This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Across Africa, people are restoring and managing mangroves, grazing lands and urban green areas in the face of increasing threats from climate change. Increasingly, they make decisions based on climate-related information supplied by governments, funders and researchers.
But are they getting the information they need? We are researchers working on ecosystem restoration and the links between people, livelihoods and the environment. We study how nature-based solutions can help people adapt to climate change.
We, together with our co-authors, interviewed 530 people from nature-based projects in Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar and South Africa. Nature-based projects or solutions work to protect damaged ecosystems, restore them or use them sustainably. The people we interviewed were part of community groups, government, NGOs, intergovernmental organizations, parastatals, businesses and research organizations.
Some depended on these projects for their livelihoods. Others used nature-based projects to cope with climate change, environmental damage and threats to food and water supplies. Their work included protecting and restoring forests, mangroves, wetlands and rangelands.
It also included conservation agriculture, agroforestry, rotational grazing and urban greening. Campaigns against overfishing and deforestation are also part of nature-based projects. So are planting native trees, reseeding grazing land, managing livestock numbers, sustainable beekeeping and removing non-native plants.
For example, smallholder farmers who use communal lands to graze their sheep in the uMzimvubu catchment in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, form part of grazing associations, which are nature-based solution programs that support rural livelihoods. By participating as members, farmers receive several benefits, including information about managing their rangelands sustainably. Another example is a community nursery in Madagascar that grows mangrove seedlings to replant forests.
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