3 November 2009
160 members of the Forest and Land Management Committees (FLMCs) and General Assemblies (GAs) of Nimopoh and Nitrian in Sinoe County identified indiscriminant hunting, fishing, slash & burn method of farming and animal trapping as the most common forms of human activities that directly affect the biodiversity of their forests and natural resources.
The committee and assembly members reached consensus on these threats at five one-day training sessions in five towns in Nimopoh and Nitrian where the Land Rights and Community Forestry Program (LRCFP) carried out training on Biodiversity Threat Analysis.
The goal of the training was to build confidence, foster team spirit, and promote consensus among members of the FLMCs and GAs in the assessment of threats to natural resources and biodiversity, as a first step towards improved and sustainable management. Mainly farmers, FLMCs and GAs are forest management bodies organized by communities at pilot sites of the LRCFP. They comprise youth, elders, men, women and disadvantaged people.
Because of the interactive and participatory nature of the training, members of the FLMCs were able to define biodiversity, threats and natural resources in their local languages, an aspect of the training which helped to broaden their understanding of the concepts and draw on their indigenous knowledge of the forest ecosystem.
"We should go in the communities and physically identify the threats and don't limit our understanding of threats at the level of the workshop alone", Victor Jaryee Klegbeh, Secretary of the FLMC of Nimopoh noted at the end of one of the training sessions in Deedo Town.
Inspired by lessons learned from the training, members of all FLMCs committed to demonstrate their understanding of the entire process by holding meetings in their respective communities as initial steps towards taking concrete actions to increase awareness and conduct the physical assessment of the 'threats' in each community.
The training is the second in a series of trainings designed to build the capacities and enhance the abilities of Forest and Land Management Committees to conserve the biodiversity and manage the natural resources of their respective communities. In July 2009, similar training was conducted for members of the Forest management Committees (FMCs) of Gba and Zor in Nimba County.
A team of central level technical staff from the LRCFP led by its Community Forestry specialist, Dr. Samuel Koffa, stayed in Greenville, Sinoe for nine days and worked with the County field staff and the project's implementing partners to finalize plans for the training exercise. Sinoe County has a unique forest landscape containing some of the hotspots of Liberia's biodiversity.
As part of efforts to help the Forestry Development Authority (FDA) build national institutional framework for community forestry in Liberia, LRCFP provides support to FDA for training, technical analyses and recommendations, based on its experiences in Sinoe and Nimba and experience in other countries that will enable communities to increasingly assume rights and responsibilities for managing their forest resources.
LRCFP is the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) program assisting the Forestry Development Authority (FDA) and forest-based communities to work together to manage Liberia's forests.
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