Ghana: Community Conservation in Ghana Has Evolved, but Policy and Funding Need to Catch Up

In Ghana, community resource management areas are the main way that local communities get involved in managing natural resources that fall outside protected areas. In this way, rural people protect their natural environment and earn a living from using nature sustainably.

The community resource management areas adopt a very different approach from fortress conservation. This is known to exclude and evict local communities from their lands.

Since the early 2000s, more than 63 community resource management areas have been set up across over 600 communities. They cover roughly 2 million hectares, just under 10% of Ghana's total land area.

The right to land and natural resources is complicated in Ghana. In many parts of the country, communities, traditional leaders, private companies and the government may all claim rights over the same land or natural resources. This leads to disagreements over who can use land, trees and wildlife.

We are conservation scientists specialising in community-based natural resource management, rural development and climate change. We did our PhD research on how these areas are managed. We also looked into how community resource management areas affect local incomes, jobs and people's daily lives, and how they could be funded with green financing.

In our view, community resource management areas are important because they help land to be managed by those closest to it. They also tackle climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and support people's livelihoods.

The Ghana Cocoa Forest REDD+ Programme in southern Ghana also relies on the community resource management area to bring communities, government agencies and farmers together to manage forests and carry out conservation activities.

Together, these two initiatives have established or supported 37 community resource management areas nationwide. Crucially, these initiatives focus on improved management of land and trees, not wildlife conservation alone.

However, community resource management areas have produced mixed outcomes. On the one hand, they've been successful in conservation and helping people's livelihoods. For instance, the community resource management area in Wechiau, in Ghana's Upper West Region along the border of Burkina Faso, includes a stretch of the Black Volta River where some of the last remaining hippopotamus live.

This area has helped increase the hippopotamus population by protecting river habitats, limiting hunting and involving local communities in ecotourism and conservation activities.

The Zukpiri community resource man