Why Amboseli land subdivision is a wildlife, livelihood threat

Njoroke Sitonik knows too well the impact of the ongoing land subdivision in the Amboseli ecosystem.

“It will have devastating impacts not only on our livestock but on wildlife as well,” Sitonik, popularly known as Mpere, says.

Sitonik, who is the vice chairperson of the newly created Nairrabala Conservancy, says the ecosystem should be protected for both livestock and wildlife as they are compatible land uses.

“It will help us remain on this piece of land. It is very hard for newcomers to purchase land as we have already leased it out to the Big Life Foundation,” he says.

He says there will be no fragmentation now that their land is a conservancy.

On April 10, Big Life Foundation entered into an agreement with Nairrabala Conservancy as part of the foundation's land lease programme.

The move is meant to open up more space for both livestock and wildlife.

The foundation will pay an annual land lease to 1,780 Maasai landowners in a new community conservancy known as Nairrabala.

The new conservancy's neighbouring Amboseli National Park and its 37,500 acres are an important wildlife habitat that connects key protected areas and provides crucial grazing areas for pastoralists’ cattle, goats and sheep.

Nairrabala was part of the former communally owned Olgulului Group Ranch, which is now being subdivided into individual plots to be given under private title deeds to local households.

If the new landowners sell their land or fence it to farm it, the open landscape could fragment into a patchwork of commercial agriculture and smallholdings that will struggle in this water-stressed environment now facing climate change-induced drought.

That risks limiting livestock grazing and cutting off dispersal areas for wildlife to the north of the national park, which could have serious consequences for species populations.

Big Life’s land leases support community efforts to develop conservancies, where landowners join their land together to keep it open, which is crucial for both wildlife that migrates through it and domestic animals that graze it.

Paying to lease the land and giving leaseholders and their families preferential access to scholarships, health care and employment increases support for conservation.

WORRYING TRENDS

Today, land subdivision is common in the Amboseli ecosystem.

In the Amboseli ecosystem, four of the group ranches, namely: Mbirikani, Olgulului, Eselengei and Rombo, have now completed subdivision plans, while Kuku A and Kuku B are still in progress.

The four subdividing ranches cover 1 million acres and have about 25,000 members.

The subdivision plans include both a layout for the boundaries of the subdivided parcels and a land-use zonation plan for each ranch.

The main land uses include settlement, agriculture, livestock-grazing rangeland, industrial, commercial and conservancy.

Land-use zonation is done to minimise conflict between land-use zones and ensure that natural resources are used well.

Some 368,708 acres of the four ranches have been zoned for wildlife conservation, including conservancies, corridors and a buffer zone to control development around Amboseli National Park.

The different conservancies will choose their management approaches, but most or all will allow livestock grazing.

An additional 440,000 acres have been zoned for livestock-grazing rangelands, where fencing and conversion to other land uses (such as agriculture) are prohibited by the land-use plans.

The land-use plans have been approved by the county government, and most (Eselengei, Mbirikani and Olgulului) have been gazetted at the national level through SEA processes.

These two areas, conservation and rangeland, will support the livestock economy in the ecosystem, which depends on the free movement of animals because it is a semi-arid place, as well as wildlife conservation and ecotourism.

There are almost daily contraventions of the plans happening in some areas, particularly Eselengei and Rombo.

On Eselengei, people from other counties, such as Nairobi and other urban centers, are busy buying and fencing land, drilling boreholes, farming without the necessary permits and breaking land-use plans.

Sitonik says the community is set to benefit from payments made from the lease.

He says the new partnership with Big Life will help the community secure job opportunities, such as scouts.

“Some of our children will get bursaries,” Sitonik says.

The quest to have private land titles in people’s own names has been sweeping across some of the group ranches in the Amboseli ecosystem.

In fact, the quest was the most powerful driver for the pressure that members of some of the group ranches put on the leadership to subdivide their land.

Under the Land Registration Act, the registration of a person as the proprietor of land shall vest in that person the absolute ownership of that land, together with all the pertinent rights and privileges.

Upon registration, the individual is issued with a freehold title, which vests in the holder the unlimited right to use and dispose of land in perpetuity, subject to the rights of others and the regulatory powers of the national government, county government and other relevant state organs.

This means in effect that upon registration of a member as proprietor of the land allocated to him and issuance of a title deed, such a member is in law free to sell or otherwise dispose of the land to any person in the absence of any lawful restrictions.

This freedom and the possibility that individual members may use it to dispose of their allotted portions of land to outsiders who may not necessarily share in the vision of the group for the future use of the land remain one of the greatest concerns for those who share in that vision.

These concerns are vindicated by the experience of the neighbouring Kimana Group Ranch.

There, the wanton disposition of land by members after subdivision has led to the near collapse of livestock-based livelihoods, triggered land use conflicts that threaten conservation and borne a class of landless Maasai.

Experts now warn that the ongoing subdivision risks hurting wildlife and livelihoods as livestock remains the mainstay of the Maasai community.

WHAT STUDIES SAY

Studies have shown that breaking up the open landscape risks limiting livestock grazing and cutting off dispersal areas for wildlife, with serious consequences for species' populations.

Six years ago, three researchers made the dreadful finding that the long-term changes in range resources in the Amboseli ecosystem have led to a decline in the size of household herds over the past four decades.

Kennedy Kimiti, David Western, Judith Mbau and Oliver Vivian found that livestock declines were more significant in the sedentary land-use site than in both semi-nomadic and nomadic areas under study.

“Herd mobility is possible in the nomadic land-use type due to the limited competing land uses in the area,” the three researchers noted.

“Sedentary sites and parts of semi-nomadic sites have experienced changes in land tenure from the traditional communal system to individual ownership.

“The changes in land reforms have significantly reduced the grazing areas and promoted permanent settlements that have restricted herd mobility, thereby undermining livestock production.”

They warned that the ecosystem can only achieve sustainable livelihoods and better food security if interventions are encouraged.

These include forming land trusts that advocate for land-use planning that allows for livestock movement to exploit the variable resources. 

Conservationists are deeply concerned, fearing there is no place for wildlife on small, subdivided lands.

For example, the subdivision and degradation that swept across Kaputei group ranches north of Amboseli have seen the once large seasonal migrations of wildebeest and zebra vanish. Livestock production is also compromised.

Studies have shown that the long-term changes, which include declining proportions of wet and dry season grazing reserves, woody vegetation and a variety of pastures, have had negative impacts on pastoralism and wildlife conservation in the Amboseli area.

A recent study has also shown that the savannah ungulates (large mammals with hooves) are now facing genetic problems due to fences, roads, farms and settlements.

A scientific article published in the Nature Communications journal shows that wildebeest migration hurdles not only hamper their natural movement but also lead to genetic decay in those herds that are confined and no longer able to roam freely.

The only major wildebeest migration remaining is the ‘Great Migration’ in the Serengeti-Mara.

About 1.3 million wildebeests, accompanied by about 200,000 zebras and 400,000 gazelles, cover up to 3,000km annually in a clockwise cycle that follows seasonal rainfall patterns.

But only the wildebeest and zebra from the Serengeti cross the Mara River into Masai Mara.

The study says that due to limited source material on African wildlife populations prior to the mid-1800s, the number of historical wildebeest migrations is uncertain.

However, it is known that migrations comparable to those of the Serengeti-Maasai Mara population have been lost.

The study says an example of this relates to two wildebeest subspecies known as the white-bearded wildebeest.

They are the Western white-bearded wildebeest, which makes up the Serengeti-Mara population, and the Eastern white-bearded wildebeest, whose migration is centred on Kajiado county.

PROPOSED INTERVENTIONS

Big Life Foundation CEO Benson Leyian says the Amboseli triangle has community, wildlife and habitat.

“In between the triangle is our sustainability plan because we realise none of them can be sustained without the three,” Leyian says.

He says that in the habitat, they do a number of things.

“The first one is to help the community plan. We sit down under a tree and ask them what they want to do with their land.”

Leyian says when the Community Land Act 2016 was passed, most land transitioned from group ranches to community land.

He says people had interpretation that the community land would be allocated to whoever lived on the parcel.

Leyian says the Group Ranch Act entitled registered group members to land allocation.

At that point, however, the craze of land subdivision came in.

“We joined them and tried to help them plan. The first phase in that habitat is to plan. We do an elaborate mapping of where settlement, irrigation, rangelands and conservation areas will be,” he says, citing Mbirikani.

Leyian says they have done planning for different group ranches, such as Olgulului, Kimana and Eselengei.

“We have done some of them very well, while some of them flopped because people were running ahead of us.”

Leyian says sometimes you get people who have issued land titles before the plan.

After the plan, they have to ensure that the document is referred and respected through law.

“We go through the Physical Act, where the plan is registered at the county level, to follow the restrictions as identified by the members,” he says.

Through the National Environment Management Authority, they have done a strategic environmental assessment that is gazetted by the authority.

A leasing programme ensures that landowners benefit. Under the programme, individual owners of the subdivided land have the right to do what they want with their land, so long as it is compliant with subdivision land-use plans.

Significant portions of this landscape are crucially important for livestock grazing and wildlife, and for both to continue to thrive, the land needs to be managed collectively rather than individually.

This requires joining large numbers of the newly private plots together to form conservancies, including specific areas migrating wildlife favour to find food, water or mates, and other areas with the lushest grass or most reliable water for cattle.

This process of joining plots together is voluntary; landowners can choose whether they include their plot in the scheme or not.

To help motivate landowners to sign up, Big Life raises funds from conservation supporters around the world that it then uses to pay lease fees to the landowners that join the programme.

The money is also used to fund health, education and employment initiatives that benefit leaseholders.

Nairrabala is one of many areas of southern Kenya where formerly communally owned group ranches have been broken up or "subdivided" into tens of thousands of parcels of private land and given to individual households.

If the new landowners then sell their land, or fence and farm it, the grasslands could fragment into a patchwork of commercial agriculture and smallholdings that will struggle to thrive in what is already a water-stressed environment that’s now facing a climate change-induced drought.

The Nairrabala Conservancy is an important area for both wildlife and livestock grazing.

Some 1,780 landowners in Nairrabala Conservancy will add their land to Big Life’s land lease programme.

This means the organisation will now be paying more than Sh100 million a year to more than 3,300 landowners holding, or soon holding conservation land leases with Big Life in the greater Amboseli Ecosystem.

The land leased already covers close to 100,000 acres, with plans in place to increase the leased area to about 230,000 acres.

Across the wider ecosystem, leaseholders’ sons and daughters are among the 950 students whose primary, secondary or university education is being fully or partially paid for by Big Life.

Already, 37 students from Nairrabala Conservancy have been issued with scholarships.

The organisation’s health programme closes the gap between people and crucial services, supporting 20 public health clinics and training 72 community health promoters that cater to remote villages, many in areas covered by the existing lease programme. Nairrabala’s new leaseholders will soon share similar benefits.

Big Life’s conservation leasing programme helps protect areas needed to sustain livestock grazing and wildlife movements so they are not split up, blocked or degraded, and makes sure landowners earn a benefit for volunteering to be a part of that.

Current leases are signed for 20 years, earning each landowner Sh1,000 per acre they lease per year, with inbuilt increases as time passes.