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Eastern Arc Mountains Forests of Tanzania
Eastern Arc Mountains World Heritage
Nomination Process
The Eastern Arc Mountains are known to biologists and conservationists as one of the world’s most important
areas for biodiversity. This importance was first recognised by work undertaken in the 1970s (White 1983), and in
the pioneering work on the identification of global biodiversity hotspots (Myers, 1990). Based on systematic
analyses of available species data, the importance of the Eastern Arc Mountains has been recognised in the
following analyses of global biological priority:
� Global 200 Ecoregion (WWF: Olson and Dinerstein 1998);
� part of a global biodiversity hotspot (Conservation International: Mittermeier et al., 1998; 2004); and
� part of an Endemic Bird Area (BirdLife International: ICBP 1992; Stattersfield et al., 1998).
However, despite this importance the area is yet to be recognized internationally through its inscription as a
natural property on the World Heritage List. This was first noted at the 1997 Eastern Arc Mountains Conference
held in Morogoro, Tanzania, organized by the Tanzania Forestry Research Institute (Burgess et al. 1998). A
conclusion of that meeting was that the Eastern Arc Mountains would be a suitable candidate for a serial
nomination, perhaps similar to the Australian Wet Tropics World Heritage property (Lovett 1998). The lack of a
suitable World Heritage Site in the Eastern Arc was also noted in the UNEP-WCMC global review of the
biodiversity coverage of World Heritage Sites (Magin and Chape 2004). The approach for developing an Eastern
Arc Mountains World Heritage Site needed to address the geographical isolation of the 13 mountain blocks, the
fragmentation of the forest within the respective blocks, and identify the most important sites to include within the
property.
After the Eastern Arc conference of 1997, the Forestry and Beekeeping Division (FBD) and UNDP-GEF
developed a conservation project for the Eastern Arc Mountains that included the successful serial nomination of
the Eastern Arc Mountains for inscription on the World Heritage List as a primary output. The resulting
FBD/UNDP-GEF Project, ‘Conservation and Management of the Eastern Arc Mountain Forests’, was started in
2003 and has run until 2010. The Project provided the funding to facilitate the process of developing the
nomination of the Eastern Arc World Heritage property. From 2004 to 2009 the process focused on working
within the national and local government systems to explain the World Heritage concept and gain support from
the 5 regions and 15 districts that cover the Eastern Arc Mountains, and the support of the Forestry and
Beekeeping Division and the Department of Antiquities, both within the Ministry of Natural Resources and
Tourism.
During 2004-2009 considerable efforts were also made to promote biological study of the Eastern Arc Mountains
through funding provided by the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (established by a number of donors),
UNDP-GEF and others. Support was also provided to compile all available records of species within Eastern Arc
Mountain blocks using a Geographic Information System, enabling species’ distributions to be mapped. By the
end of 2009 detailed databases had been compiled for birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians.
In 2009 UNESCO provided a World Heritage preparatory grant for technical assistance in the preparation of the
nomination dossier, and for hosting a stakeholders meeting in December 2009 when the final steps of the
nomination process were debated and agreed, with particular attention focused on the selection of sites for
including in the serial nomination.
After the meeting in December 2009 the consultant team, and a group of international scientists, updated the
available data on species values for every site in the Eastern Arc (see acknowledgements). This process
allowed a full and transparent justification of the Outstanding Universal Values of the entire Eastern Arc, in terms
of the mountain blocks within the Eastern Arc and the individual sites (mainly protected areas) within each block.
This work resulted in a series of moderately comprehensive databases that cover all the animal and plant values
Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism