Understanding Land Use and Land Cover Changes in Northern Tanzania

The project Adaptation & Resilience to Climate Change (ARCC) is funded by the Swedish Research Council. It draws together researchers in environmental change, participatory research methods, archaeology and ecology at Tanzanian, Swiss, British and Swedish institutions. Their common aim is to investigate historical patterns of land cover and land use change in northern Tanzania. The wide range of local environments there includes semi-arid scrublands, savannahs, wetlands, montane forests and highelevation vegetation. There are also many land use regimes, with land designated for conservation, pastoralism, agriculture, agroforestry and human settlements ranging from isolated homesteads to urban complexes. The allocated areas and their boundaries have all changed through time. Today's multiple stakeholders have overlapping and sometimes competing interests. In complex and contested landscapes such as these, planning for sustainable and resilient futures poses considerable challenges. It requires the integration of cross-disciplinary perspectives on past, present and future environmental conditions and land uses. Together, these provide a nexus for stakeholder consensus and help build understanding of how landscapes and human interactions evolved and potentially co-adapted to their present conditions.