Scenario-Based Conservation Planning for a Sustainable Future in sub-Saharan Africa
In sub-Saharan Africa, multiple drivers, such as: climate change; human population, demography and dynamics; economic growth; and expanding infrastructure, have an adverse effect on biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services. Typically, these factors are not consistently incorporated into land use planning and management decisions. The Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group, through its Land Use Management (LUM) working group, incorporates the current and forecasted future cumulative impact of these drivers of change to identify more robust conservation interventions.
The LUM task team will share current progress on developing a methodological approach to conservation and land use planning based on scenario analysis, and guidelines for its application, to incorporate equitable and climate-smart alternatives into land use decisions for conservation. This methodology is being applied in four countries: Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, Republic of Congo, and Tanzania.
Speaker Bios
Hedley Grantham, Director, Spatial Planning at Wildlife Conservation Society
Hedley leads Wildlife Conservation Soceity’s spatial planning program and is also a research associate at the University of Queensland. Hedley’s main focus is on supporting biodiversity conservation and sustainable development planning at the landscape and seascape scale. He is a specialist on designing and integrating multidisciplinary science and priority setting analysis to support planning and decision-making process. He also works on development planning including how to improve siting of impacts, and better application of the mitigation hierarchy including the design of biodiversity offsets
David Williams, Program Director-Conservation Geography at African Wildlife Foundation
David has 20 years of experience as an ecologist applying GIS and remote sensing to benefit ecological and conservation programs across two continents. He has led the African Wildlife Foundation’s Spatial Analysis Laboratory for over a decade to support conservation planning and monitoring under the aegis of AWF’s landscape conservation approach. David’s research interests include the innovative use spatial tools to map and simulate land-use impacts on ecosystems, wildlife populations, and human livelihoods; and the evaluation of conservation outcomes with a focus on law enforcement effectiveness. When not lucky enough to be dusting up his boots in the bush, David is based in Washington DC.
David received a MEM in Resource Ecology from the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University and a BA in English Literature from the University of Michigan.
Dr Ayesha Tulloch, Research Fellow, Wildlife Conservation Society
Ayesha is a conservation ecologist whose research focuses on using ecological knowledge to inform conservation decision-making. Based at the University of Queensland as a partner investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions and the National Environmental Science Programme's Threatened Species Recovery Hub, she is currently a research fellow with the Wildlife Conservation Society working on land use planning to preserve ecosystem function, biodiversity and human livelihoods in Africa. Her current research integrates mapping of anthropogenic processes such as forest harvesting and bushmeat hunting with priorities for carbon storage, human subsistence and biodiversity conservation, and forecasts likely scenarios of declines in biodiversity under future scenarios of human resource use versus conservation management.
Ayesha worked in applied management in non-government organisations and academia for 10 years prior to returning to academia. She now works primarily in dynamic human-modified landscapes where there are usually multiple threats and conflicting objectives related to biodiversity and social or economic factors. She has a particular interest in solving conservation problems related to threatened bird and mammal communities, by integrating research on anthropogenic and ecological processes such as fire, invasive predators and ecosystem degradation, and using cross-disciplinary approaches such as network analysis and decision theory. Ayesha’s work spans theoretical and applied ecology as well as decision-making for both monitoring and managing biodiversity, including Red Listing of Ecosystems, community dynamics, prioritising threat mitigation actions for species recovery, monitoring effectiveness, and human-wildlife conflict.