Conservation Outcomes of Collaborative Forest Management in a Medium Altitude Semideciduous Forest in Mid-western Uganda

ABSTRACT

Globally, community involvement in forest management has been hailed as an effective strategy to achieve both conservation and livelihoods improvement goals. In Uganda, Collaborative Forest Management (CFM) has been promoted to enable registered local community groups to co-manage specified areas of state forests with state agencies. However, there is paucity of empirical research evidence on conservation outcomes that are attributable to CFM. To fill this gap, this study used forest inventory data collected in compartments under different forest management regimes (CFM, inactive-CFM, and non-CFM) in 2003 and 2016 to assess spatial and temporal changes in forest structural attributes in a semideciduous forest in mid-western Uganda. Our ordination results show significant changes in tree communities in the non-CFM compartment. The CFM compartment registered a net increase in basal area. We attribute these changes to the high rate of illegal timber extraction and charcoal processing, with signs of the latter only recorded in the inactive- and non-CFM compartments. Illegal timber extraction was perpetuated by powerful outsiders while charcoal processing was dominated by local area residents for cash income. Deliberate management interventions should be instituted to curb illegal human activities and enhance regeneration and recruitment of target tree species in the forest.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaborative Forest Management
• forest conservation outcomes
• human activity
• Uganda

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by NORAD through the NORHED project (UGA-13/0019). Permission to conduct the project was provided by the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology (NS - 511) and NFA. The NFA also availed us biophysical data that we used as a basis for selecting and comparing changes in selected structural attributes. We thank our key informants and the leaders of KICODA CFM group for providing valuable data on the governance of the CFM. We are very grateful to the immense technical and in-kind support provided by Budongo Field Conservation Station and Makerere University Biological Field station. We thank our team of field assistants for their dedicated support during data collection. Finally, we are grateful to the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their comments that helped to improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflict of interest.

Supplementary materials

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Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD) [UGA-13/0019].