Happy World Environment Day!
Happy World Environment Day!
To celebrate World Environment Day today—5 Jun 2020—the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) is focusing on something called ‘participatory rangeland management’. As rangelands cover most of the Earth’s ice-free surface, managing them in equitable as well as sustainable ways are BIG matters—geographically, agriculturally and humanistically speaking.
Fiona Flintan is a senior scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), currently based in Rome, where she is seconded to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).
Flintan interviewed her colleague Ken Otieno for this year’s Global Landscapes Forum Bonn Digital Conference, held from 3–5 Jun 2020 and ending today.
Ken Otieno is acting director for RECONCILE, a non-governmental organization based in Kenya working on conflict issues, natural resource management and land governance. Otieno also coordinates the Rangelands Initiative Africa of the International Land Coalition. In these initiatives, he coordinates projects on participatory rangeland management.
Asked by Flintan what his major message was for the global audience and participants of this conference, Otieno said:
‘Let pastoralism and rangelands be given the same prominence that agriculture is given.’
Otieno explained that pastoral livestock herders ‘face many, many challenges.’
Among these pastoral challenges are an inability to have pastoral land tenure rights properly integrated in the statutory frameworks of national governments.
