Adaptation and Resilience to Climate Change

An important aspect coming out of the recent International agreements, such as the Framework Convention on Climate Change, have been plans to integrate climate change information and perspectives into new policies and programs for the protection of ecological systems, including measures that enhance adaptive capacity, strengthen resilience and reduce vulnerability to climate change. These recent plans resonate with United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that emphasize the enormous value of the goods and services people obtain from ecosystems, and the crucial role these goods and services play in poverty alleviation and development. Ecosystems are the primary resource for human well-being and provide key functions essential to sustainable economic development, especially for East African nations whose economies are heavily dependent on agriculture, rangeland pastoralism, forestry management and wildlife tourism: tourism accounting for 12.9% of Tanzania GDP 2014. Planning for the long-term future sustainable use of natural resources requires an understanding of the complexities (inherent in historical, contemporary and future adaptation scenarios) surrounding the process calling for new conservation paradigms and integration of information from long-term historical perspective on human-environment-societal-wildlife interactions and engagement with the biocultural heritage and societal evaluations of these information to achieve an increasingly diverse set of conservation, social and economic objectives. However, our present knowledge on human-ecosystem-environment interactions and capacity to adapt and build resilience to climate change is incomplete, often time-bounded to the recent past and largely qualitative in nature.