Across Africa, threats to ICCAs include both physical action (e.g. the imposition of extractive, invasive and polluting uses of land, water and coastal environments) as well as cultural action (e.g., the imposition of new values, foreign to the complexities and sophistication of the original local cultures). In Guinea as in Zambia and South Africa, mining is displacing communities, polluting water sources and eroding the land. In Senegal and Tanzania, dams and water diversion schemes have violently disrupted the complex socio-ecological systems that had evolved through centuries of knowledge development and exchanges in river ecosystems. In Kenya and Nigeria, electric transmission lines, oil pipelines and port developments are encroaching forests, polluting wetlands and displacing peasant agriculture. In Sierra Leone and Madagascar, fisheries are being devastated by trawlers, as forests are by illegal loggers. Throughout the continent, pastoralists are being squeezed out of their traditional migratory routes because of land grabbing– from large scale mono-cropping to uranium mining…
Meanwhile, fundamentalist beliefs are being forced into peoples’ mind by violence, terrorism and money, and a colossal cultural flattening is on the way through evangelization, poor-quality formal education and advertisements. The results include lack of respect for traditional indigenous knowledge and institutions, and even the loss of that knowledge and those institutions within communities, as the youth looks at urban areas and migration as the only options to secure their future. Other threats include climate change (e.g. severe coastal erosion) and poaching of wildlife at an industrial scale. Recognition of collective customary rights and responsibilities to land, waters and natural resources is rarely found at the scale at which it could put a stop to these disruptive phenomena. On the contrary, abuses and interferences on customary rights and institutions remain common.
