Sustainable land management in practice in the Kagera Basin: Lessons learned for scaling up at landscape level
This book (PDF) from FAO provides insights into sustainable land management in the Kagera Basin, shared by Burundi, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Uganda. It showcases how land degradation can be successfully challenged and climate change can be coped with through sustainable landscape planning and management. The book presents the results of the five-year Transboundary Agro-ecosystem Management Project for the Kagera River Basin. The project starts from the idea that knowledge is a basis for sustainable development, but successful implementation depends on understanding what works in the field and where to improve lives and the environment. In the Kagera basin, smallholder farmers depend almost entirely on natural resources for their livelihoods: besides growing crops they are also livestock keepers and, may also supplement their diet through fishing and gathering wild products. The project used an integrated ecosystems approach to managing land resources at landscape scale, backed up by learning through Farmer Field Schools and catchment committees and plans. The process empowered land users to combine locally adapted practices and plan and manage their territories to achieve local benefits and a range of improved ecosystem services. The results show that sustainable land management techniques do have multiple benefits. When carried out at scale across the globe, these techniques can secure viable livelihoods for rural communities while restoring the resource base for future generations.