Potential Impacts of Climate Change on Coupled Socioecological Systems in East Africa: The Case of the Chagga Agroforestry and Maasai Agropastoralism across the Greater Environments of Mount Kilimanjaro Region

Abstract:

The various types of rainfall-dependent coupled socioecological systems that conspicuously characterize mountain-environments across Africa, such as the Chagga homegardens, an intensive agroforestry system, constitute a major economic backbone to the local inhabitants. Similarly, agropastoralism that characterizes the adjoining rangelands of such mountain-environments, such as that practiced by the Maasai people of Kenya, in the northern plains that adjoins Mount Kilimanjaro, is major contributor to local food security. Both Chagga agroforestry and Maasai agropastoralism also contribute greatly to broader-scale economic sectors and respectively to sustainable utilization of rangeland and mountain-environment resources. Like similar coupled socioecological systems across Africa, the Chagga agroforestry and Maasai agropastoralism are being, and will continue to be affected by the changing climate. This study uses an integrated approach to explore the sustainability of Chagga homegardens, an intensive agroforestry system, in the southern slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Concurrently, the sustainability of the Maasai agropastoralism (a livelihood-diversification type) in the northern slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro and the adjoining plains in Kenya is explored. This explication is followed by conceptualization of the potential future of Chagga agroforestry and Maasai agropastoralism systems under diverse scenarios of climate change—and alongside simultaneous effects of cross-scale social and biophysical factors, processes, and their interactions—in an integrated model. The premise of this study is that coupled socioecological systems, such as Chagga agroforestry and Maasai agropastoralism, linked to and/or dependent on mountain environments and microclimates, are natural-laboratories. Apropos this last point, the two systems offer timely insight into how similar systems in different geographical locations are likely to be influenced by the continuously changing climate amidst simultaneously heightened permeation of global socioeconomic and sociopolitical change. This insight become important as climate-influenced agriculture and pastoralism and their various derivatives continues to dominant livelihood systems across Africa.