This paper examines the impact of climate change on poor households across South Africa who practice subsistence farming to supplement their household income and dietary requirements. We consider three production systems: specialized crops, livestock and mixed crop-livestock farming.

The joint EfD Report 2013/14 showcases the work undertaken by the Environment for Development Initiative. 

Please access the report to find out more about our research projects, policy interaction, academic capacity building and publications.

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In southern Africa, many early conservation efforts from the late 1800s and early 1900s either displaced local communities or restricted their access to natural resources. This naturally affected community attitudes towards protected areas and efforts were later made to rectify growing tensions. In the last few decades of the 20th century, these efforts led to conservation and ecotourism models that increasingly included communities in the decision-making and benefit-sharing process in order to garner their support.

The economic importance of the various attributes of dryland nature-based tourism in the Kgalagadi area is generally unknown, as is the distribution of benefits from such tourism. This study seeks to value selected attributes of nature-based tourism in the Kgalagadi area by applying the choice experiment technique and then assessing the potential for nature-based tourism to contribute to the Khomani San ‘bushmen’ livelihoods through a payment for ecosystem services scheme.

Given the considerable popularity of community-based wildlife management as a conservation tool, it is of interest to assess the long-run sustainability of this policy not only in conservation terms, but also in financial terms. In this paper, we use cost–benefit analysis to study the social and financial sustainability of a large set of community conservancies in Namibia, one of the few countries where community-based wildlife management policies have been in place long enough to assess their long-term viability.

Presently, the mountain gorilla in Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo is endangered, mainly by poaching and habitat loss. Revenue from gorilla tourism is shared with local communities, but the current scheme yields less-than-optimal conservation outcomes and therefore cannot be entrusted with long-term conservation. However, a performance-linked benefit sharing scheme, in which the park agency makes payments to the local community based on the increase in the gorilla population, can achieve socially optimal conservation.