Over the past decade, Indigenous Maasai communities living in Ngorongoro District in Tanzania have faced a series of violent evictions. The government recently announced that more evictions are planned, under a proposal to divide the Ngorongoro Conservation Area into four zones.
Category: Tanzania
Monitoring deforestation for REDD: Maps, datasets, and above all uncertainty
How do we know whether or not a REDD project is actually reducing deforestation and forest degradation? Satellite data is one increasingly popular answer. Computers can be trained to use the data to detect deforestation and changes in land use and plot the information on easy to read maps.
Tanzanian farmers launch crowdfunding campaign to get justice after being violently evicted by forest guards from the Jane Goodall Institute’s REDD project
In 2009, the Jane Goodall Institute received US$2.76 million from the Norwegian Embassy in Tanzania. The money was to run a REDD project in the Masito Ugalla Ecosystem. Under the REDD project, farmers were violently evicted. The farmers received no compensation, and have had no help since the evictions.
How the poorest of the poor end up paying for REDD
I wrote this post in June 2018, for iz3w (Informationszentrum 3. welt), an organisation based in Freiburg, Germany. A German translation of an edited version is published in the May/June 2019 issue titled, “Klimawandel” (Climate change). The following is the unedited version.
Guest Post: Norwegian climate policy affects the poorest
Hanne Svarstad and Tor A. Benjaminsen have been carrying out research into REDD in Tanzania for several years. Svarstad is a political ecologist, sociologist and professor in Development Studies at Oslo Metropolitan University. Benjaminsen is a human geographer and professor of Development Studies at the Department of International Environment and Development Studies (Noragric), Norwegian University…