Rob McInnes, together with colleagues from the Ramsar Secretariat, the African Wildlife Foundation and an expert in natural resource management and sustainable development in East Africa, conducted a Ramsar Advisory Mission (RAM) to the Kilombero Valley Ramsar Site (KVRS) in Tanzania (6-8 November 2016). The floodplain wetland system used to cover more than 7,000km2 but in recent years has been subject to wide scale degradation, including excessive cattle grazing, unregulated irrigation and water abstraction, slash and burn agriculture, intensification of cultivation practices and upstream hydrological changes associated catchment land use modification and hydropower.
Working in close collaboration with the Belgian Development Agency (BTC) through the KILORWEMP project and the Wildlife Division of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism, the RAM team conducted aerial surveys of the KVRS, interviews with village leaders in and around the wetland, consultations with other government officials and agencies and facilitated a workshop to both understand better the issues at hand and to develop potential solutions in order to stem the rapid and concerning loss and degradation of this critically important wetland system.
The RAM report is due for production and release in January 2017.
Thanks for this Rob