Determinants of farmers' tree-planting investment decisions as a degraded landscape management strategy in the central highlands of Ethiopia

Berhan Gessesse,Achim Bräuning,Woldeamlak Bewket

doi:10.5194/se-7-639-2016

Abstract

Abstract. Land degradation due to lack of sustainable land management practices is one of the critical challenges in many developing countries including Ethiopia. This study explored the major determinants of farm-level tree-planting decisions as a land management strategy in a typical farming and degraded landscape of the Modjo watershed, Ethiopia. The main data were generated from household surveys and analysed using descriptive statistics and a binary logistic regression model. The model significantly predicted farmers' tree-planting decisions (χ2 = 37.29, df = 15, P < 0.001). Besides, the computed significant value of the model revealed that all the considered predictor variables jointly influenced the farmers' decisions to plant trees as a land management strategy. The findings of the study demonstrated that the adoption of tree-growing decisions by local land users was a function of a wide range of biophysical, institutional, socioeconomic and household-level factors. In this regard, the likelihood of household size, productive labour force availability, the disparity of schooling age, level of perception of the process of deforestation and the current land tenure system had a critical influence on tree-growing investment decisions in the study watershed. Eventually, the processes of land-use conversion and land degradation were serious, which in turn have had adverse effects on agricultural productivity, local food security and poverty trap nexus. Hence, the study recommended that devising and implementing sustainable land management policy options would enhance ecological restoration and livelihood sustainability in the study watershed.

Highlights

The sustainability of mankind depends on the wise use of precious environmental capital such as soil, water, vegetation and others in the globalized 21st century world (Keesstra et al, 2016)
Large rural family size is on the whole linked with a higher human-labour resource, which would enable a household to realize a range of agricultural activities as well as landresource conservation and management practices
The marginal effects of the odds ratio show that increasing the size of the household by one unit increases the probability of participation in tree growing by nearly 0.6 times, other predictor variables being constant in the model

Summary

Introduction

The sustainability of mankind depends on the wise use of precious environmental capital such as soil, water, vegetation and others in the globalized 21st century world (Keesstra et al, 2016). As part of the earth’s environment and constituents of the watershed landscape ecosystem, land resources such as soil, water and vegetation have a variety of essential life support roles like provisioning, regulating and supporting functions and services (Keesstra et al, 2012, 2016; Berendse et al, 2015; Brevik et al, 2015; Decock et al, 2015; Smith et al, 2015). Land uses and land covers (LULCs), mainly vegetation covers, have been subjected to change globally in the form of conversion or modification, and their environmental functions and services have destabilized from time to time (Turner and Meyer, 1994; Turner et al, 1994; Geist et al, 2006; Najam et al, 2007; Angassa, 2014; Gong et al, 2015)

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