PANGANI BASIN WATER BOARD

On Mt. Meru, the problems facing the forests are similar to those threatening Mt. Kilimanjaro, and are as
follows (Bwoyo, pers. comm.):
• Illegal cutting – the mountain’s forests are usually exploited for commercially attractive juniper
and Olea capensis trees.
• Grazing – in the dry season, adjacent communities graze their livestock inside the forest.
• Land scarcity – on the eastern side of the mountain, encroachment is an increasingly serious
problem.
• Lack of support – in some villages, the Catchment Forest Project (CFP – described below) gets little
support from village leaders, some of whom are personally involved in harvesting the forest.
• Fire – this was a particularly serious problem between 1998 and 1999.
• Funding – the CFP obtains virtually no money for its operational activities from the government.
Bwoyo (pers. comm.) argues that because of the vital role played by forests in the PRB, funds
should be invested in the CFP by power generating interests or the Pangani Basin Water Office
(PBWO) (see also Evans, 1997).
Box 4: Threats to the PRB’s forests
• Demand for land: as population densities rise and rural economies remain poor, the demand
for agricultural land increases and, hence, forests are felled to make way for these.
• Demand for timber: many of the remaining forests within the PRB contain economically
valuable timber species, which, as they become scarcer, attract higher prices. Timber is also
felled for firewood and for charcoal manufacture.
• Demand for pasture: livestock populations within the Basin appear to be on the increase.
As agricultural land increases in area, grazing land decreases, and herders mount forest
incursions to seek pasture.
• Forest settlement: as communities seek to extend their agricultural and grazing land, so too
they settle within forest boundaries.
• Weak regulation: despite the reserve status of many of the Basins forests, the authorities
cannot implement the restrictions that this implies because of low staffing levels, poor pay
and corruption. In addition, the Forestry and Bee Keeping Division’s Catchment Forest Project
is funded almost entirely by donors, giving rise to questions about its sustainability. Finally,
community involvement in the management of the basin’s forests is nascent and, at present,
largely ineffective.
• Forestry development: the development of plantation forest at the expense of indigenous forest
gives rise to conservation concerns.
• Forest fragmentation: as pressure mounts on the Basin’s forests they often become fragmented.
Many forest species are unwilling to cross over forest gaps, giving rise to biodiversity
conservation concerns.
• Fire: typically started by humans either deliberately (so as to destroy forest regarded as unfairly
protected and closed to human exploitation) or, more typically, accidentally (from, for example,
accidents during charcoal burning or ‘smoking-out’ bees from hives.
14