Munyaga River Corridor Restoration
The Bwindi Impenetrable National Park is a critical watershed system for the entire Kigezi region of southwestern Uganda and large areas in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It is part of the western rift valley that marks the watershed boundary between the River Nile and River Congo basins. Three major rivers (Munyaga, Ntengyeri and Ruboroga) flow northwards through Kayonza Sub-county, where Mukono Parish is part, and join River Ishasha to mark the Uganda-DRC border, run through the Queen Elizabeth National Park, and drain into Lake Edward (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Map of the key river systems in Bwindi INP
The Munyaga River Ecosystem
The Munyaga River and its major tributaries constitute an estimated total length of 130 Km; equally split between Uganda and DRC. The Uganda portion has about 13 Km inside the Bwindi INP, 13 Km in Mukono Parish; 30 Km in Kyeshero Parish and 8 Km in Butogota TC. The river and the related ecosystem, especially outside the protected Bwindi INP, have been put to a wide range of human uses, mainly agro-forestry and fishing, livestock farms, tea plantations, and mining of sand and stones for construction, especially in the rapidly urbanizing areas of Bwindi and Butogota. The Bwindi HEP dam has so far been the largest single-use project on the river, and its impacts on the river ecosystem have not been fully documented and mitigated as may be needed. During the dam construction process, it was noted that there are large fluctuations in river height due to seasonal heavy rains in different parts of the river valley; with river height rising during floods up to four times its low height, (Uganda Ministry of Finance Planning and Economic Development, 2009).
Healthy ecosystems are a fundamental requirement for sustainable development and biodiversity conservation. Biological resources support human livelihoods and make it possible to adapt to changing needs and environmental conditions. The concurrent conservation and sustainable use of fresh water ecosystems are a critical contributor to attaining a number of United Nation Sustainable Development Goals 2030, such as Goal 1: End poverty in all its forms everywhere; Goal 2: End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture; Goal 3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages; and Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. However, Goal 6 (Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all freshwater ecosystems such as Munyaga) is most critical, particularly in attainment of the following targets and their respective indicators:
Target 6.3: By 2030, improve water quality by reducing pollution, eliminating dumping and minimizing release of hazardous chemicals and materials, halving the proportion of untreated wastewater and substantially increasing recycling and safe reuse globally
Indicator 6.3.1: Proportion of wastewater safely treated
Indicator 6.3.2: Proportion of bodies of water with good ambient water quality
Target 6.4: By 2030, substantially increase water-use efficiency across all sectors and ensure sustainable withdrawals and supply of freshwater to address water scarcity and substantially reduce the number of people suffering from water scarcity
Indicator 6.4.1: Change in water-use efficiency over time
Indicator 6.4.2: Level of water stress: freshwater withdrawal as a proportion of available freshwater resources
Target 6.5: By 2030, implement integrated water resources management at all levels, including through transboundary cooperation as appropriate
Indicator 6.5.1: Degree of integrated water resources management implementation (0-100)
Indicator6.5.2: Proportion of transboundary basin area with an operational arrangement for water cooperation
Target 6.6: By 2020, protect and restore water-related ecosystems, including mountains, forests, wetlands, rivers, aquifers and lakes
Indicator 6.6.1: Change in the extent of water-related ecosystems over time
Target 6.6.b Support and strengthen the participation of local communities in improving water and sanitation management
Indicator 6.6.b.1: Proportion of local administrative units with established and operational policies and procedures for participation of local communities in water and sanitation management
The JEGMI has developed a community-based initiative to protect and restore the ecosystem, starting with a pilot program along the Munyaga River banks while creating a corridor extending from Queen Elizabeth National Park to Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. The initiative is be scaled up to the entire Munyaga river ecosystem in Uganda. And, conditions permitting in DRC, similar initiatives may be considered along other river ecosystems associated with the Bwindi INP.
The initiative has been developed and implemented as an ecosystem management program, which has been defined by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) as “a process that integrates ecological, socio economic, and institutional factors into comprehensive analysis and action in order to sustain and enhance the quality of the ecosystems to meet current and future needs.” As such, ecosystem management embraces a holistic, inter-disciplinary approach that recognizes the inter-connectivity among ecological, social-cultural, economic and institutional structures.(Munang et al., 2011).
The initiative is premised on the recognition that people are an integral part of ecosystems and depend on other components of the ecosystems and their interactions for health and sustainable survival. The key ecosystem interactions include the water cycle; the maintenance of stable atmospheric, climatic and hydrological conditions; and the continued production of food and many other products and services of ecosystems that contribute to our well-being. Ecosystem functions are the result of plants and animals (including humans) interacting with each other and with the physical components of their environment. Ecosystem-based management attempts to regulate the use of ecosystems so that we can benefit from them while at the same time modifying the impacts on them to preserve basic ecosystem functions. (Pirot et al., 2000)
The program shall be based on the Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) approach, which is recommended by the United Nations (UN) and other conservation authorities as the most sustainable means to incorporate the multiple competing and conflicting uses of water resources. The IWRM approach propagates a holistic approach to water management by involving and ensuring multi-stakeholder participation in decision-making processes.
The initiative shall also utilize the five basic principles of Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM); namely (Addun and Muzones, 1997) these:
Empowerment: the actual transfer of economic and political power from the few to the impoverished many, and the operationalization of community management and control;
Equity: where communities as a whole rather than a few individuals benefit;
Sustainability: which ensures development through resource-extraction practices consider the limits of the resources - their carrying and assimilative capacity, intra-generational equity or equity between the present and future generations;
Systems orientation: where the community functions in the context of other communities and stakeholders, just as resources are ecologically linked to wider ecosystems;
Gender-fair: where women are involved in the control and management of community sources, and their practical and strategic needs are addressed.
The initiative shall focus on conservation and restoration as necessary of the river bank area that is protected by government provisions as prescribed in the Uganda National Environment (Wetlands, River Banks and Lake Shores Management) Regulations, No. 3/2000 (Under section 107 of the National Environmental Act Cap 153)(Uganda Ministry of Water Lands and Environment, 2000). The regulations define a "river bank" as “the rising ground, not more than 100m long, bordering or adjacent to a river in the form of rock, mud gravel or sand and in cases of flood plains includes the point where the water surface touches the land, that land not being the bed of the river.” The regulations define two categories of protections for river banks, under section 29.
Category 1 provides for a protected zone of one hundred meters from the highest watermark of the river (applicable to 20 large rivers listed in the regulation.
Category 2 provides for a protected zone of thirty meters from highest watermark of the river. The Munyaga River is covered under Category 2.
Mission
To contribute to environmental conservation and Climate Change Mitigation and Adaption through actions that boast natural environment systems, regenerate biodiversity and enhance ecological balancing
Objectives of the Project
To provide sustainable protective care resource base for wildlife and human life
Promote conservation of protected and non-protected natural resources through planting of bamboo
Protecting nature through working in partnership and community sensitization programmes
Promoting equitable and sustainable utilization and management of river buffer zone conservation areas through corridor creation while planting bamboo
Expected Outcome
At least 102 hectare of land are reserved and protected along the river
A corridor is created along River Munyaga Buffer zone to allow the restoration of flora and fauna
Over 20,000 bamboo and10000 indigenous tree species like mahogany and ebony planted within corridor.
Key elements in program design and its implementation
Ecosystem survey: This will be done in Phase One consisting of mapping and marking area to be conserved and analyzing comments of stakeholders.
Community mobilization: This shall start with the different categories of leaders in the community and gradually include all community members, local government and protected-area conservation managers. The mobilization activities shall include community dialogue forums, media-based education and participatory discussions, group exploration visits along the Munyaga River, and community-led prioritization of specific issues to be addressed. The program shall prioritize the needs and welfare of community stakeholders, who do farming along the river system, to ensure that they receive tangible benefits from taking on the responsibility for managing the corridor while protecting the Munyaga River ecosystem, either through improved quality of life or financial rewards.
Partnership building: The program implementation shall adopt a partnership approach, working closely with elected local government leaders and employed staff, community groups, educational and religious institutions, and private sector actors especially in the tourism, agriculture and agro-processing industries. The partnership with schools will be geared towards creating lifelong awareness among the staff and students; direct partnership in awareness-raising activities such as music, dance, drama, poetry, written essays and artwork; and engaging some of the students and staff as individual change agents in their families and other social settings.
Awareness creation: This shall be used as a key entry point and agenda-setting activity and as a platform for advocacy. It will be used to generate and clarify the issues of focus in ecosystem restoration and sustainable management; to agree and promote goals and targets for the project; to disseminate actions and progress in program implementation; and to publicize and celebrate program successes. The following communication methods and channels shall be used:
Public-awareness messages, using local communication tools (announcement in places of gathering, community radio, and phone-based messages)
Written information products (brochures, fact sheets and posters),
Meetings and consultations (small or large gatherings with targeted stakeholders),
Special events and community awareness days (e.g., on World Environment Day),
Community education initiatives by relevant resource persons and change agents.
Capacity building: Areas for capacity building shall be identified by the community members during participatory planning and review exercises in the long run. These will be conducted at the Phase One of the project to come up with and prioritize noted problems, resources and opportunities and to identify areas for capacity building. Similar reviews shall be done periodically in the life of the program to address emerging issues. The capacity building will focus on enhancing genuine community engagement in all aspects of the program, from planning to implementation, progress monitoring, annual reviews and periodic evaluations. The capacity- building process will include elements of classical training and on-going mentoring.
Partnership with Bicultural Conservation Institute (BCI) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
The mission of the Biocultural Conservation Institute (BCI) is to empower local communities to connect to and protect their native wildlife through
Education,
Research, and
Livelihood enhancement.
Empowering local communities to protect their lands and wildlife not only benefits that particular group of animals, but also the people who will depend on a biodiverse landscape for food, water and livelihood for generations to come is at the heart of BCI
The current WWF mission is to conserve nature and reduce the most pressing threats to the diversity of life on Earth, delivered through six thematic goals with people at the centre:
CLIMATE: Create a climate-resilient and zero-carbon world, powered by renewable energy
FOOD: Drive sustainable food systems to conserve nature and feed humanity
FORESTS: Conserve the world's most important forests to sustain nature's diversity, benefit our climate, and support human well-being
WILDLIFE CONSERVATION: Ensure the world’s most iconic species, including tigers, rhinos, and elephants, are secured and recovering in the wild
FRESH WATER: By 2025, the health of the world’s major basins is improving or maintained
OCEANS: A resilient ocean sustains marine life and functioning ecosystems that support rich biodiversity, food security and sustainable livelihoods
Corridor Connection
The Joint Efforts for Green Mountain Initiative Corridor proposal would connect a series of large existing protected areas, allowing connectivity from Northern Bwindi Impenetrable National Park to the southern portion of Queen Elizabeth National Park along River Munyaga ecosystem using bamboo and other indigenous tree species like mahogany and ebony. The corridor will be 10 meters starting from the river banks. This will involve in surveying and mapping of corridor demarcation, compensating farmland owners, fencing of the corridor using acacia thorn plants and planting of bamboo trees. After compensation, community members will resettle themselves and abandon the land for the project.
The corridor area shall be managed by Joint Efforts for Green Mountain Initiative together with the local government. The Bwindi-Queen corridor runs through farmland linking two of Uganda’s most iconic forest parks, benefitting elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees, monkeys and other animal species.
The Bwindi-Queen corridor will maintain ecological connectivity between the Bwindi and Queen National Parks along local River Munyaga system, which will sustain ecosystem services for local farmers and communities living further downstream. It is anticipated that, through careful land-planning, at least over 102 hectares estimate of land could be restored into corridor ecological connectivity.
Why river Munyaga protection using bamboo
Habitat isolation is causing animal population reductions and extirpations in forested areas of Uganda. This problem extends to protected areas of Bwindi Impenetrable National Park and Queen Elizabeth National Park, which, while often well-conserved, can be too small and isolated to maintain species that exist at low densities and require large contiguous areas of habitat (e.g., some large mammals). Uganda has been at the forefront of tropical forest conservation and savanna forest conservation, and a large proportion of the country’s land area is currently under some form of protection. One such area is the southwestern portion of Uganda, which is an extremely biodiverse region with several noteworthy national and privately owned protected areas. However, the two protected national parks are joined by the River Munyaga ecosystem. Within Joint Efforts for Green Mountain Initiative framework of bamboo corridor, we propose one corridor as target for restoration and full protection of River Munyaga, which will stretch from Queen Elizabeth National Park to Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. This corridor would link two major protected areas in southwestern Uganda, while impacting a small number of people who reside and carry out farming, stone and sand mining along river Munyaga banks. After natural or active reforestation of the corridor using bamboo, the result would be contiguous protected area of over 102 ha estimate, which would allow animals to move freely from one protected to another.
Bamboo corridors are important conservation tools for maintaining species diversity in places where habitat loss results in small isolated areas of natural landscapes and may be vitally important for long-term survival of species under the ongoing human-induced climate change. Corridors can help facilitate and subsequently reduce extinction probabilities of some species, especially those that are unlikely to travel across large open spaces (e.g., primates, large terrestrial mammals). While not a perfect replacement for large blocks of natural habitat, corridors often allow a number of small populations to effectively function as one large, viable population.
Tropical rainforests continue to undergo rapid deforestation and fragmentation in many parts of the (Uganda). However, some countries have slowed deforestation and have even begun to show net positive rates of forest cover. Where deforestation has been largely halted and conservation efforts are strong, the opportunity exists to connect remaining blocks of isolated forest. For example, Uganda suffered extremely high rates of deforestation in the latter half of the 20th century, but by the year 2000, reforestation rates were higher than deforestation rates. Although the exact amount of Uganda’s forest cover is debatable, the country has been slowly gaining forest cover (to about 50%, since the turn of the century, indicating that Uganda is going through the “forest transition.”
Anticipated effects of River Munyaga Bwindi-Queen corridor
Despite many studies showing that landscape corridors increase dispersal and species richness for disparate, concerns persist that corridors can have unintended negative effects. In particular, some of the same mechanisms that underlie positive effects of corridors on species of conservation interest may also increase the spread and impact of antagonistic species (e.g., predators and pathogens). These concerns are relatively small and manageable compared with the large positive effects of facilitating dispersal and increasing diversity of native species.
Rationale of the project
It is believed that the intervention will lead to increased conservation of natural resources, including protecting the River Munyaga, creating contiguous habitat for wildlife, and controlling extinction of flora and fauna species; this in turn will improve the livelihoods of the communities living near the corridor through tourism and tourism-related activities. As communities learn the importance of this project, it will encourage the young and old to advocate planting of bamboo at households to address climate change and increase community resilience.
Implementation structure
Joint Efforts for Green Mountain Initiative will manage the project under the supervision of funders. Joint Efforts for Green Mountain Initiative (JEGMI) will oversee the technical implementation of all activities. Management, policy and technical support will be received from donors, Uganda Wildlife Authority, Biocultural Conservation Institute, and JEGMI, which is the implementing body. Progress reports will be prepared on quarterly basis by the Joint Efforts for Green Mountain Initiative project manager approved by the founder. The reports will describe actions undertaken towards achieving specific strategies of the project and will include costs, benefits, performance measures and progress to date.
Integrating Community‐Based Family Planning Services with corridor restoration
Kanungu district has a population of over 277300 on estimate with a density of 210.2/km2. Overpopulation is associated with negative environmental and economic outcomes ranging from the impacts of over-farming, deforestation, and water pollution to eutrophication and global warming. While a lot of positive steps are being taken to better ensure the sustainability of humans on our planet, the problem of having too many people has made lasting solutions more challenging to find
Family planning contributes to women’s empowerment, improves family and general health, advances education and life opportunities and, by slowing population growth, eases pressures on wildlife and ecosystems. Integrating reproductive health improvements with sustainable natural resource management is a valuable development approach. These activities include Reproductive health, birth control methods; HIV/AIDS, health education and promotion among others. We acknowledge that the future health of our planet has never been more uncertain, and that the health of people and ecosystems are connected. This is the overarching reason to join forces in promoting the linked reproductive health of people and long-term health of ecosystems
Monitoring and Evaluation
Evaluation will be done during the implementation of each activity and in monthly and quarterly reports, depending on logical stages of the project implementation. The Project Manager will be responsible to make sure that the target activities and objectives are met. Evaluation will be done through field visits for monitoring the uptake of the corridor. The project result evaluated will be shared to various stakeholders for any comments and future uptake of same or similar project to further initiative.
Project Sustainability
The project will be sustainable to the community living adjacent to where the project will be implemented. The knowledge and skills imparted to trainees on topics about restoration of River Munyaga ecosystem corridor will be used by them in their daily lives to enhance the corridor, especially bamboo, but also sustain their livelihoods from various optional income-generating activities. The project managers and assistant manager together with the project founder will oversee forest protection. Also the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park (BINP) , local government, and Biocultural Conservation Institute will participate in this during and after implementation of this project and help assure project accountability. Hence the change in altitude and practice through this project is a key factor for sustainability.
Management of the finances
Unlike any other personal business, Joint Efforts for Green Mountain Initiative has a chain of managing finance using project accounts. These accounts have principal signatories to control unnecessary withdraws. The project manager shall be responsible for preparing cash books, analysis books, and payment vouchers. Quarterly Internal audits shall be done to check the impact of this grant; after the end of each year, JEGMI shall do Audit for proper management of grant and transparency, and the audited report shall be submitted to stakeholders
HOME