The use of fire in West Africa's savanna landscapes is contested, ranging from views that see it as a natural part of the landscape to those advocating its complete prohibition. Despite decades of restrictive fire policies, widespread seasonal burning of landscapes reveals a persistent gap between policy intentions and on-the-ground practices. Using Northern Ghana as a case study, this research examines how traditional burning practices are problematised in contemporary fire-related policies and practices, drawing on Bacchi's What is the Problem Represented to be? (WPR) framework to examine underlying assumptions, dominant discourses, silences, and policy effects.Findings revealed the enduring influence of historical land degradation narratives, alongside emerging carbon mitigation narratives, with comparatively limited attention to adaptation. The framing of all traditional burning practices as ‘bush burning’, ‘wildfires’, or ‘uncontrolled burning’ obscures their varied ecological, cultural and livelihood functions in savanna systems. Contemporary fire governance privileges technocratic and market-oriented solutions, marginalising traditional fire knowledge and oversimplifying the socio-ecological complexity of fire regimes. In doing so, policy discourse often positions local communities, particularly herders and marginalised groups, as contributors to environmental degradation, while diverting attention from broader historical, political-economic and ecological processes shaping fire use.The study argues for more holistic, politically informed, and ecologically nuanced approaches to fire governance that recognise the productive and adaptive role of controlled burning, engage with traditional fire knowledge, and address the structural drivers shaping environmental change in Northern Ghana.

Scientists are divided about how to respond to high levels of biodiversity loss. These differences have become clear in recent debates over the role of area-based conservation, which includes protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures. Debates between supporters and critics of these measures reflect the views of different epistemic communities who engage with area-based conservation using various methods, framings and normative positions. Conservation scientists emphasize biodiversity protection and habitat integrity; land systems scientists foreground land-use dynamics in interconnected socio-ecological systems; and political ecologists examine power relations and the social implications of protected areas. Despite these emphases differing in focus, they are internally compatible in that they share concerns about both biodiversity loss and social equity, although they assign different weights to these priorities. This Perspective brings together authors representing these three epistemic communities along with a fourth — environmental data justice scholars. We argue that disagreements among conservation scientists, land systems scientists and political ecologists can become constructive by applying vocabularies and frameworks from environmental data justice. Introducing environmental data justice to the debate will help conservation researchers and practitioners to develop more effective interventions to achieve the underlying goals of area-based conservation. Scientists disagree about area-based conservation’s role in addressing biodiversity loss. This Perspective examines how conservation scientists, land systems scientists and political ecologists approach these debates differently and argues that environmental data justice frameworks can bridge epistemic divides, helping researchers to develop more effective and equitable conservation interventions.

Globally, there are growing demands for evidence-based policies to manage wildfires. Currently, fire management in Northern Ghana relies on policies and projects developed without a comprehensive understanding of fire trends and drivers. This study analyzed spatiotemporal trends in burned areas (500 m MODIS and 30 m Landsat products), active fires, and fire seasonality using linear regression analysis to investigate shifts in fire regimes between 2000 and 2022. Biophysical and social drivers of the observed trends were also examined. When averaged across Northern Ghana, MODIS burned area data (large fires) revealed a significant decreasing trend, while Landsat burned area (sensitive to large and small fires) and active fires showed no significant trend. When disaggregated by region, MODIS burned area showed significant decreasing trends for the Savannah Region, Upper East and Upper West Regions. Conversely, Landsat burned area showed no trend in all regions of Northern Ghana. Active fires increased significantly in the Northern Region. Active fire data also revealed a shift in fire seasonality in Northern Ghana towards more mid-dry season fires. Institutional perspectives attributed the decline in large fires (as identified by MODIS) to the success of interventions aimed at reducing uncontrolled burning (locally referred to as bushfires), while persistent burning (as indicated by Landsat burned area and MODIS active fires) was linked to livelihoods dependent on burning. LULC analysis showed increases in agricultural and built-up areas, consistent with cropland expansion associated with fire-dependent land clearing. The study also identified important limitations associated with the existing fire products that obscured accurate fire detection. Our results highlight the importance of scale, resolution, and sensor characteristics in interpreting fire regimes. Aggregating data across the whole of Northern Ghana obscured contrasting trends in individual regions. The different trends observed between MODIS and Landsat burned areas suggest that changes in fire activities are occurring unevenly across spatiotemporal scales. Additionally, shifts towards mid-dry season burning suggest misalignment between current early burning policies and actual fire dynamics in Northern Ghana. Effective and sustainable fire management will therefore require integrating local perspectives, recognizing the ecological role of fires in savannas, and adopting monitoring approaches tailored to different fire types.

In Africa, landscape burning by local communities is vital for rural livelihoods and wildfire risk management. However, the socio-political dynamics and everyday governance that shape its use have received less attention. Drawing on livelihoods as an intimate government theory, this study uses focus group discussions, key informants and semi-structured interviews to examine how fire use in Northern Ghana is negotiated through self-governance and broader power structures. The findings revealed that land tenure emerged as a key factor restricting fire use and decision-making, particularly among women and settled migrants. These restrictions formed part of the broader mechanisms for maintaining social hierarchies and territorial control in these communities. On private farmlands, fire use was widely accepted and framed as responsible, with decisions largely controlled by male household heads. In communal areas, traditional authorities, notably the Earth priest, governed through spiritual and moral narratives. At the same time, decentralised state and NGO-led participatory approaches introduced competing and multiple forms of control. These overlapping structures have contributed to reshaping fire regimes, while reinforcing marginalisation and intensifying the politics of environmental stewardship. We argue that achieving inclusive fire governance requires confronting the embedded power dynamics within everyday livelihood practices.

Understanding ecosystem service (ES) change in African drylands is critical as land use transformation increasingly affects ecosystems and the communities that depend on them. However, most ES assessments overlook or homogenise local perspectives, limiting their accuracy and relevance. This study develops an approach that combines Landsat-based land cover mapping with participatory assessment to quantify changes in provisioning ES in the Lower Omo, a culturally diverse region of southwest Ethiopia, over the past two decades. The method incorporates the perspectives of multiple beneficiary groups, enabling social and spatial differentiation of ES change across the landscape.Results highlight the importance of natural land covers (shrubland, grassland, and riverine forest) for local provisioning services and show substantial ES declines associated with the expansion of monoculture agriculture linked to large-scale land acquisitions. Disaggregated ES maps reveal that changes that appear uniform in satellite-derived land cover data are experienced unevenly across communities due to differences in livelihoods, values, and exposure to land use change. For example, bush encroachment increases ES value for some groups by supporting cultivation, wild plant harvesting, and wood products, while reducing grazing resources for pastoral communities. Similarly, commercial monoculture expansion produces uneven outcomes, with some communities losing access to high-value ES while others are less affected.These findings demonstrate that bridging participatory perspectives and remote sensing improves ES assessments by revealing distributional impacts often obscured by top-down analyses. The approach offers a replicable framework for producing socially differentiated, landscape-scale ES assessments to inform sustainable land management in dryland regions.

The Kananaskis Wildfire Charter marks an important step toward addressing increasingly extreme wildfires. Attending to complex drivers, supporting Indigenous and local fire stewardship, and shifting toward integrated fire management will help ensure equitable, effective, and ecologically grounded governance and management.

A growing nature recovery agenda in Scotland is creating new ecologies through species reintroductions, placing increased pressures on rural communities to coexist with animals for which there are no cultural, institutional or living memories. One such species is wild boar, officially called feral pigs, and hereafter WBFPs to acknowledge debates over their identity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Scottish Highlands, this paper examines emerging interpretations of WBFP coexistence; and factors shaping them across local and national discourses. Locally, three discourses – ferality, wildness, and controlled decontrolling – emerged that each propose distinct pathways to coexistence. These discourses were shaped by the unsanctioned nature of WBFPs' release, the extinction of experience, tensions over rewilding, the Scottish Government's non-interventionist approach (including the feral categorisation of WBFPs), limited scientific knowledge, storytelling, and media sensationalism. We examine two cross-cutting themes – belonging and storytelling – to understand how these factors have shaped and co-produced discourses. WBFPs were predominantly positioned as out of place, dangerous, and unruly. This perception of unbelonging was predominantly shaped by the extinction of experience, where the absence of cultural practices, management traditions, and institutional frameworks has left WBFPs without established roles or relations in the landscape. Storytelling emerged not merely as anecdotal noise, but as a powerful driver of coexistence interpretations. Limited experiential and scientific knowledge created more fertile ground for stories to circulate – amplifying negative experiences, fuelling fear, and polarising discourses. These disputes are likely to be reproduced wherever WBFP populations expand under the Scottish Government's current approach, which has helped construct WBFPs as a feral pest rather than a native species with which coexistence must be negotiated.

Global policy commitments to ensure that protected and conserved areas (PCAs) are equitably governed have increased interest in empirically assessing and analyzing social equity. Although numerous assessments have been conducted in individual PCAs, there is limited empirical insight into equity as a multidimensional concept beyond the site level. We investigated the distributional, procedural, and recognitional equity challenges associated with the governance of PCAs and determined whether the identified challenges differed according to governance type and actor group. We conducted a meta-level analysis of equitable governance assessments conducted at 37 PCAs in 19 countries that form part of the new SAGE (Site-level Assessment of Governance and Equity) database. SAGE is a participatory tool for site-level actors to systematically discuss and assess equity dynamics at their PCAs. We found a large variation in assessment results across the sites. Mitigating the negative impacts of conservation on local communities was most often identified as the biggest challenge. In general, equity assessments tended to be slightly more positive for PCAs governed by and with Indigenous Peoples and local communities than those governed purely by government agencies. Evaluations of different actors often revealed substantial differences in opinion on specific governance issues. In particular, evaluations of PCA decision-makers tended to be more positive than those of PCA users. As an early-stage exploration of the growing SAGE database, our findings provide proof of concept that tools for assessing and improving PCA governance gain value from taking multidimensional approaches and need to consider different actors' views. Although the growing SAGE database holds potential for further insights on how equity is perceived across governance types, ecosystems, and geographical regions, the primary objective of SAGE needs to remain understanding and advancing equity at the site level.

Nature-based solutions are increasingly advocated to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss, while improving ecosystem resilience and providing additional ecosystem services. In Scotland, woodland expansion and restoration of degraded peatlands are expected to play a major role in meeting net-zero emissions by 2045 and have prompted debates about the impact of increased woodland cover and prescribed fire on the biodiversity and ecosystem services provided by upland landscapes. In alignment with national policy, the Cairngorms National Park, the UK’s largest national park, has committed to an ambitious programme of woodland expansion and peatland restoration in a landscape dominated by heather moorlands that is predominantly managed through prescribed burning for game management. Using the Native Woodland Model and the InVest modelling platform, we assessed the effects of five land cover and land use change scenarios, with different levels of prescribed fire regulation and woodland expansion, to evaluate their benefits and costs on biodiversity and carbon sequestration. Results show that changing the extent and management of habitats will result in different carbon sequestration pathways, as well as biodiversity winners and losers. The scenario presenting greater benefits for the conservation of biodiversity also has lower above-ground carbon sequestration potential and a larger negative impact on red grouse habitats, thus being less profitable to sporting estates. Hence, trade-offs will be necessary to achieve optimal carbon sequestration and biodiversity gains, with a potential role played by the continuation of prescribed fires and traditional moorland management practices as well as complementary grants and support measures based on biodiversity benefits rather than carbon sequestration. The results from this study could support discussions regarding future management of the uplands, trade-offs between loss of carbon in soils, carbon sequestration in woodlands and conservation of biodiversity, as well as stakeholders likely to be affected.

Fire has cultural and economic significance for Indigenous and rural peoples worldwide, being used to manage landscapes for activities such as hunting, gathering, cropping, and forestry, and for ceremonial and spiritual purposes. Policy interventions by state and non-state organizations, such as regulations, economic incentives, and communication campaigns, can target fire use directly, or affect it indirectly, for example, by restricting land access. Yet evidence of such impacts has not been synthesized at the global scale. We analyzed 512 examples in 68 countries to describe the range of policy interventions by state and non-state organizations that target and/or affect fire use, categorizing interventions based on the broad actor types involved, their mode of operation (e.g., regulation) and their intentionality and/or possible effects vis-a-vis fire use. Of these interventions, 74% involved only state agencies in policy design and implementations, 4% involved only non-state organizations, and 18% involved collaboration between state and/or non-state organizations and/or communities. Three hundred and nine interventions directly targeted fire use, of which 87% aimed to eliminate or constrain fire use. Two hundred and three affected fire use indirectly, of which 88% led to reductions in or constraints upon fire use. Though there is some recognition in the 21st century of a need, in certain contexts, to support local fire use, for reasons related to environmental justice, ecology, wildfire risk and climate change, the literature we reviewed points to several challenges for contemporary efforts toward this end. These include contradictions between policy interventions, mistrust between actors following histories of fire suppression, greater fuel loads increasing the risk of burning where fire has been suppressed, and the need to consider the indirect effects of other types of policy, such as those related to land tenure.

Local access to "wild,"common-pool terrestrial and aquatic resources is being diminished by global resource demand and large-scale conservation interventions. Many theories suggest the well-being of wild harvesters can be supported through transitions to other livelihoods, improved infrastructure, and market access. However, new theories argue that such benefits may not always occur because they are context dependent and vary across dimensions of well-being. We test these theories by comparing how wild harvesting and other livelihoods have been associated with food security and life satisfaction in different contexts across similar to 10,800 households in the tropics. Wild harvests coincided with high well-being in remote, assetpoor, and less-transformed landscapes. Yet, overall, well-being increased with electrical infrastructure, proximity to cities, and household capitals. This provides large-scale confirmation of the context dependence of nature's contributions to people, and suggests a need to maintain local wild resource access while investing in equitable access to infrastructure, markets, and skills.

Millions of households globally rely on uncultivated ecosystems for their livelihoods. However, much of the understanding about the broader contribution of uncultivated ecosystems to human wellbeing is still based on a series of small-scale studies due to limited availability of large-scale datasets. We pooled together 11 comparable datasets comprising 232 settlements and 10,971 households in ten low-and middle-income countries, representing forest, savanna and coastal ecosystems to analyse how uncultivated nature contributes to multi-dimensional wellbeing and how benefits from nature are distributed between households. The resulting dataset integrates secondary data on rural livelihoods, multidimensional human wellbeing, household demographics, resource tenure and social-ecological context, primarily drawing on nine existing household surveys and their associated contextual information together with selected variables, such as travel time to cities, population density, local area GDP and land use and land cover from existing global datasets. This integrated dataset has been archived with ReShare (UK Data Service) and will be useful for further analyses on nature-wellbeing relationships on its own or in combination with similar datasets.

Intertidal mudflats are highly productive coastal habitats, serving as a transition zone between terrestrial and marine ecosystems and providing a wealth of ecosystem services, including providing nursery and feeding grounds for many species of conservation and commercial importance. These habitats are important for wintering shorebirds and waders, which depend on them for food, nesting, and migration. Their importance was formally recognised in 1971 following the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, yet their conservation status remains largely uncertain as they are difficult to survey, and a complete understanding of their complex biophysical processes has yet to be established. While intertidal mudflats are found all around the UK coastline, there are few routine field surveys of these habitats, making effective conservation in the face of rising anthropogenic and climate pressures challenging. Marine protected areas (MPAs) across the UK list mudflats and sandflats not covered by seawater at low tide as a designation feature separate from saltmarshes, but they are often managed together - where management exists. A lack of resources has resulted in several paper parks around the UK, where MPAs are designated but not adequately monitored or managed. This study explores the use of population data of benthic species and shorebirds as a proxy for temporal changes in mudflat con-ditions, focusing on two MPAs in the Irish Sea, Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland, and the Solway Firth in Scotland/England. It finds that the two methods together can provide information useful to support MPA management, but this approach is hampered by poor availability of sufficient data. Such data limitation can impact what it means to achieve or maintain favourable conditions for these habitats.

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are important yet complex conservation tools that can be difficult to govern and manage. In France, the State manages protected areas with national status, but consults communities and users when making decisions. How can the governance of an MPA be improved while respecting the framework imposed on it by State regulations? This study focuses on the Sept-iles National Nature Reserve (Reserve naturelle nationale, or RNN), located in northern Brittany (France) and renowned for its natural heritage, particularly for its seabird conservation efforts. Its management methods are provided for by the French Environmental Code, and are structured around an Advisory Committee, a Scientific Council, and a designated manager. Any change in the functioning of this committee must comply with the provisions of French law. Following a decree to extend the perimeter of the RNN, there was the opportunity to reassess the functioning of the current governance structure the RNN Sept-iles and to define its strengths and weaknesses so that these may be addressed as the RNN grows. Various stakeholders - for the most part members of the Advisory Committee - were engaged through semi-structured interviews, guided by the principles of good governance. This study found that the current structure of the Advisory Committee is not aligned with the French Environmental Code and proposes new working groups that could offer stakeholders more opportunities for participation. There were issues of representation, communication, and power struggles within the Advisory Committee and highlights a distinct lack of young people within the governance structure of the RNN, which poses questions about its future. This is one of the first studies in France to propose an alternative governance structure involving more RNN stakeholders that can fit into the current framework imposed by State regulations.(c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Global resource demand and large-scale conservation interventions are diminishing tropical communities’ access to food, fiber, fodder and fuel from wild (e.g. uncultivated) resources. Theory disagrees on whether the wellbeing of wild harvesting households will thus be diminished, or if it can be improved by a transition to non-wild livelihoods and other economic development. Here we present a cross-sectional analysis identifying in which contexts households with non-wild livelihoods have experienced superior food security and life satisfaction across the tropics, and vice versa—contexts where wild harvesting continues to be associated with better outcomes. Using a dataset of ~10,800 households representative of diverse peri-urban and rural development tropical contexts, we model that in 2015, ~650 million people in the region were directly harvesting wild resources. Regardless of livelihood type, the wellbeing outcomes of all households increased with electrical infrastructure, proximity to cities and household capitals. Non-wild harvesters achieved superior outcomes in most, but not all, contexts. Wild harvesters maintained relatively high outcomes in more remote and less converted areas, and amongst households with lower physical capital (cultivated land, productive assets). Our results suggest that while reduced access to wild resources is more likely to disrupt the wellbeing of remote and less capitalized households, overall improvements to wellbeing have historically been associated with improved access to infrastructure, markets and other household capitals. Our results thus support policies that balance maintaining access to wild resources while pursuing sustainable and equitable longer-term improvements in services, infrastructure and markets.

The role of common pool natural resources (CPRs) such as forests, grasslands, rivers, lakes, wetlands and oceans in rural economies has been much debated in the literature, often on the basis of micro-level and context-specific analyses focusing on a single CPR in a single location. This paper draws on data from nine low and medium-income countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America to estimate the contribution of CPR-based income to poverty and inequality, and to explore how CPR-based income is associated with household assets, the abundance of CPRs, and institutions of resource access.Our analysis confirms that CPR income contributes significantly to the income of the rural poor. Households below the World Bank $1.9 poverty line derive on average one fourth of their household income from CPR. Therefore, there is a potential synergy between SDGs 14 (conserving life below water) and 15 (conserving life on land), and SDG 1 (poverty reduction). Elite households, however, generally benefit more from CPRs, not because of differential access to the resource but because of their differential access to complementary productive assets, financial capital, social networks and markets. Hence, CPRs reduce inequality only when resource extraction is done for subsistence purposes using labour-intensive methods.

Human-set fires are a crucial component of African savannas, affecting ecosystem structure, carbon emissions, local hazards and livelihoods. Yet, most fire research in these ecosystems focuses on the fire ecology of protected areas. Research exploring fire regimes in inhabited landscapes remains limited, undermining opportunities for culturally and environmentally sustainable fire management. To address this gap, we used interviews in Tanzanian farming communities and remote sensing to identify intentions behind fire use and the perceived relative frequency and riskiness of fires set for different purposes. We found that the most common ignitions were intentional and important to livelihoods. Burning was adaptive, responsive to environmental conditions, and optimised for the intended outcome with the perceived riskiest fires intentionally spreading uncontrolled. Remote sensing showed that most of the total burned area was accounted for by fires during the late dry season when people burned for activities, such as field preparation, and when environmental conditions encouraged fire spread. Our findings offer an insight into fire regimes in inhabited landscapes, by exploring how intentions shape the fire regime at the landscape scale. We discuss how understanding these intentions and local priorities, including adaptive uses of fire, is key to sustainable fire management outside protected areas.

Adverse effects of climate risks on access to potable water are increasingly being acknowledged in sub Saharan Africa. Resilient infrastructure supported by appropriate governance arrangements, is therefore central to water security under these extreme weather events. For several decades, governments in sub Saharan Africa have developed governance arrangements including infrastructure and legislation to ensure water security. However, the effectiveness of policy consideration in resilience of potable water infrastructure to climate risks/extreme weather events as well as their seasonality has been a neglected area. Using Zomba rural in Southern Malawi as a case study, this study was therefore aimed at addressing this gap by assessing the effectiveness of local water policy responses to extreme weather events using the 2015 flooding effects on potable water in Zomba rural in Southern Malawi as a case study. The study firstly analysed rainfall and extremes indices for evidence of trends of climate risks in Zomba during the period from 1982 to 2015. To understand the effects of the 2015 flooding on water infrastructure and access to potable water as well as evaluate policy provisions for responses to climate risks, the study further applied a qualitative approach through policy document review, key informant interviews, focus group discussions. The results suggest a generally decreasing annual rainfall pattern with high variability by seasons and frequent occurrences of droughts and flooding. The annual rainfall decrease was not statistically significant at alpha = 0.05 level, whereas the extremes indices were statistically significant. However, the study found that current policy frameworks are more biased towards drought preparedness as compared to flooding preparedness. For instance, the 2015 floods destroyed vital water supply infrastructure and the responsible institutions could not rehabilitate the damaged infrastructure, leaving communities with intermittent and no supply of potable water for over six months. On the other hand, during dry seasons and drought conditions, the intakes are above the water level. These results show that the present rural water infrastructure is vulnerable and not resilient enough to extreme weather events. In addition, the water institutions are especially not prepared to handle flooding events and their impacts. In this regard, water legislation and infrastructure designs do not adequately take into consideration the effects of extreme events on access to potable water, making water security a challenge in rural Malawi.

Restoring degraded landscapes is critical for achieving global environmental and development goals, and agroforestry is increasingly promoted as a nature-based solution to land degradation. Farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR) is an agroforestry-based approach for restoring degraded agricultural land and it has been widely implemented in African drylands. However, a recent systematic review found significant gaps in the evidence base for FMNR, including that its upscaling has been based on inadequate understandings of local contexts. Furthermore, studies reporting on farmer adoption of FMNR have mainly relied on quantitative data from household surveys, resulting in limited understandings of what motivates farmers who practice FMNR. This paper draws on the results of a qualitative study in northeastern Ghana to address two questions: 1) How and why do farmers practice FMNR? And 2) How does context influence farmers’ rationales for practicing FMNR? We found that farmers grounded their perspectives on the utility of FMNR in nuanced understandings of the local farming and land and tree tenure systems. The results of our study also demonstrate how farmers’ decision-making was situated within socially and agroecologically differentiated contexts, which were conditioned by long-term, multi-faceted change in the region. We conclude that in spite of the rush to scale up FMNR, more attention should be directed to assessing where, when, and for whom FMNR might be appropriate. Such assessments should be grounded in resource managers’ preferences, local agricultural and land and tree tenure systems, and the requisite biophysical conditions for FMNR. To support these efforts, we propose an FMNR suitability assessment framework, based on our findings and those from related studies. As landscape restoration is scaled up globally, initiatives should be informed by evidence demonstrating how and why resource managers might practice a restoration activity as well as how context influences their choices.