Protected areas have often been defined as the backbones of biodiversity
conservation. Protected areas have often been defined as the backbones
of biodiversity conservation. However, legitimate demands formulated by
countries for their economic development, growing human populations,
forest fragmentations, and needs of local communities for sustainable
livelihoods are also pressing demands on protected areas, stringently
pressuring conservation community to identify means to reconcile long
term biodiversity conservation and communities' livelihoods. Hence,
integrating conservation activities within the global framework of
economic development of countries with high biodiversity had become part
of conservation paradigms. Integrated development as a route to
conservation, strict protected areas, community managed areas, etc. have
been tried but resulted in debatable outcomes in many ways. The lukewarm
nature of these results brought 'landscape approach' at the front of
biodiversity conservation in Central Africa. Since the late 1990s the
landscape approach uses large areas with different functional attributes
and shifts foundational biodiversity conservation paradigms. Changes are
brought to the role traditionally attributed to local communities,
aligning sustainable development with conservation and stretching
conservation beyond the confines of traditional protected areas. These
three shifts need a holistic approach to respond to different
conservation questions. There are only a few instances where the
landscape experience has been scientifically documented and lessons
learnt drawn into a corpus of knowledge to guide future conservation
initiatives across Central Africa. To subjugate one biodiversity
conservation landscape as one case study emerged as a matter of urgency
to present the potential knowledge acquired throughout the landscape
experiment, including leadership and management, processes tried,
results (at least partially) achieved, and why such and such other
process or management arrangement were been chosen among many other
alternatives, etc. The challenges of the implementation of the
conservation landscape approach needed also to be documented. This book
responds to the majority of these questions; drawing its content from
the firsthand field knowledge, it discusses these shifts and documents
what has been tried, how successful (unsuccessful) it was, and what
lessons learnt from these trials. Theoretical questions such as threat
index, and ecological services, etc. are also discussed and gaps in
knowledge are identified.
