Smallholder farm in an Ethiopian biosphere reserve. Courtesy James Borrell Protecting nature and reducing poverty are often treated as separate global challenges to be solved. But in many parts of Africa, the same land is needed for conserving nature and for people’s food security and livelihoods.
Ethiopia is one of the most important centres of crop diversity in Africa. It is where several crops were first grown. Hundreds of crop varieties have evolved in Ethiopia over thousands of years. They provide valuable genetic traits that help scientists breed crops that can better withstand drought, disease and climate change.
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About 70% of Ethiopians rely on farming, grazing and natural resources for their livelihoods. But the country also has a long history of food insecurity, including famines that killed up to one million people.
We are a team of conservation scientists who research issues at the intersection of agrobiodiversity, food security and protected area conservation in Ethiopia.
We set out to discover whether Ethiopia’s protected areas are actually working for nature and for people. We also wanted to find out what these protected areas tell us about the real world challenges of meeting global biodiversity targets.
To do this we compared changes over time between protected and similar unprotected places. We combined satellite images showing how the land was being used with information on poverty and food security. We collected this data from surveys of more than 3,000 households across Ethiopia from 2011-2016.
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This is the most comprehensive study ever carried out on Ethiopia’s protected areas because it examined conservation from several different angles at once. It assessed how well protected areas represent the country’s ecosystems and species, how effectively they prevent habitat loss, and how they affect the food security and livelihoods of nearby communities. It also included the views of Ethiopian conservation experts – the first study to bring this together in a single national assessment.
Our research found that communities living within 10km of a protected area were more likely to go hungry and experience a decline in their living standards than similar households elsewhere. To establish this, we compared similar communities. We asked what life might have been like if a protected area had never been created nearby. We matched communities that were alike in almost every way, except that one was close to a protected area and the other was not.
By tracking how they changed over time, we could estimate the effect of living near a protected area, rather than simply showing that the two happened to be linked.
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Our research therefore argues that the success of conservation cannot be measured solely by how well biodiversity is protected.
Our findings show that without greater investment in supporting the livelihoods of communities living alongside protected areas, the global push to conserve 30% of the planet by 2030 risks being built on a foundation that is neither equitable nor sustainable.
Ethiopia has 79 protected areas covering 9.4% of the country’s land surface. These areas include national parks and community conservation areas. Most are now managed by regional governments, with key national parks under the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority. Our study estimated that around 18 million people live within 10km of the protected area network.
We found that Ethiopia’s protected areas reduce tropical forest loss. They also prevent land from being taken over for farming and help maintain grasslands. They house a large proportion of threatened species and those that are only found in Ethiopia.
These include the Ethiopian wolf, Gelada monkey, big-headed African mole rat, Walia ibex, yellow-fronted parrot and others. This is an incredible achievement given limited resources and capacity available for conservation.
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However, we also found that these environmental gains have come at the cost of wellbeing and food security for communities living close to protected areas.
We found that people living within 10km of a protected area were more likely to go hungry. They were also more likely to see their living standards worsen than similar households living farther away.
