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Catchment forests occupy a total of 2.8 million hectares in Tanzania. This is about 8% of the
total forested land in Tanzania. While catchment forests offer both direct tangible benefits
and indirect benefits of which some are perceived as environmental services, they are
threatened by prevailing high rate of deforestation and general degradation. Traditionally the
management of catchment forests focused on expanding the area under state tenure by
excluding local communities. This approach has resulted in greater forest degradation as a
result of increasing demand for forest products by local communities due to population
increase and lack of alternative sources of income. Inadequate government resources in terms
of manpower and funding to effectively manage catchments forests and other forests also
contributed to the failure. This reason and others have led to the emergence of Participatory
Forest Management (PFM) in its varying facets reflecting varying degrees of involvement of
local communities in the management of forest resources. PFM has two main scenarios in
Tanzania, Joint Forest Management (JFM) where by villagers and the government jointly
manages the forest, and Community Based Forest Management (CBFM) whereby
management of the forest is vested wholly in the hands of the local communities. JFM is
adopted in catchment forests because of their sensitive nature. The total forest area which is
under PFM or is in the process of changing is 2,975,919 ha of which 1,890,613 ha are under
JFM.
The last decade has witnessed an overwhelming popularity of PFM in most developing
countries with varying levels of success. A well managed catchment forest normally benefits
a wide range of stakeholders, normally far away from the forest in the form of water for
domestic use, hydroelectricity, tourism and carbon sequestration among others. It is logical
that these stakeholders should pay for the outcomes of good forest management as incentives
to the managers, the local communities. In a study carried out with respect to catchment
forest reserves in Tanga, Morogoro, Arusha and Kilimanjaro regions the actual Total
Economic Value (TEV) of the forests was rated at USD 496 million per year. A fraction of
this value should be ploughed back to the local communities as payment for environmental
services. Various benefit sharing mechanisms have been explored in this paper as incentives
for improved forest management. |
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