Authors

Colin J. Courtney Mustaphi^*1,2, Rebecca Kariuki³, Linus Munishi⁴, Anna Shoemaker⁵, Claudia Capitani⁶, Thomas J. Biginagwa⁷, Peter Mwangi⁸, Pamela Ochungo⁹, Stefania Merlo⁷, Simone Markoff^1,7,10, Sandra O. Brugger^1,11, Anneli Ekblom¹², Paul Lane^7,13, Rob Marchant⁶

 

*Presenter

¹Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Basel, Switzerland

²Center for Water Infrastructure and Sustainable Energy (WISE) Futures, Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology, Tanzania

³School of Sustainability, College of Global Futures, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

⁴School of Life Sciences and Bioengineering (LiSBE), Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology, Tanzania

⁵Independent researcher

⁶York Institute for Tropical Ecosystems, Department of Geography and Environment, University of York, United Kingdom

⁷McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

⁸Independent researcher

⁹MAEASaM Project, British Institute in Eastern Africa, Nairobi, Kenya. https://maeasam.org/

¹⁰Department of Economics, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

¹¹Laboratory of Environmental Chemistry, Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland

¹²Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

¹³School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

Abstract

The Adaptation & Resilience to Climate Change project¹ draws together several scientific approaches that includes, archaeology, palaeoecology, remote sensing, social sciences and numerical modelling, to study socio-ecological changes during the later Holocene across southern Kenya and northern Tanzania (Courtney Mustaphi et al., 2019, 2021a; Scaini et al., 2024). The multidisciplinary project has nested temporal scales that focus on the past few millennia, centuries and lived decades as context for scenarios of potential future changes into future decades (Kariuki et al., 2021; 2022). Our aims of this presentation are to provide a synthesis of the main results and insights arising from the work undertaken to date since 2017, and to summarise the methods used and the challenges associated with their integration. We will also discuss how data of past environments and histories of land use have been deployed for modelling potential future scenarios and trajectories of socio-ecological change.

The Kenya–Tanzania borderlands cover several ecosystem gradients from the Lake Victoria shoreline areas, wooded and grassland savannahs of the Greater Serengeti Ecosystem, shrubby woodlands, and intermittent highland and montane forests; such as Ngorongoro and Kilimanjaro. Environmental changes across the region have been characterised at millennial-to-centennial scales through paleoenvironmental and archaeological research (Westerberg et al., 2010; Marchant et al., 2018). Paleoenvironmental research has shown millennial-scale variability in hydroclimate (Marchant et al., 2007; Verschuren et al., 2009; Tierney et al., 2011: Loomis et al., 2017), vegetation (Kendall, 1969; Githumbi et al., 2018; van der Plas et al., 2021) and fire patterns (Courtney Mustaphi et al., 2021b,c; Temoltzin-Loranca et al., 2023). Archaeological and historical data indicate that livelihood and land use strategies have changed throughout the Holocene across eastern Africa, including our study area. Livelood strategies have included foraging, extensive and intensive agriculture, smallholder farming, pastoralism, agroforestry, commercial agriculture, and market gardening (Koponen, 1988; Robertshaw et al., 1990; Shetler, 2007; Prendergast et al., 2014; Iles, 2016; Lane, 2016; Tryon et al., 2016; Marshall et al., 2018).

A stakeholder led scenario modelling approach, named “Kesho”, meaning “tomorrow” in KiSwahili, captured some local perspectives of past-present-future environmental changes across the region. The analysis of these discourses develop an understanding of how the socio-ecological systems and associated land uses evolved and may continue to change under alternative pathways during future decades (Capitani et al., 2016). Multi-stakeholder scenario-building workshops from several locations, including the Greater Serengeti Ecosystem, Ngorongoro highlands, and Amboseli plains were undertaken during 2018–2021. The workshops explored the causes and consequences land use changes of the recent past to present time and discussions of the main potential drivers of future land use change to co-develop alternate scenario narratives for future land use. Qualitative and semiquantitative scenario data collected through workshop exercises were integrated with scientific environmental and socio-economic data, climate, land use suitability, projected land demand, and demographic (census) data in spatially explicit models (R and ArcGIS) to generate future projections of land use and land cover changes (Capitani et al., 2016; Kariuki et al., 2021). The output projections identified areas likely to experience deforestation, agricultural expansion, and encroachment and the implications of these changes on biodiversity and rural livelihoods. The outputs highlight that climate change impacts, population growth, infrastructural development, and the tourism and agricultural economy are anticipated to be the main drivers of future land use and land cover changes at the borderland region (Kariuki et al., 2021; 2022). Multistakeholder questionnaires, interviews, and workshops are also used to elucidate perspectives on drivers of land use change and synergies and tradeoffs between agricultural development and biodiversity conservation pathways (Markoff et al., 2023) and such semiquantitative results are used in Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models to simulate the impact on the economy of potential future scenarios at national to global scales (Delzeit et al. 2018). The modelled future land use change scenarios are presented on maps that are then useful in dialogues around decisions and consensus about sustainable land and resource management in multifunctional landscapes (Capitani et al 2019; Kariuki et al., 2021; 2022).

Historical records, observational data, ecological and social surveys, and satellite monitoring have characterised some aspects of environmental changes over the past century (Dublin et al., 1990; Dublin, 1991; Estes et al., 2012; Reid, 2012; Veldhius et al., 2019) and can be combined with paleoenvironmental and archaeological evidence to envisage future potential land use transitions (Magliocca et al., 2018; Aleman et al., 2018; Kariuki et al., 2022). Spatial and ecosystem knowledge gaps remain and few records of the past few centuries exist that show more local changes at high temporal resolution. New data that characterise patterns of longer term processes for modelling the evolution of socio-ecological systems over the past few centuries are required to clarify pre-colonial, colonial, and recent socio-ecological changes and long-term ecologies. Remote sensing products imaged by satellites have also been used as a basis to derive land cover and land use maps at finer spatial scales. The spatial classifications generated require ground truthing fieldwork to develop improved classification models with Random Forest machine learning algorithms (Mwangi et al., 2024). Further fieldwork to assess the validation of the outputs helps enhance these models. Integrated approaches that pull together a combination of paleoenvironmental research, archaeology, archives, oral histories, anthropological data, remote sensing, and computational numerical methods, characterise landscapes and how socio-ecological systems have varied through time (Gillson and Marchant, 2014; Courtney-Mustaphi et al., 2019; Boivin and Crowther, 2021). These scientific data of past changes and important environmental and societal drivers of landscape change build useful resources for dialogue on environmental resource management and inform pathways to desirable and sustainable future changes. This study demonstrates the potential, challenges, and utility of the integration of multidisciplinary research at multiple spatial and temporal scales to develop retrospective scenarios of socio-ecological snapshots and multistakeholder perspectives on future changes in the coming decades (Scaini et al., 2024).

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