In eastern Africa, overgrazed fields and eroded soils are leaving farming and herding communities more exposed to drought and floods, and a new project will test whether restoring land with nature-based solutions can reverse that trend. Land degradation is a critical problem across sub-Saharan Africa. It strips soils of their ability to hold water and support crops, which makes communities more vulnerable to climate shocks and undermines their ability to adapt. The research gap is that many proposed solutions fail because they are not designed with local people, ignore gender and age inequalities, or do not address the social norms that prevent adoption. If successful, the project will produce tested, scalable approaches to restoring land using methods like agroforestry or improved grazing, co-developed with communities in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Kenya. It will also deliver a group-based intervention to shift community norms around land use, and guidance on how to make solutions equitable across gender and age groups. The outcomes could help policymakers and NGOs implement land restoration that actually sticks, strengthening climate resilience for millions of agro-pastoralists across the region.
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Land degradation is a critical problem in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), which exacerbates vulnerabilities to climate change among agro-pastoralist and farming communities in the region. It increases exposure and sensitivity of agro-ecological systems to climate impacts and reduces effectiveness of climate adaptation options, undermining resilience of the affected communities. It is essential to find effective solutions to mitigating land degradation and implement them successfully in order to strengthen climate resilience of agro-pastoralist and farming communities in SSA and build pathways for climate resilient development. The proposed project aims to achieve this with a focus on nature-based solutions (NbS). Our aim is to strengthen climate resilience of agro-pastoralist and farming communities in SSA by co-developing and testing equitable NbS to land degradation, assessing their feasibility and scalability, and exploring evidence-based pathways to facilitating implementation of such solutions by stakeholders. The project outcomes will provide stakeholders at local to international level with evidence of NbS that are acceptable to stakeholder communities, adaptable to different contexts, and applicable at wider scales. To achieve this, we will advance an interdisciplinary and community-based approach, engaging cutting-edge research in soil and agricultural science, group psychology and anthropology, and development studies, as well as stakeholder knowledge and collaboration of local NGOs and policy-makers. The project is structured in three work packages (WPs), engaged in a continuous interdisciplinary exchange. WP1 will build on local knowledge to co-develop multi-purpose NbS to land degradation that strengthen climate resilience, test their effectiveness across contexts, and model their scalability. WP2 will examine the role of gender, youth, and intersectional inequity and vulnerability in the context of land degradation and the associated climate resilience, and explore pathways to implementing equitable solutions that are sensitive to gender and age-defined social differences. WP3 will identify social psychological barriers and opportunities for NbS adoption and test a group-based intervention aimed at strengthening community resilience, well-being, and norms and values supporting NbS implementation. The above aims will be delivered across three field sites in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Kenya, providing opportunities for contextualising across geographic, social, and cultural conditions. Principal outcomes of the project will include new evidence on effectiveness, contextualisation, and scalability of NbS addressing land degradation and the associated climate vulnerabilities in SSA; enhanced knowledge of how equity issues need to be incorporated in NbS implementation; and a tested approach to ensuring temporal sustainability of NbS implementation by addressing community norms and values.
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