Image: Pastoralist rock art, Serengeti, Tanzania. Photo: P. Lane.
The Adaptation and Resilience to Climate Change (ARCC) project focuses on documenting the parameters leading to socio-ecological resilience in the borderlands area of Kenya and Tanzania, with specific reference to the Serengeti Basin, Tanzania. Its primary aims are to understand how societies, landscapes, ecosystems and Protected Areas have responded to climate change and societal use, and to better understand how they may respond in the future. To do this, the project is focusing on the temporality, spatiality & complexity of interactions and interdependencies of social-ecological systems in north-western Tanzania over the last 300 years. Local livelihoods here currently range from intensive agriculture to livestock herding & hunting-and-gathering, coupled with employment in tourism, conservation, and mineral extraction. Pressures from global climate change, rapid population growth, competing land use (including wildlife conservation), and new 'governmental' regimes pose major threats to livelihoods, their sustainability & resilience to future socio-ecological shocks. Using a cross-disciplinary approach integrating archaeological, environmental, archival, modern land use & remote sensing data, with collaborative modelling of future land use & land cover change scenarios, the project hopes to identify past and possible future drivers of change & sources of resilience, and to use this information to generate guidelines for land use planning in the study area.
External Collaborators and Team Members
- Professor Robert Marchant, Department of Environment and Geography, University of York, Co-PI.
- Dr Linus Munishi, Nelson Mandela African Institute of Science and Technology, Arusha, Tanzania, Co-I.
- Dr Anneli Ekblom, Department of Archaeology & Ancient History, Uppsala University, Sweden, Co-I.
- Dr Rebecca Kariuki, Nelson Mandela African Institute of Science and Technology, Arusha, Tanzania.
- Dr Anna Shoemaker, Department of Archaeology & Ancient History, Uppsala University, Sweden.
- Dr Colin Courtney Mustaphi, Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Basel, Switzerland.
- Dr Claudia Capitani, Department of Environment and Geography, University of York.
VetenskapsrâSwedish Research Council), Sida and Formas Sustainability and resilience – Tackling climate and environmental changes Programme, 2017-2020.