process and the Nature design were:
Experience with the Nature NPA Program has been mixed
At the level of sectoral implementing agencies in government, the opportunities identified in the spirit of the new democracy and harnessing the power of public consultation and debate have been captured. The strength of Nature’s NPA Program lies in its supporting, but not interfering in, government’s policy reform agenda. In addition to providing financial support, Nature also established a format for policy reform - internal review, followed by inter-governmental consultation and negotiation with the private sector, NGOs and resource users - which has been successfully adapted to the requirements of individual sectors. Within this framework, and with the assistance of a number of other donor and technical partners, notably UNDP, UNEP, FAO, GTZ, Danida and the World Bank, the following achievements may be recorded:
Despite a generally good fit between Nature’s objectives and the thrust of the new NRM movement in Malawi, progress against stated performance benchmarks has been lamentably slow. The first tranche of dollar funding was disbursed in February 1997, and the second tranche (originally tentatively programmed for September 1996) has yet to be disbursed. Two factors combined to delay progress:
The financing of policy reforms through the budgetary process did not materialize as expected.
Government’s eager adoption of the donor-financed NEAP process was mistaken for willingness to target budget resources to implementing agencies in support of Nature’s objectives. This assumption is clearly evident in the Nature PAAD, where not only policy reform but also field-level implementation are identified as legitimate objects of NPA support:
"… NPA financing will enable the GoM to increase local currency budgetary outlays in the areas of environmental protection and natural resources management. … These additional outlays are required to establish and maintain appropriate structures for environmentally sustainable development and to expand needed government field-level services."
Although clear in the PAAD, and apparently good business sense for the MoF, the requirement to fund at least those activities which contribute to the attainment of performance criteria was not explicit in the Program Grant Agreement and was not satisfactorily achieved in practice. Not only were the operational aspects of Nature - including financing - inadequately negotiated with the MoF prior to program start-up, but lack of capacity in that institution, always reeling from one fiscal crisis to the next, inevitably relegated Nature to a low priority for most of the time. Government’s failure to finance the reform program for almost a year after approving the budget was the single most important factor in Nature’s slow performance.
Nature’s complex and detailed conditionality proved cumbersome in the face of rapidly changing circumstances.
Two major elements in the Nature policy matrix - the Performance Based Budget System and the institutional review of NRM agencies -were closely paralleled and overtaken by similar but government-wide programs supported by other donors - the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework and the Functional Review of the Civil Service. In the latter case the duplication was exacerbated by the funding delays already described - had it been performed earlier, Nature’s institutional analysis would have made a valuable contribution to the Functional Review. But beyond the duplications which could not easily have been foreseen at the design stage, an undue preoccupation with details of process have made the Nature policy matrix a difficult and sometimes ambiguous instrument with which to manage policy reforms across a diversity of government agencies. With hindsight, the linking of the reform process to a time-bound action plan and the inclusion of policy and legal reviews as formal performance indicators have rendered compliance unnecessarily difficult.
Risks associated with removing Nature support
Viewed as the sum of its achievements to date, the Nature Program has made an impressive contribution to the re-orientation of NRM policies in Malawi, yet, as described above, performance against formal criteria has been disappointing. It is to be expected that the USAID Mission will therefore give critical consideration to the future of its support to the natural resources sectors. At one extreme the Mission could simply withdraw from natural resources in favor of more rewarding investment targets. What are the risks attending withdrawal, and what are the opportunities for developing a more satisfactory partnership in the future?
Even in the absence of continued USAID support there is no real danger of the NRM sectors backsliding into a command and control management style - policy thinking at the higher levels of the civil service is too far advanced, the democratic process itself is too well-established and several new statutes would have to be replaced. But without active intervention there is a distinct risk of the current near-zero management scenario persisting for an extended period, despite the achievements in policy reform:
The original objectives of Nature are as valid today - and as well aligned with the aims of government institutions - as they were in 1995, but the fact that political support for the Program has not translated into a realignment of the recurrent budget remains an issue of concern for the USAID Mission. Here the behavior of a resource-poor government resembles that of a resource-poor household: short-term survival strategies take preference over long-term sustainability. The challenge for the future lies in securing natural resources budgets from further attrition and then working with line agencies to improve their effectiveness within the existing financial constraints.
The future: guiding principles
Most processes in nature are reversible, over time: Malawi is not faced with impending environmental disaster, but with the challenge of making an ill-managed system more productive.
Few if any of the adverse changes in the status of Malawi’s natural resources are irreversible. The rapid denudation of natural miombo woodlands post-democracy is not the product of a permanent change in land use, it results from the excessive harvesting of standing trees. The roots of most miombo species remain alive in the soil for many years, and a reduction in harvesting will produce an immediate response in forest regeneration. Similarly, over-exploited fish stocks in the more accessible of Malawi’s natural waters comprise a great diversity of mostly small species with short life histories, and are capable of swift recovery if fishing pressure is reduced. Even catchment processes are reversible: degraded watersheds, characterized by eroded upper slopes, silted watercourses and depleted groundwater, can, given time, be restored by changes in land use and management.
Adverse changes brought about by human influence eventually generate their own negative feedback - generally experienced as a reduction in the availability or productivity of the resource - which under suitable conditions will induce modifications in behavior and change in the reverse direction. The task of natural resource managers is to harness, amplify and build upon this process. Three complementary approaches are necessary:
Interventions based on the supposed need to avert disaster can subvert the development of emerging or potential management systems by over-riding the feedback process, confusing the negative signals from resource extraction. For instance, the dumping of free fertilizer in smallholder farming communities for supposed food security benefits would retard the emergence of a more holistic approach to soil fertility which has grown out of the reduced access to inorganic fertilizers over the past few years.
The speed with which the new generation of NRM policies can be implemented will affect the outcome at landscape level.
In the absence of externally imposed management regimes the tendency is not towards chaos, but towards the evolution of new equilibria shaped by a combination of economic, ecological and social forces. The new equilibria will, by definition, be "sustainable" but they may not necessarily be optimal. Two examples illustrate this point:
In the forestry sector the virtual abandonment of government controls over customary forests following the 1993 referendum led quickly to the growth of an illegal industry supplying fuelwood and charcoal to urban markets. The number of people employed in this industry must now be counted in the hundreds of thousands. The most immediate result has been the removal of standing trees from woodland within economic transporting distances from major markets (eg. Mwanza District, supplying Blantyre). As a secondary impact the price of woodfuel has increased as harvesting centers move further from the market and transport costs rise. Most of the benefits accrue to urban-based traders, not to the inhabitants of the supply areas. Left unchecked, this process will proceed to take in Forest Reserves as well as customary forest (both effectively open-access), once the rising price of fuelwood overcomes traditional respect for government authority. An expected - but as yet undemonstrated - tertiary impact is the reduction in household-level fuelwood use in response to increased cost. But more importantly, the increase in wood energy costs is already beginning to make the production of fuelwood from private plantations and woodlots increasingly attractive. In the absence of any policy or government intervention, the forested areas of Malawi would undergo progressive transformation from indigenous forest to treeless landscape to exotic plantations.
Implementation of the forestry policy would intervene in this process by increasing the value of indigenous fuelwood before it is completely removed (by closing access to it). There would still be an important place for exotic plantations, but the sustainable management of indigenous forest would also - for the first time - become commercially competitive. Ultimately, the speed with which the forestry policy is implemented will determine the medium-term balance between the two forest types, a balance with important implications for wildlife, for biological diversity and for catchment processes.
In the wildlife sector, it is evident that government resources are currently inadequate to protect the "protected areas", much less the wildlife resources on customary land. It is anticipated that one major route to wildlife conservation will be through the attraction of private sector investment into wildlife utilization - both non-consumptive (photo-tourism, lodges, up to and including protected area management) and consumptive (safari hunting, game ranching). Investment costs in wildlife industries can be very high, and whatever the nature of the enterprise, its medium-term profitability is likely to be directly proportional to the status of the wildlife resource on takeover. Given the current rapid decline in wildlife populations all over Malawi, it is clear that the slower the privatization process the less attractive it will be, and hence the less likely that this element in government’s wildlife strategy will remain a feasible option.
Opportunities for policy implementation
The Strategic Review of June 1998 suggested goals, principles and "strategic shifts" to redirect SO2 onto a new path. These recommendations were perhaps less radical than were supposed at the time, since there had always been an expectation that the emphasis of Nature would shift from policy reform to policy implementation once the reforms had been completed. However, this part of the program had not previously been described in any detail, and the review team made a very creative input into the definition of criteria for the implementation of NRM initiatives within the new policy framework. There are many opportunities for tangible support to the improvement of NRM in Malawi which are consistent with the team’s recommendations:
Help institutions to re-orient themselves to new roles within negotiated budget-share limits - exploiting field capacity which is currently wasted
Envisaged here is an agreement - negotiated with the MoF and reinforced through the NPA mechanism - to maintain selected agency budgets at a fixed (but not necessarily increased) share of the national total. Using project support, these agencies could be assisted to carry out institutional modifications - including privatization, downsizing, re-training and re-orienting - to better fit them to their new roles, release a greater proportion of their budgets for field operations and thereby use existing field capacity to the full.
Support landscape-scale multi-sector NRM initiatives
The "model forest", a broad area-based approach to multiple resource governance, goes much further than the "boundary community" system of protected area co-management in that it attempts to bring together all of the parties with an interest in the resource. (Flue tobacco estates, for instance, are important consumers of fuelwood harvested illegally from protected areas, yet they do not form part of the conventionally defined boundary communities and are excluded from current co-management experiments.) The model forest concept has been explored in depth over the past 30 months by the Forestry Department, the Department of National Parks and Wildlife and the Ministry of Lands, Housing, Physical Planning and Surveys, with assistance from the International Model Forest Network and Nature (University of Arizona Cooperative Agreement). In an initial planning exercise two sites - which included public, customary and private land - were selected for pilot implementation, but the principal donor, CIDA, unexpectedly withdrew support late in 1998 and left the initiative grounded. This promising and innovative approach to NRM remains an open opportunity for donor support.
Harness internal and external investment into the wildlife and eco-tourism sectors - a "target zone" approach
Although the new wildlife policy welcomes the entry of private sector initiatives in protected areas, institutional caution has tended to divert potential investors towards those areas which have been least successfully protected, ie those now almost devoid of wildlife. Such caution is understandable in the context of an unhappy history of government-private sector relations in the wildlife sector, but major opportunities have been missed in the past and given the rate of deterioration of protected area wildlife resources the time window in which the private sector can afford to make a viable impact is limited. A target zone approach could focus on the privatization of one of the higher-potential protected areas, with USAID providing institutional support and to some extent underwriting the risk of such a venture.
Capture the opportunities provided in smallholder agriculture by the reduction in access to fertilizer
There is now strong evidence to suggest that reduced access by smallholder farmers to inorganic fertilizers over the past five years has contributed to the growth of a new attitude towards soil fertility problems. At the center of the new movement is a conceptual leap from perception of the problem as a simple lack of fertilizer to a broader understanding of the spectrum of soil deficiencies resulting from long-term reliance on inorganic fertilizer as the only means of enhancing fertility. This process of conceptual change must be facilitated - it is not happening by itself - and offers a major opportunity for an extension initiative. The principal risk to such a venture is the effort now being made by government and some development partners to increase smallholder access to fertilizer through a variety of subsidies: again, it may be possible to apply a target or exclusion zone approach in order to test/develop an approach for wider application.
Given the significant pressures on natural resources in Malawi, timely and accurate national environment information is needed to improve natural resource management in Malawi. Environmental monitoring technologies such as GIS and remote sensing are considered to be key tools to provide such information to improve environmental management. A major component of MEMP’s activities over the past six years has been its involvement in the training of environmental monitoring technologies.
The objective of MEMP’s GIS training has been the sustainable development of human resources for environmental monitoring. Listed below are key characteristics of the approach used by MEMP for GIS training in Malawi towards developing self-sufficient in-country expertise for environmental monitoring.
To ensure the development of sustainable in-country expertise for environmental monitoring, MEMP has emphasized in-country trainings in GIS. Such GIS trainings under MEMP have included both in-country formal trainings (e.g. annual GIS training cycles and specialty GIS trainings) and one-on-one assistance to address specific institutional environmental monitoring needs (e.g. at the Department of Forestry and the Department of Surveys) [see section on "knowledge"]
Tiered annual training
An important characteristic of MEMP’s approach to developing sustainable in-country capacity for environmental monitoring has been its emphasis to conduct a tiered annual training program typically consisting of an introductory, intermediate, and advanced training. Such a tiered training has helped ensure that participants - over the span of one year - will be regularly trained and exposed to environmental monitoring technologies. Furthermore, such a tiered approach has allowed participants - during periods between trainings – to explore environmental monitoring applications in their own institutions. To date four annual tiered trainings have been conducted (see Final Report: Fundamentals of GIS and Remote Sensing Training Course, September 26 - October 7, 1996).
"Wall-of-lead"
It was recognized that developing sustainable in-country capacity for environmental monitoring would need to adequately consider the high turnover of staff in Malawi government agencies. MEMP’s approach to GIS training considered such a high turnover by emphasizing training a large number of individuals – otherwise referred to as the "Wall of lead" approach. The "Wall of Lead" approach to GIS training further helped assure that staff of various ranks were trained ranging from senior to technical officers. It has, for example, become clearly evident that senior staff who have followed the GIS training - while more involved in administrative issues rather than environmental monitoring- have given significant support to technical staff trained in GIS to conduct environmental monitoring.
Cross-sectoral training
Given the multifaceted nature of environmental issues, the GIS training program has emphasized training individuals from various institutions with a mandate to monitor certain aspects of the environment. Such a cross-sectoral emphasis has involved the training of environmental monitoring technologies to the Department of Surveys, Department of Forestry, Land Resources Conservation Branch, Meteorology, Department of Environment Affairs, and the University of Malawi (Polytechnic, Chancellor, and Bunda).
Training of trainers
Yet another important aspect of developing sustainable in-country capacity for environmental monitoring has been MEMP’s involvement in the training of trainers. During the last two annual tiered GIS training sequences (1996-1997 and 1997-1998) emphasis has been placed on the participation of UNIMA and other educational institutions. During the past two GIS training sequences (1996-1997 and 1997-1998), for example, almost half of the participants of the GIS training were from UNIMA and other educational institution. Furthermore, during the last GIS training sequence (1997-1998) five staff from UNIMA and the Land Husbandry Training Center – all of whom were trained in GIS during the previous training sequence (1996-1997) – instructed the majority of the GIS training sequence.
Follow-up training
Yet another characteristic of developing sustainable in-country expertise for environmental monitoring has been MEMP’s emphasis on follow-up training. Not only have formal trainings been conducted in GIS training (e.g. four sequences to date as indicated above) but additionally one-on-one assistance was provided to address specific institutional environmental monitoring needs. Follow-up training included assistance at the Department of Surveys to develop core digital environmental data sets, Department of Forestry to analyze land use and land cover, Land Resources and Conservation Department to monitor soil erosion and crop yield, Meteorology Department to develop dekadal and monthly rainfall maps, and UNIMA to integrate GIS in environmental research and university courses and curricula.
MEMP’s GIS training has yielded various accomplishments including: 1) the GIS trainings themselves; 2) the products that have been a direct result of the GIS trainings; and 3) possibly most important, an in-country expertise for environmental monitoring. Each of these accomplishments has been elaborated upon below.
GIS Training
MEMP’s GIS training component has resulted in four successful annual sequences of GIS training (1994 – 1995, 1995-1996, 1996-1997, and 1997-1998). Each of these annual GIS training sequences consisted of an introductory, intermediate, and advanced training. Approximately twenty participants participated in each of these annual training sequence.
MEMP’s GIS training effort has further resulted in the successful training of trainers during the last two past sequences in GIS training (1996-1997 and 1997-1998). Such training of trainers efforts have consisted of: 1) training staff from UNIMA and the Land Husbandry Training Center during two annual GIS training cycles (1996-1997 and 1997-1998) and 2) providing one-on-one assistance to UNIMA and Land Husbandry Training Center staff to instruct sessions during the 1997-1998 GIS training sequence – where the majority of the GIS training was conducted by Malawian trainers.
In addition to the formal GIS training annual sequence as described above, specialized GIS trainings were conducted under MEMP. These include a specialized training in database development, digitizing soil erosion using the Soil Loss Estimation Model for Southern Africa (SLEMSA), and land cover change and soil erosion analysis.
Furthermore, less formal follow-up trainings were conducted under MEMP. These included primarily one-on-one assistance to the Department of Surveys to develop core digital environmental data sets, Department of Forestry to analyze land cover and land use, Land Resources Conservation Branch to monitor soil erosion and crop yields, and the Meteorology Department to map rainfall.
Products
MEMP’s GIS trainings have resulted in the development of a number of environmental monitoring products. These include land use and land cover maps for the Shire watershed, soil erosion maps for the Shire watershed, monthly rainfall surface maps at the Meteorology Department, the digitizing of the Land Resources Evaluation Project (LREP) soils map at the Department of Surveys and Land Resources Conservation Department, and the digitizing of the national 1:50,000 and 1:250,000 map series at the Department of Surveys.
Expertise
Perhaps the most important accomplishment of MEMP’s GIS training component has been the development of a core group of dedicated and capable in-country environmental analysts for environmental monitoring. To date approximately eighty individuals have been trained. Of this group approximately one fourth were individuals from UNIMA and other educational institutions mandated to continue building capacity for environmental monitoring. Furthermore, five staff from UNIMA and the Land Resource Husbandry Training Center successfully instructed the majority of the 1997-1998 GIS training sequence (1997-1998) - staff that are fully capable of continuing training GIS professional to university-level courses.
As a result of MEMP’s GIS training efforts, there is significant evidence of indigenous demand for GIS/environmental analyses. To date such an indigenous demand has focussed primarily on sectoral applications of GIS. With increased coordination, it may be easily assumed that indigenous demand for cross-sectoral environmental analysis will increase. Impacts of MEMP’s GIS training efforts have been described below for various institutions including the Department of Surveys, Department of Forestry, Meteorology Department, Land Resources Conservation Department, and UNIMA.
Department of Surveys (DOS)
MEMP’s capacity building impacts at the DOS include:
GIS Training impacts at the Department of Forestry (DOF)
MEMP’s capacity building impacts at the DOF include:
GIS Training impacts at the Meteorology Department (MET)
MEMP’s capacity building impacts at the MET include:
GIS Training impacts at the Land Resources Conservation Department (LRCD)
MEMP’s capacity building impacts at LRCD include:
GIS Training impacts at UNIMA (Bunda, Chancellor, and the Polytechnic)
MEMP’s capacity building impacts at UNIMA include:
The impacts of the GIS training as described above are a testament that MEMP’s approach in emphasizing the development of sustainable in-country capacity in environmental monitoring has paid off. MEMP’s emphasis on in-country training, tiered trainings, "wall of lead" approach, cross-sectoral training, training of trainers, and follow-up training has yielded a core group of dedicated and capable in-country environmental analysts for environmental monitoring. Such environmental monitoring capacity has tremendous potential to further impact national natural resource management that may ultimately lead to improved environmental conditions in Malawi.
One of the foundation activities of MEMP was assistance in the development of a National Mapping Programme and associated Malawi Digital Spatial Data Standard (MDSDS). A National Mapping Programme consists of a set of procedures, standards and institutional arrangements that are designed to facilitate the development of interoperable digital map data across a group of participating national mapping agencies.
Through coordination on issues of resolution, storage formats, coding, documentation and data quality reporting, the output of a National Mapping Programme allows the use of digital map data from a group of participating agencies in a GIS environment. In this manner, analysts working on environmental issues can gain simple access to the necessary data sets from one or more agencies, import them into their GIS software system, and use them together within specified limits of accuracy and precision.
The key elements of a National Mapping Programme include:
Under the Arizona/Clark Cooperative Agreement, emphasis was placed on the first of these, as it provides the necessary foundation upon which agreements about procedures and distribution can be based.
The Malawi Digital Spatial Data Standard (MDSDS) specifies the procedures to be used in developing digital maps that are included within the National Mapping Programme. At present, a Provisional Version has been developed with the Department of Surveys, consisting of components which are general to the National Mapping Programme, and additional elements which are specific to the operational procedures of the Department of Surveys and the specific products they produce. However, two workshops were conducted in March, 1999, in which this document was presented to surveyors, cartographers and GIS analysts from a large group of mapping agencies within the Government of Malawi. While the intention of these workshops was only to elicit comments at this stage, it is envisioned that the general components would ultimately receive cross-agency ratification, with the subsequent development of specific procedures to be used by each participating agency in meeting these guidelines. Together, these documents would comprise the complete National Mapping Programme.
The General Components of the Malawi Digital Spatial Data Standard consist of:
The MDSDS Spatial Reference System Standard specifies the reference systems that should be used for all mapping within the National Mapping Program. In the Provisional Version 1.1 established by the Department of Surveys, three reference systems were established:
All three use the ARC1960 horizontal datum and the National Datum vertical datum. Key developments in this respect include a statement of the procedures to be used in converting map data to these systems, including the development of new Molodensky constants to be used in datum transformations.
The MalawiGP system is expected to be the basis for most mapping within the National Mapping Programme. It is the system currently being used for all topographic mapping, and conforms to the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) Zone 36, in use by several Southern Africa nations. It defines a single metric plane reference system for the entire country with error characteristics that do not exceed 1 part in 2500 (1:2500) with respect to discrepancies between this planar representation and the ARC1960 model of the spheroidal nature of the earth.
The MalawiLN and MalawiLS systems are to be used in municipal and local government applications where the 1:2500 error characteristics of MalawiGP are of insufficient precision to support cadastral, planning and engineering activities. These systems break the country into two zones with a boundary consisting of the northern borders of Ntcheu and Mangochi Districts. By doing so, it has been possible to create these two systems with error characteristics that do not exceed 1:10,000 for any part of the country.
The MDSDS Spatial Accuracy Reporting Standard specifies the procedures to be used in determining the spatial accuracy of digital map products. The specification is quite detailed, and considers the contributions to positional error from photo control, aerotriangulation, photogrammetric plotting, scribing, reprographic materials, printing registration, temperature and humidity effects on paper products, and the final digitizing process. In addition, consideration is given to issues of vertical accuracy arising from the digitizing of heights from map products.
Metadata (literally "data about data") refers to the documentation of map layers that should be included with all distributed spatial data in the National Mapping Programme. The MDSDS Metadata format consists of a ASCII text file with a specific structure of manditory and optional elements. The structure includes a wide variety of elements including specification of the attribution and lineage of data files, georeferencing, accuracy and precision, resampling parameters, and thematic completeness.
The MDSDS Spatial Data Transfer Standard recognizes three approved formats:
The agency-specific components of MDSDS consist of:
Examples of these elements as they apply to the Department of Surveys can be found in the MDSDS Provisional Version 1.1 draft.
Digital map tiles are the equivalent of map sheets – a logical segmentation of the land surface into manageable chunks. These will vary between agencies and may be based on administrative divisions (e.g., Districts) or rectangular divisions of map space. Note that quadrangles (rectangle-like divisions based on lines of latitude and longitude) should be avoided because of their non-linear borders and the subsequent difficulty that would arise in assembling them in a GIS environment.
Coding standards describe the entities that are encoded for each distributed map layer associated with an agency-specific map product, their means of graphic representation, and the specific coding schemes to be used in specifying their attributes. For example, a rivers layer specification might indicate that they are to be encoded as lines is the river if less than 100 meters wide, and as polygons for stretches with a width of 100 meters or more. Similarly it would indicate the numeric codes to be used for cases of permanent and intermittent streams. Also included with coding standards are the official spellings to be used for each entity type.
Quality Control Procedures are designed to ensure that digital map products meet the necessary requirements of completeness and structural integrity.
The Malawi Environmental Monitoring Program (MEMP) produced three major papers documenting environmental change as it relates to the impact of market liberalization on the environment. These papers are included in this document. The purpose of this section is to review the evolution of the MEMP program for the period of 1993 through 1999.
The Government of Malawi and USAID originally designed the MEMP to meet two perceived shortcomings in Malawi. First, although Malawi was considered a data rich country, little information existed in the form of reports which reflected the analysis and interpretation of existing data. Secondly, a negative determination resulting from an evaluation of the potential impacts of market liberalization required the development of monitoring and mitigation programs to address any negative impacts. The MEMP and the Malawi Agroforestry Extension (MAFE) programs were developed to meet these needs.
MEMP evolved from USAID's EMEMP process for environmental monitoring, evaluation, and mitigation plans of policy reform which have potential to adversely affect the environment. MEMP began during the 1993/94 growing season as the autocratic rule of the first thirty years of post independence government came to an end. During the five years of the activity, Malawi experienced a number of significant changes. The MEMP can be characterized as an evolutionary program that attempted to adapt to technical considerations as well as to the many institutional, political and social changes that occurred from 1994 through 1999. The following chronology briefing summarizes the evolution of the monitoring effort.
1991-2 Discussion between the Government of Malawi and USAID's REDSO office on developing a national monitoring program were conducted with USAID advisory staff from Nairobi. GoM proposed twenty large catchments using an off-site sampling system with flumes, similar to a recently completed cathcment comparison study conducted at the Bvumbwe Agriculture Research Station. Negotiations resulted in reducing the number of catchments to five and limiting their size to approximately 1,000 hectares.
1992 GoM held a workshop attended by most of the MEMP participating agencies including; Departments of Water, Forestry, Survyes, Land Resources and Conversation and Environmental Affairs. The Department of Wildlife and National Parks participated in the workshop but subsequently were not included or involved in the MEMP.
No report was produced from this workshop that could be used to document the catchment selection process. The catchments apparently were selected in an ad hoc manner using criteria that included; presence in one of five distinct agro-ecological zones, presence of smallholder burley farmers, presence of a perennial stream (one of the original catchments did not have a perennial stream), and the presence of smallholder burley farmers. In a separate document prepared in 1997, the Department of Environmental Affairs noted that issues of deforestation were not included in site selection, but exclusion of estates was.
1993 A design team from WRI, USAID, and Arizona prepared what was to become the working document for the MEMP program in April.
A technical advisor arrived in October. Initial discussions on the design of the program revealed that little attention had been paid to collection and analysis of social data. The Harvard Institute of International Development (HIID) proposed a graduate student to conduct surveys in the five catchments.
No monitoring equipment was delivered until the end of the 93/94 rainy season. Field work focused on development of based maps by the Department of Surveys, surveying and development of stream profiles by the Department of Water, preparation of landcover maps by the Land Resources and Conservation Department. Clark University began a series of trainings for the MEMP agencies in the use of geographic information systems for analysis.
1994 Video surveys were conducted in March. Technical problems resulting from equipment failure resulted in missing data for two catchments. Analysis of the data from the remaining catchments revealed areas of incomplete coverage and difficulties with geo-referencing.
The Department of Surveys was not able to produce cadastral maps of the small catchments. This problem required and the problems with the video equipment required modification of the landuse monitoring component and resulted in the consideration of a pilot area sampling frame to collect environmental data. (See the following section for a summary of the area sampling frame activity.)
The results of the social survey revealed very small numbers of smallholder farmers growing tobacco in the catchments. It was not possible to find any catchments with a large enough sample size to analyze data with any level of confidence. This finding resulted in another modification of the original design, incorporating both on-site sampling from field pits in farmers fields with the original design of off-site sampling at the catchments outlet.
1995 Release of NPA funds to support field activities was delayed resulting in problems with supervision of data collection during the first rainy season. It was only possible to assemble data from one catchment for the 1994/5 rainy season. Analysis of this data indicated problems with quality control, specifically with the collection of samples from farmers fields. There were also indications that the inclusion of on-site sampling was overwhelming laboratory capacity, resulting in long time delays. This problem was compounded by the failure to release NPA funds to cover laboratory analysis costs.
Examination of the photo interpretation to produce landcover maps revealed coarse classifications which when compared with the classification of SPOT satellite imagery for the same area, indicated that it would not be possible to compare landcover change with any level of confidence relying on air photo interpretation. Land cover change from market liberalization appeared to be impossible to quantify as originally proposed using aerial photo interpretation. It was hoped that the pilot area sampling frame would overcome this inadequacy.
1996 A proposal to extend the MEMP program and place it in USAID's new strategic objective for natural resources management under the NATURE program shifted the focus from market liberalization to a larger group of policy reform initiatives. To address the capacity constraint in data analysis and interpretation, an environmental science advisor was proposed as an addition to the technical assistance team.
Technical assistance was provided through WRI to assist in reviewing the current small catchment monitoring approach with recommendations for analysis and report production. Problems in assembling the data required from all the catchments continued to delay timely production of findings.
1997 An Environmental Science Advisor arrives and conducted a reconnaissance survey in February. Using the report of a previous technical advisor, recommendations were made to modify the small catchment monitoring to provide a more statistically robust design which could be used for monitoring soil erosion parameters.
1997/8 The Environmental Science Advisor using a Bunda College student provides necessary assistance to collect data from two catchments which is analyzed and reported on by one undergraduate student. GoM conducts a parallel data collection effort, but no data is analyzed until the arrival of a Malawian PhD candidate to assist the agencies.
1998/9 With the assistance of the PhD candidate, who focused his field work on one of the original MEMP catchments, a complete data set is completed for the growing season. Data samples are analyzed under the direct supervision of the candidate. Nearly all the analysis and interpretation is completed in one year.
USAID/Washington conducted an assessment of four EMEMP programs in Africa early in 1999 (Hecht, Marks). A number of options are described for assessing potential impact where it is difficult to anticipate impact in advance of implementation. These options include:
During the period of MEMP implementation in Malawi, the first four options were explored with the fifth option experimented with through proposals to link USAID's agri-business, agroforestry and monitoring programs. Mitigation without monitoring eventually appeared to be the undocumented choice of the Government's Environmental Affairs Department.
Of the six options, the first two presented the most tangible results in the form of documented reporting. The narrowly focused research in Nsipe EPA is included as part of this document. (See ENVIRONMENTAL REPORT: The Impact of Market Liberalization on the Malawian Environment and Papers Table of Contents for more on National EIS development). The in-depth research which initially relied on the perceived and articulated capacity of the governmental agencies, produced more timely results with the arrival of the Science Advisor who operated largely through the UNIMA system. It should be noted that the small grants research activity which was always a component of the MEMP, did not produce any results until the non project assistance funding mechanism was replaced through direct project assistance funding. Linking EIS development with monitoring was the specific intent of the development of an issues based information system which initially focused on the Middle Shire and potential problems with siltation of the country's power generation infrastructure.
As noted above in the MEMP section, the proposal for a pilot area sampling frame (ASF) evolved from the need to try to provide Malawi with a methodology to monitor environmental trends at a national level. The initial MEMP activity to sample from five small catchments could be viewed as a small sampling frame, which was always noted to not be representative of any particular variable. Ideally, the videography technology which was initially proposed, would be used in conjunction with an established sampling frame. In the absence of an existing frame and with the failure to map the small MEMP catchments, alternatives were sought which could be used to meet the needs of the country at a larger scale.
As many environmental variables are area based, a sampling frame based on area versus one based on population or households, should provide data to support an environmental monitoring program. Area or grid based analysis was to be supported through the large technology transfer component using GIS as an analytical tool.
Area sampling frames have been used in many parts of the world for agricultural surveys. There are fewer examples of their use for environmental surveys and even fewer examples of their use in conjunction with GIS technology or community based monitoring initiatives, both of which were being proposed as tools and methodologies in Malawi. As the Ministry of Agriculture had recently adopted a new household based sampling system, there was reluctance to consider the ASF for crop estimates. For these reasons, a pilot sampling frame focusing on environmental variables was proposed for just one of the eight agriculture districts in Malawi.
The pilot activity, while generating little information on environmental variables, generated considerable interest in area sampling frame methodologies, and over time with the results of the new agriculture surveys increasingly being questioned, the ASF was considered as an alternative for crop estimates in conjunction with environmental data collection. The initial activity which was supported through the cooperative agreement and USAID, was subsequently taken over by the World Bank with technical input from the FAO, and focused much more on agricultural data collection.
A separate report is included which summaries the pilot activity in Machinga ADD. Many of the constraints to the pilot activity are similar to those of the MEMP, being institutional in nature. It is notable that subsequent consultancies through the World Bank for the agriculture surveys, question the ability of the agencies to collect probability survey information on a sustainable basis at anything below the national level. The pilot activity revealed problems relating to supervision, administration and training of enumerators which suggest that major changes are necessary to 'fix' either the current or any future system. These changes were well beyond the scope of the MEMP as a capacity building program, as they entail major on-the-job training initiatives coupled with internal and external training courses.
At this time, area sampling frame methodologies are being considered as part of three options for improving surveys to the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation. These include:
This report is the result of a negative determination from the Initial Environmental Examination of USAID’s Agriculture Sector Assistance Project (ASAP) which among other policy reforms, provided the opportunity for smallholder farmers to enter directly into Malawi’s lucrative cash crop export sector. The report is specifically written to meet USAID’s environmental reporting requirements developed as part of USAID’s Environmental Monitoring, Evaluation and Mitigation Plans (EMEMP). The report and methodologies used to complete it reflect several efforts to assess the impact of policy reform that began in 1993 with an intensive study of water quality in small watersheds. The results of the earlier in-depth intensive data collection are reported on in a separate document recently completed by the Environmental Affairs Department.
Investigations for this report were carried out at a time when a number of changes, triggered by a set of macroeconomic policies, including the agricultural reform policy and other national events were starting to take effect. Key among them were the shift to multi-party democracy, the implementation of fiscal reform measures, and the removal of pricing subsidies. Each had different impacts but the central ones ranged from the collapse of the mechanisms for the enforcement of natural resource laws and regulations, the devaluation of the local currency, and the significant increases in the pricing of fertilizer. Many of these changes occurred in 1994 and resulted in a number of cross cutting environmental and social impacts which make the assessment of a single policy reform measure difficult to isolate and assess. In addition, environmental change, like else where in the world, is an ongoing process often accelerated by policy changes.
A number of the findings from this assessment are not only related to agriculture policy reform, but to the pursuit of improved environmental management through Malawi’s current cross-sectoral natural resource policy and legislative reforms under the NATURE program. These include the apparent lasting effects of Malawi’s political history resulting in low levels of community organization and a distinct lack of initiative on the part of some communities members and their leaders to seek local solutions to declining local and hinterland environmental conditions.
Executive Summary
The objective of the Public Lands Utilization Study (PLUS) was to provide biophysical data and social information on the status and use of publicly held lands. This information was to be provided to assist decision making within Malawi’s land policy reform programme.
For the purposes of this study, "public lands" were defined as protected areas (forest reserves, national parks, and wildlife reserves). However, spatial information was gathered on agricultural schemes occupying government land as well. The final products of PLUS include this report and a spatial, digital atlas; combined, these provide access to the information collected, the analyses of the data, and recommendations for policy makers.
PLUS was conducted in conjunction with utilization studies on Malawi’s two other major land tenure types: estate land (ELUS) and customary land (CLUS). Completed in June 1997 and February 1998, respectively, these studies shared with PLUS the common purpose of improving the base of information on land in Malawi. The studies ran parallel to the activities of the Land Policy Reform Commission (LRCP), appointed by the President as an independent body to assess public views on land issues and make land policy reform recommendations to the government. This combination of efforts affords policy makers the opportunity to assess public land policy within a broader land reform programme. The most consequential conclusion reached by PLUS suggests that changes in public land policy should not be made in isolation, but within a general land policy concurrently addressing public, estate, customary, and urban land.
Approach
The Lands Steering Committee requested that PLUS determine:
PLUS addressed these objectives on two levels. Data were captured for all of Malawi’s protected areas at the highest spatial scale possible (Level 1). In many instances the resolution of digital, national-level mapping data is currently not high enough to assess factors surrounding land use or the potential impacts associated with changes in land tenure. This necessitated a second analysis (Level 2) that integrated finer resolution spatial information with field-intensive site studies on selected tracts of public land and their adjacent communities. This focus permitted direct input from the Lands Steering Committee on site selection and emphasized the unique conditions of each protected area while permitting interpretations not possible at lower resolutions.
This approach differed from the global sampling strategy and the "efficiency of use" focus of ELUS and CLUS for several related reasons:
"Public Lands," with the notable exception of agricultural schemes, are judged to be unique. They were created to protect forest, water, and wildlife resources from the intensive use that would degrade or transform them. They exhibit great variety in inherent resources and in how those resources are used.
Changes in the allocation of Customary or Estate Lands would result in changes in tenure, and not necessarily changes in land use. Criteria for evaluating proposed changes might include consideration of efficiency or equity. With the exception of agricultural schemes, changes in the status of Public Lands involve changes in land use as well as tenure. Thus, evaluation criteria such as efficiency cannot be invoked without an understanding of the value of current uses.
If each reserve is unique in terms of its resource and value, then a "global" approach to evaluating them is not appropriate. Each public land must be evaluated in terms of the nature of its resource and the local environmental, economic, and social context in which it exists.
Summary of Results
On the national level, PLUS found that protected areas (forest reserves, national parks, and wildlife reserves) represent 20% of Malawi’s land area and serve a variety of functions, though catchment protection was critical for over 80% of this land. They also serve as the stock for over half the country’s woody resources. This is extremely important in Malawi, where fuelwood and charcoal represent the energy source for 98% of rural and 94% of urban fuel needs.
PLUS estimates that less than 10% of the land within protected areas is suitable for agriculture at an acceptable overall risk of erosion, though the study was constrained by low-resolution data for national soils, elevation, and slope. Population pressure on public land was greatest in the south and central regions, with population densities of almost 100 people per km2 in the 1987 census.
Population pressure in the northern region was much lower (1987 census estimates of 35 people/km2), though concentrations of around specific protected areas was very high. Projected population growth rates (3.2%) suggest that that the extreme theoretical case of immediately opening all of Malawi’s protected public land—regardless of suitability—would provide additional land for only 20 years, at the current average land holding size per family (1.0 hectares), with all other contributing factors remaining constant (population growth, yields, etc.).
Estimates indicate that forest decline in Malawi is progress at a rate of 3.5% per year. The results of change detection analysis on data provided by the Forestry Department indicate that between 1973 and 1991, 6% of the land in protected areas has experienced negative change.
The five protected areas ultimately selected for Level 2 analyses were Mulanje, Zomba-Malosa, and Dzalanyama Forest Reserves, Liwonde National Park, and Vwaza Wildlife Reserve. These proved to be quite different from one another in terms of primary and secondary use, agricultural suitability, erosion hazard, population pressure, ease of access, and change in land cover between 1984 and 1994. Suitability for agriculture ranged from less than 3% of the land area in Mulanje to 63% for Vwaza and 90% in Dzalanyama. After erosion hazard analysis results were incorporated to determine the risk of soil loss under traditional agricultural management practices, only 58% of Vwaza and 51% of Dzalanyama proved to be environmentally suitable.
Population pressure analysis of the five sites followed the national trends, ranging from very high around Mulanje in the southern region (25 people per hectare of protected land) to much lower around Vwaza in the northern region (less than 2 people per hectare of protected area). In national terms, this suggests that 19% of Mulanje’s land area is under pressure above the national average for protected areas while none land within Vwaza is under pressure in excess of the mean. The zones of higher pressure in a number of cases corresponded to concentrations of land cover change between 1984 and 1994 along protected area boundaries, though some areas under pressure were converted to forestry plantations during that period in Mulanje and Dzalanyama.
The range of figures presented above can be misleading if taken out of context. For example, Dzalanyama’s high level of "environmentally suitable" land addresses two factors of suitability: potential for crop growth and erosion hazard. Yet the rationale for protecting Dzalanyama Forest Reserve is based on other issues such as protecting over 30% of the Lilongwe water supply catchment area and an even greater percentage of the actual drinking water. Similarly, Vwaza and Liwonde provide habitat to fauna, which are irreplaceable and critical to the tourism industry, which is an important source of Malawi’s foreign currency.
Potential population pressure must also be considered in conjunction with these other factors. For example, lower population pressure near Vwaza does not necessarily mean lower demand for land. The advent of numerous tobacco estates has effectively decreased customary land availability to the point that there are limited land allocation options for local chiefs. This is a situation analogous to that faced in areas of much higher population density.
To introduce that important human component into the PLUS effort, a community-based study was carried out among the populations that abut the five protected areas. Following a multi-dimensional research methodology, a team of U.S. and Malawian researchers conducted rapid appraisals in 138 communities around the reserves, then designed and implemented a formal survey in 22 villages, interviewing over 550 households.
This component of the research addressed three fundamental questions: what is the socio-economic profile of the households surrounding the protected areas; what resources do they extract from the reserves and in what quantities; and what is the impact of reserve utilization on the well being of these households. With these goals in mind, the study identified the sources of income that make up the livelihood systems of these communities, quantified household income, then estimated poverty levels using a national per capita maize dietary standard as a proxy measure of the barest minimum level of survival.
The results unambiguously demonstrate the precarious livelihoods of the households in the study. Overall, nearly half the entire sample cannot meet the basic maize-based standard. The major factor determining this level of poverty is the lack of adequate agricultural land as well as the absence of non-agricultural employment opportunities. In those protected areas where the surrounding population pressure is highest and the land more scarce, poverty is clearly more extensive.
At the same time, the annual (1996) use of reserve resources was quantified for each household and expressed in terms of kilograms per capita. This estimate was then compared against a national measure based on per capita wood consumption (adjusted for non-wood resources). In this case, the majority of the population is situated well above the proxy standard, suggesting intensive use of the resource base. A distinction between household utilization and income-generating activities based on protected area resources as either inputs or outputs demonstrated that almost half the households not only consumed products from the reserves, but also gained income from this utilization.
To answer the third question, an estimate of the importance of reserve-based income was derived, and it demonstrated that the protected areas indirectly generated about one third of the total household income for those families using the resource. In effect, the community-based study clearly indicates that the income-earning potential from proximity to the protected areas makes a critical contribution to livelihood survival. At the same time, the local population resents the closure of the protected areas and the transaction costs associated with extraction. They expressed a clear desire for access to the agricultural lands within the boundaries, even though such access might easily compromise the natural resource endowment of the reserves.
These results provide an information base for decision-makers, but also highlight the fact that every decision is site-specific. In each case, site-specific expertise will be required to evaluate the available information while local representation of all interested parties will be paramount in reaching the consensus on tenure and management necessary for successful implementation.
The following recommendations represent a synthesis of data analysis, model results, and opinions expressed in surveyed villages as well as those from the debate on issues which took place during the PLUS Closing Seminar in November 1997. In cases where the individual views expressed in the field or during the debate did not reach consensus, we have attempted to include the differing perspectives. This effort to combine quantitative data analyses with qualitative perspectives underscored the quintessential need for decisions on changes in land tenure to be made by qualified representatives of all local and national stakeholders. Decisions made on study results alone will not incorporate the unique views of those who will ultimately be directly impacted. These recommendations and indeed the entire analysis of PLUS, have been greatly enhanced by national expertise provided by the Lands Steering Committee and by the local participation we received throughout Malawi.
All three utilization studies demonstrated the inter-dependence and conflict among sectors (public, estate, customary, and urban). Security of tenure, availability and access to resources and the potential to find alternatives to land-dependent income strategies are three examples of inter-dependence that cross tenure boundaries. A change in policy for one tenure type will impact each of the others. This necessitates a coordinated policy representing all stakeholders with mechanisms to address potential future changes in land tenure or use in an equally coordinated and representative fashion.
Land demand estimates suggest that converting "available suitable" land to agriculture from all sectors will provide at most, 20 years worth of land given current crop yields and population growth trends (and assuming a mean land holding size of 1.0 hectares per family). Increases in agricultural productivity or the prospect of agricultural expansion into marginal lands through the adoption of improved management techniques have resulted in limited increases in agricultural productivity during the past 15 years. Smallholder families, faced with shrinking per capita land holdings, require alternative income sources beyond their personal farms to meet the needs of their children in the future. PLUS socio-economic analyses showed that families faced with land shortages actually use public land resources to generate additional income (i.e. fuelwood, brooms, fruits, medicines, timber, charcoal, etc.).
To put this in perspective, note that public land (including agricultural schemes) represents 2.0 million hectares, or 21% of Malawi’s land area, while suitable customary land represents 4.3 million hectares, or 44%. CLUS II has found that 1.9 million hectares of customary land are currently under cultivation (including 266,000 ha unsuitable for agriculture), leaving 2.6 million suitable hectares theoretically "available" for cultivation – 1.3 times the total land in the public sector. It has been suggested that much of that "available" suitable customary land may be occupied by dwellings, urban expansion, and/or undocumented estates. Other portions may not yet be exploited due to limited access to drinking water, or they may be considered "long term fallow" due to loss of soil fertility in the past.
PLUS estimates that only 10% of the protected area land may be suitable for agriculture and even the most favorable estimates do not exceed 30%. Yet protected areas represent over half of Malawi’s national stock of natural resources, representing a major source of fuelwood. They serve other critical needs: protecting catchments to limit soil erosion, maintaining stable sources of drinking water (particularly for urban areas) and providing habitat for Malawi’s unique wildlife.
If 100% of Malawi’s protected areas (regardless of suitability for agriculture) were converted to agriculture, land demand estimates suggest population growth would exceed the expanded land base in less than 20 years. If such a change were made, valuable and often irreplaceable ecological resources would be lost and any recovery efforts would be costly and would take a considerable amount of time, if they were even possible. Topsoil losses and nutrient depletion are very difficult processes to reverse.
PLUS findings at the national level as well as for the five intensively studied reserves demonstrate how variable protected areas are in terms of their use and biophysical conditions, as well as population and political pressures. The framework for decision making provided by PLUS offers a suggested response mechanism to requests for change in tenure status of a given tract of land. Without question, some of the steps require time and resources, yet each step provides critical information that is needed for an informed decision. Each step insures stakeholder participation at the local and national level so that all those affected are part of the process and are involved in the solution. This involves costs; however, these potential costs are not greater than the costs of permanently lost resources where a decision was made with limited participation or inadequate information.
The demand for a blanket policy solution for all of Malawi’s protected areas at one time is based on the current, intense pressures on these reserves and parks. For a solution to be viable, particularly at the local level, policy decisions must be made based on all information currently available and on the basis of consensus of all interested parties. The policy should include provisions for addressing requests for change in land tenure on a case by case basis that incorporates participation by all local stakeholders and multi-sectoral expertise at the national level.
One of the highlights of the PLUS Closing Seminar was an intense debate over the "best use" for Malawi’s protected areas. The debate was heated, particularly in the beginning when opposing viewpoints supporting agricultural expansion and more stringent protection were raised. However, as the debate evolved, examples related to specific reserves or parks were put forward, and with each, information unique to the local situation had to be interjected in order to inform the discussion. It became clear that the choice between agriculture and protection was not the same for any of the examples. Moreover, those able to contribute to the discussion on a given example varied, either because they had local experience, or had expertise involved directly with a local issue (such as drinking water supply or plantation management).
During the presentation it was very clear that the extensive data collected for Mulanje, Zomba-Malosa, and Dzalanyama Forest Reserves, Liwonde National Park, and Vwaza Wildlife Reserve served as a foundation from which discussions among stakeholders – some with conflicting views – could begin to form decisions in a collaborative manner. The information informs the debate and allows it to be connected directly to the land, but should not—in isolation of stakeholders—direct policy or tenure decisions.
On the national level, PLUS has found that potential population pressure relative to proximity to public lands is highly variable. This is true not only between regions, but within them as well. Moreover, there is high variability in the total land area of each protected area and the corresponding population density. If the objective of opening up land to cultivation is to at least temporarily alleviate pressure for land, the costs of resettlement that may be required to move those in need of land must be included in the analysis.
Families adjacent to protected areas are faced with a quandary. They need land and that which is inside the protected area appears available. However, they also require the resources they obtain from that land, both for basic sustenance (fuel, medicine, hungry season foods, and sometimes even water) and for alternative income (they represent 30% of household income). Faced with a choice, most families would take the land over the resources, though with regret. A viable alternative would be a co-management situation where inhabitants of communities adjacent to protected areas could sustainably utilize reserve resources as well as a portion of the income generated by the official primary use, such as tourism or timber sales. The strategy would have to emphasize the importance of not letting incursions beyond sustainable use go unchecked by using access to proceeds from the protected area as an incentive. If the net benefit of such an arrangement exceeded the costs represented by their limited access to the protected land (i.e. foregone agriculture production or resource sales), the potential for success would be greater. If the costs of such an arrangement exceed potential income from the reserve and protection is still desired, other methods of compensation should be considered.
PLUS did not study management strategies on Malawi’s public lands. However, in virtually every village meeting and in most of the key respondent interviews, concerns were raised about the impacts of protection conducted solely through the policing by forest guards and scouts. The objectives behind the policing were generally understood and respected, but the need for resources and in some cases even land was viewed as great enough to warrant breaking the law. On the other hand, free access was also viewed as negative, particularly where over-exploitation of resources was already evident.
The desire to cooperate in protection efforts was much greater where line agency personnel had shifted from strict policing efforts to a combination of extension and enforcement, particularly in conjunction with a Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) program. Sharing access to, and benefits from, the resources encouraged participation in self-regulation of extraction. In Vwaza Wildlife Reserve, PLUS had the opportunity to compare attitudes in villages involved with a pilot CBNRM program to those from villages not yet involved. The greater the stake local communities had in the reserve and its proceeds, the more willing they were to establish self-enforcement and the better their attitudes were towards the agency responsible for protection.
Participants at the PLUS Closing Seminar raised the concern that current land policy and legislation did not incorporate traditional customary law and practices well enough to address current pressure for land, particularly within protected areas. Protected areas, as is the case for customary land, are often considered the land of all Malawians, and yet management and rules of access to protected areas are not currently an official part of the customary system of land allocation and management. While it was generally accepted that protected areas required different management, the general consensus was that excluding them from the customary system of land management enhanced the potential for conflict and reduced the chances for sustainable use.
In addition, it was also suggested that new strategies in natural resource management might fail if they were not developed in conjunction with agricultural policy. Particular examples given included efforts to promote burley tobacco production and the manipulation of input subsidies such as fertilizer prices without consideration of environmental or economic impacts, particularly in the long term. International market pressures were viewed by some as having the direct effect of boosting income, particular for medium income-level smallholders. However it also was suggested that it may have the indirect affect of increasing vulnerability at the household level (particularly among lower income smallholders) when those pressures encouraged cash crop rather than food crop cultivation.
Abrupt and substantial changes in subsidies for fertilizer left some families with soils depleted of organic-based nutrients due to previously promoted inorganic chemical fertilizers. These families were faced with inadequate income to cover the new costs due to decreased subsidies and virtually no transition time to return to green tillage and manure applications, strategies pursued in the past but which require several seasons to revitalize nutrient-depleted soils. These conflicts put further pressure on protected areas as a source of resources (i.e. poles for tobacco drying sheds, etc.) for cash crop production as well as sites for alternative land to those nutrient-depleted plots.
Participants also raised a word of caution: traditional land practices in the face of non-traditional population growth and changing market conditions do not lead to easy solutions, hence the recommendation that policy makers attempt to reconcile customary law and practices with contemporary conditions.
Both representatives of communities adjacent to protected areas as well as participants at the PLUS Closing Seminar acknowledged that there is some history of local management of natural resources, but much time has passed since those days. In the intervening period, rural population has grown while land and resources have become more difficult to obtain. It was proposed that education in natural resource management was necessary to combine the local knowledge of the land and resources and management practices of the past with today’s social, economic and environmental conditions. But at the same time, concern over the need for a similar education programme for forestry guards and parks and wildlife scouts would be crucial. It was expressed that local communities possessed the knowledge and abilities to conduct natural resource management, if they could be given the capacity to do so and could work side by side with the line agency personnel attempting to achieve the same goals. Both local and national representatives cautioned that such an effort would not succeed unless the real and perceived benefits of sustainable natural resource management outweighed the costs to local communities.
Malawi has more than 60 agricultural schemes, representing over 215,000 hectares of land. A number of these are being evaluated for privatization while others are being evaluated for the potential transfer of management to local cooperatives. Many are considered unproductive and a few are actually lying idle. Most schemes (other than some of the veterinary operations) lie on land suitable for agriculture and in many cases, are under cultivation or have been in the past. Their potential should be evaluated in the same manner as other government-owned entities that have been considered for privatization.
When MEMP’s activities began, the original intent was to monitor soil erosion in five small catchments. This included monitoring of both control plots (small fenced-in plots where conditions could be controlled) and farmer’s plots (pits to collect sediment loss from farmers’ fields where conditions were not controlled). However, preliminary results summarized by Bashir Imam suggested that questions remained in how to interpret results from these plots. The results could not be used to estimate soil loss hazard because prediction technology available did not consider the cultivation practices or climate in Malawi. In 1995, Dr. Donald Slack came to Malawi on a mission to provide advice on monitoring. A primary finding of this report was that efforts should be re-focused to improving the prediction technology through research.
One aspect of this shift in focus was to bring a research institution, the University of Malawi (UNIMA), into MEMP’s erosion assessment efforts. In particular, the MEMP Environmental Science Advisor, Dr. Yusuf Mohamoud, was placed at Bunda College of Agriculture. The refocused effort was summarized in: An Overview of the Malawi Environmental Monitoring Programmes’ Small Catchment Monitoring Component with Recommendations to Meet Malawi’s National Environmental Monitoring Requirements. In his first year of research, he focussed his efforts on two of the small watersheds, Kamundi and Chilindamaji in order to improve the effect of cover and Malawi cropping patterns in the Soil Loss Estimation Model for Southern Africa (SLEMSA; Elwell, 1978). Furthermore, two students from Bunda College were stationed at the watersheds to collect data. One of these resulted in a thesis on use of the SLEMSA model on the Kamundi catchment (Mughogho, 1998).
Furthermore, Dr. Mohamoud used the data from the small plot study to develop a rapid assessment technique: Development of a Rapid Assessment and Monitoring Technique for Soil Erosion in Malawi Based on Analysis of the Occurrence of Broken Ridges. In addition, Dr. Mohamoud used available remote sensing and runoff data to make a preliminary assessment of how historical remote sensing data might be used to assess long term trends in erosion: Large Catchment Study.
To further develop the institutional capacity of UNIMA to research erosion hazard assessment, four researchers from the UNIMA system came to the University of Arizona for a participatory training in soil erosion research methods. The focus of this training was how to improve soil erosion hazard assessment using remote sensing and GIS, especially in application of the SLEMSA. The result of this training was a summary paper describing the current status of research: Recommendations for Future Research to Support Erosion Hazard Assessment in Malawi. Furthermore, the first portion of the necessary research was summarized in a research proposal: Proposal for Research to Support Erosion Hazard Assessment in Malawi.
Elwell, H.A. 1978. Soil Loss Estimation Model for Southern Africa, Compiled Report of the Multidisciplinary Team on Soil Loss Estimation, Rhodesia.
Mughogho, M.A. 1998. Evaluation of the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) and the Soil Loss Estimation Model for Southern Africa (SLEMSA) Under Malawai Conditions: A Case Study of Kamundi Catchment Near Mangochi, Unpublished B.S. Thesis, Bunda Collge of Agriculture, University of Malawi
The objective of MEMP’s technology transfer program was to strengthen environmental monitoring capacities through the introduction and use of new geographic technologies. Technologies such as geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, and global positioning systems (GPS), can significantly increase productivity and efficiency by supplying timely and relevant information to environmental decision makers.
The six years the cooperative agreement has been involved in this process has afforded a unique insight into the transfer of these technologies. We have learned some valuable lessons which will be articulated here. For more detail on the development of the technology transfer methodology and the challenges that were faced over the years, please refer to the accompanying trip reports.
The dominant perspective for the technology transfer component is that it must be demand driven and not technology driven. It is perhaps unfortunate that we use the term technology to refer to GIS and related environmental information technologies since it too easily conveys the notion of some thing that can be acquired. While there certainly are physical components to these technologies (such as hardware and software), the mere possession of a GIS does not imply that one can use a GIS, nor that one can produce useful products. There is a process of learning and adaptation that is, to many, surprisingly long. GIS is foremost a way of thinking, and for an individual, the route to full productivity can take years. For an organization, however, the process is even longer. This certainly dictates that the route to full implementation lies beyond the scope of the typical donor-funded project. Thus, we steered away from the concept of acquisition to the process of implementation.
All too often technology transfer programs are developed with an overwhelming, and at times, exclusive emphasis on the technology being adopted rather than the needs of the individuals and institutions implementing the technologies. Our perspective focused on the appropriate use of these new technologies within a Malawi context, i.e., the ability of the GOM to absorb and utilize these technologies on a recurrent basis. Thus, an overwhelming emphasis was placed on in-country training programs that included training in technique and application development and research. In the end, over 80 GOM and UNIMA individuals completed training in geographic technologies with key organizations such as DOS, LRCB, and DOF engaged in routine GIS analysis. Also, several specialty application oriented trainings were developed to meet specific Malawi environmental monitoring needs. These included developing digital data standards, erosion modeling, and map production (see GIS Training section above).
Not all expectations were met and the lessons learned and the challenges that were confronted while working along side our Malawian counterparts are many. An initial assessment of these lessons were detailed in a report to USAID in 1996. A few of the important ones are mentioned here.
Foremost, a strength of this program has been the opportunity to engage in the process of technology transfer rather than simply technology acquisition. Unlike most development projects, the six year MEMP program allowed for a continual reworking of the technology transfer program. The implementation of GIS technologies demand a long-term commitment to both properly train those using the techniques and to adequately involve the end-users of information for which the technology produces. An important challenge to be overcome is to get those involved to recognize that what is being transferred is a process, not merely the acquisition of equipment and techniques.
Although this project has set in place a firm technical foundation in which the technology can be used within the GOM, primarily at the senior technical staff level, we have not adequately involved the highest levels of GOM officials. This level of involvement is crucial if new technologies are to be sustainable and if information is to be developed that addresses the need’s of decision maker. Developing a national-level information system for gathering, processing, analyzing and reporting environmental information, has proved to be a formidable coordination task at all levels. For a variety of reasons, the Environmental Affairs Department (EAD) has been unable to serve this function. The current configuration is not viable and an alternative must be found. Without a body or commission to support the use of these new technologies, a wider diffusion of the technologies will not be possible. Instead, the use of GIS will remain isolated within the few agencies.
To be fair, it was also assumed at the start of this program that the GOM had individuals with the right scientific and research backgrounds in which to take advantage of these new technologies. It was quickly learned that these skills are seriously deficient in Malawi at most levels, within and outside the GOM. An attempt was made to address this issue through the involvement of UNIMA. Many lecturers have now been trained as trainers of GIS, and a few are incorporating these techniques into their curriculum. But this is a long-term process and will need much attention to properly train those coming out of the UNIMA system to be the kind of scientists and researchers who can take proper advantage of these new technologies. As a result of these deficiencies, the transfer process is projected to take even longer than expected, but it is a barrier that can be overcome, and has in limited cases.
What was also unexpected was the state at which the GOM is in. The GOM is undergoing a significant economic crisis and this is reflected in the almost subsistence-like economy practiced by government officers. Wages are extremely low, and as a result, professional government staff at all levels take advantage of any opportunity to supplement their income. The primary means has been through attendance at donor-sponsored workshops and training courses, where per diem allowances are comparatively substantial. In most cases attendees can make the equivalent of one or two months salary in only a few days. Thus government officers are unlikely to turn down such opportunities whether or not their attendance is justifiable. In essence, virtually the entire civil service is on a subsistence economy in which wages are gathered from a spectrum of donor activities resulting in a stifling effect on the government's regular duties. It is not uncommon to find civil servants being absent from their regular duties for weeks at a time.
Living at the subsistence level has also seen its effects on the general health of government staff and on their stability, both important issues to be overcome by the GOM for the long-term viability of technology adoption. In regards to staff stability, given the need for technical expertise to perform in the area of environmental management, and consequent educational requirements, there is a very strong tendency for personnel with higher levels of education to go through an almost continuous process of promotion and job change. This has had a significant impact on the stability of environmental initiatives. It was thus anticipated that our efforts at training staff would only exacerbate this process and that our concept of a stable core team might be in jeopardy.
Clearly it was unrealistic to expect that anything other than a general improvement of the educational base could change this situation. Thus, our short-term solution was simply to train a larger number of individuals than might have ordinarily been required to form an initial core team within each agency, in the hope that those left behind would be adequately prepared to carry on the task, while those that percolated up could provide high-level political support at a later stage (see the discussion on the "wall-of-lead" approach in the GIS Training).
It is important to point out that a lack of donor coordination also has significantly hindered the transfer of technologies, especially in the beginning stages of the project. Not only are donors competing for products, many are also competing for the limited trained staff that are available within the government. In the latter stages of the project, an important collaboration was made with the World Bank who supplied additional in-country funding for MEMP related data development activities. However, this has been an exception as most donors are often in competition for the scarce skilled human resources currently available.
Ultimately, technology shapes almost all aspects of how things are done in an organization, not just what is done. Thus, implementation of GIS -- like any other technology -- is not just hardware and software procurement, but ultimately adoption of a process that results in the technology becoming a functional part of the organization. Many, if not all the challenges faced through the adoption of new technologies can be overcome if addressed in this way. DOS is a shining example as shown in the Impact Indicators section in the GIS Training section.
The prototype EIS on the Middle Shire used a learning approach towards further developing a National EIS. The prototype EIS strategy was designed to: 1) produce different outputs in a relatively short time period for an area of national interest (e.g. the Shire); 2) provide answers to questions of national importance (e.g. siltation in the Shire); and 3) to bring together major information producers, information consumers, and decision makers.
In order to replicate the analyses found in the Middle Shire for other national inquiries, four areas of a National EIS (NEIS) need to be addressed: 1) development of a national-level environmental data infrastructure, 2) environmental analysis, 3) decision support, and 4) EIS oversight. Recommendations based on the Prototype EIS will be made with respect to each of these EIS components.
The development of an in-country national environmental data infrastructure entails the routine collection of core national environmental data sets. It is important that such environmental data sets are managed adequately to ensure that they are easily retrievable and interoperable as national environmental concerns arise. The ability to supply environmental data from a variety of sources is facilitated through the development of data standards and an environmental data infrastructure that allows for proper archiving and regulated accessibility. This ensures that environmental data used for environmental decision making is of the highest accuracy and integrity.
The prototype EIS relied on an EIS task force with members from various institutions to obtain environmental data. These institutions included the Department of Surveys, Department of Forestry, Meteorology Department, and Land Resources Conservation Department.
An important component of a sustainable National EIS is multidisciplinary environmental analysis to routinely address national environmental concerns as they arise. Such environmental analysis may be conducted to help identify environmental "hot spots" (e.g., as done in the Middle Shire assessment) or to carry out elaborate analyses within specific areas of environmental concern. Highly trained technical staff are required to conduct routine multidisciplinary environmental analysis. Such multidisciplinary analysis may span biophysical and social explanations of environmental change and result in recommendations on mitigation strategies as needed by environmental decision makers/information users.
The prototype EIS emphasized the analysis of land cover change and soil erosion generally for the Shire watershed and more specifically within "hot spots" microwatersheds such as the Lisungwi, Rivi-Rivi, and Lisanjali. The prototype EIS relied on a task force with members of various institutions to conduct environmental analyses about the Shire. This included the participation of the Department of Surveys, Department of Forestry, Meteorology Department, Land Resources Conservation Department, and Department of Environmental Affairs.
An EIS is intended solely for the support of environmental decision making and to improve environmental conditions and management. It is critical that environmental information users and providers are adequately linked such that: 1) environmental information is collected with respect to user demands; 2) environmental information is adequately disseminated to all relevant environmental decision makers and stakeholders; and 3) adequate support is given for environmental information usage (e.g. through policy and extension). An EIS needs to accomplish these tasks on a routine basis.
The prototype EIS emphasized dissemination of information to a wide range of environmental information users including ESCOM, SUCOMA, and various NGOs and GOM institutions. The prototype EIS further conducted a needs assessment to gain a better understanding of user needs specifically for the Shire and more generally nation-wide.
This is the most important component of an EIS. An effective EIS implies that all activities are coordinated and integrated. EIS oversight requires that a committee/forum/institution is mandated to oversee and coordinate activities such that: 1) environmental data are routinely collected according to standards and user demand within respective institutions; 2) environmental analysis draws from multidisciplinary expertise and is routinely conducted to satisfy user demands; 3) environmental information needs are routinely assessed and information routinely disseminated, and 4) environmental support are routinely reviewed to encourage environmental information usage (e.g., review of extension, environmental support funds, and policy). Perhaps one of the most important task of EIS oversight is to ensure the development of a long term EIS strategy that adequately addresses the sustainable development of a national-level environmental data infrastructure, information analysis, and decision support.
Oversight to develop the prototype EIS was primarily provided by an EIS task force leader with technical assistance from Clark University and the University of Arizona. Preliminary discussions were held on determining more sustainable in-country EIS oversight. It was proposed that an EIS oversight committee consisting of members from different agencies further provide oversight to the development of a NEIS. Final approval of this committee is pending.