Elephant numbers are also continuing to climb and now stand at around 1,600, in the larger Amboseli Ecosystem marking a full recovery from the 2009 drought losses www.elephanttrust.org. The recovery testifies to the negligible poaching, as documented in Big Life www.biglife.org. The growing Amboseli population is dispersing widely across the Kenya Tanzania borderlands, according to collared elephant tracking by IFAW www.ifaw.org.  As reported earlier, elephant numbers in the park grew sharply after a long declined from the late 1980s to the drought of 2009. The resurgence was due to the lower elephant pressure on the swamps and regrowth of sedges following the loss of some 400 animals in the drought. The elephant numbers in the park have begun to decline once more with the heavy pressure on swamp grazing. The growing and dispersing herds of elephants is causing conflict with farmers east and south of Amboseli. David Western and Peadar Brehony (coordinator of the Borderlands Conservation Initiative) met Richard Bonham and his staff of Big Life on Mbirikani Group to discuss how to address the mounting human-elephant conflict. We agreed to pull together all the main NGOs, including ACC, ACP and the Amboseli Trust for Elephants to address the conflict under the umbrella of the Amboseli Ecosystem Trust. The AET board of trustees met the following week and agreed to serve as the umbrella for the human-wildlife conflict study and management program.

Livestock populations

Livestock populations sprang back to pre-drought levels far faster than from natural recruitment. The resurgent population is due in large measure to pastoralists selling their healthy cattle and buying up twice the number of Somali cattle from the north. The rapid recovery has stunted pasture regeneration and pushed Amboseli back into a premature grazing deficit. Cattle have moved in from as far as the rift valley, putting yet more pressure on the grasslands. This recurrent boom and bust cycle of livestock and grassland production will be the focal point of land use and herd management at the Mbirikani land planning workshop in January. Funds are available under the GEF grant, starting January, to develop better herd and pasture management programs.

Following the year-long moratorium on developments NEMA (National Environmental Authority) issued pending a Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) of the Amboseli Ecosystem Management Plan (AEMP), Amboseli Ecosystem Trust (AET)  raised the $100,000 from the NGOs and KWS to conduct the review. LCAOF has been kept abreast of progress in previous reports. Following a very professional and participatory process, the Strategic Environmental Assessment  was approved by the steering committee in November. NEMA subsequently issued a letter of authorization granting AET authorization over the plan. The gazette binds all government agencies, land owners and developers to the provisions of AEMP. The plan zones the Amboseli ecosystem according to best land uses and tourism intensity zones. It also calls for a clear demarcation of wildlife dispersal areas and corridors. The SEA of an ecosystem management plan is the first of its kind for Kenya and possibly Africa. It is a landmark in granting the landowner association the responsibility for implementation oversight and integrated natural resource management of the ecosystem. It also calls for livestock and water plans to be drawn up in the coming year. There has been enormous interest in the SEA process from other landowner association, NGOs and most recently the US Ambassador. He paid a visit to Amboseli in October to review the plans and discuss US funding for similar initiatives.The gazetted land use plan comes at a time when a new grant from the Global Environmental Facility, administered through KWS, will inject four years of funding into biodiversity conservation and habitat restoration of the Amboseli ecosystem.ACC will also help set up the Nongotiak Resource Centre under contract to AET over the next five years, as it does with Lale’enok under SORALO. Finally, under the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) grant (see below), ACC is provided funds to help build up the capacity of AET. In doing so it will draw heavily on the skills of KWS and other NGOs.

Land use planning in Kajiado County

The governor of Kajiado County, David Nkedianye, who holds a PhD in conservation biology, called on ACP and ACC to co-host a workshop on land planning for the county. The governor is fully aware of the pressures of subdivision and land buying companies poised to snap up pastoral lands for speculative resale to small holders. We held the meeting in October for a spectrum of leaders across the county to look at the risks of subdivision and promote land use planning. The upshot was that Maasai leaders convened a meeting in Mombasa early November to consider the risks of subdivision. They came out strongly opposed to sub-division ranches until the alternatives have been fully weighed and land use plans drawn up. Kimana Group Ranch adjacent to Amboseli was cited as the prima fascia case against subdivision. Since the subdivision the ranch has been largely fenced and sold to land speculators, leaving the Maasai with no grazing or future on the land.Following the leaders caution, the Mbirikani group ranch committee has called on ACC to help convene a land use planning workshop in January. The plans will draw on GEF and other funds to implement the program. Ololorashi Ogului is expected to follow a similar process shortly.

It has been a busy and productive time for ACP and, in the interests of space, only the highlights are covered here. 

¨       Funded by African Wildlife Foundation through a Dutch grant, ACP is assisting ACC to draw up an environmental vulnerability framework for northern Tanzania and southern Kenya. The analysis will draw on the long-term data for Amboseli to look at the causes of degradation and biodiversity loss.

¨       Dr. David Western was approached last year by John Galaty, well known for his work on East African pastoralists, to submit a joint grant proposal to the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and IDRC to study and influence community-based conservation in the Tanzania-Kenya borderlands. The two institutional bodies are McGill University and ACC. SSHRC and IDRC awarded eight grants at a launch of the joint funding program in Ottawa in early October.

¨        ACC and McGill University were awarded a seven year grant of $2.5 million. The grant covers studies and training as well as regular reviews of the finding and applications. The study will use changes in wildlife numbers and elephants and lions as keystone indicators, drawing heavily on the outputs of work of the Borderlands Conservation Initiative.

¨       Dr. Victor Mose has excelled in setting up a fully integrated database for Amboseli, overseeing the data analysis and designing open source analytical and visualization tools. He attended a spatial ecology workshop in Birmingham, UK in June and has also attended modeling workshops in Lyon France. He recently presented a paper at the annual bioinformatics (TDWG) congress in Sweden. In addition, he sets up databases and press-button analytical programs for ACC, SORALO and other organizations.

¨       Rebecca Kariuki, who began as an intern with ACP two years ago, has won a prestigious EU scholarship to do her PhD at University of York, working on plant dynamics drawn from the long-term Amboseli database.

¨       Eric Ochwang’i was awarded a Masters in social statistics from the University of Nairobi, based on his analysis of cascade effects caused by the compression of elephants in Amboseli National Park. 

¨       Kennedy Sakimber, David Maitumo’s son, has joined ACP and is underway on his Masters looking into Maasai views of change in Amboseli, the causes of change, and how the community is affected and responds.

¨       Dr. David Western attended the World Parks Congress in Sydney in November to give a presentation at a special session of human wildlife conflict.