Coastal East Africa
Threats
Illegal timber harvested and transported in northern Mozambique.
© WWF Philipp Goeltenboth
Over the past 50 years, human activity has significantly altered this once pristine paradise. The countries here are among the poorest in the world and livelihoods and human health are directly connected to the natural resources.
Climate Change
Countries like Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique have already been suffering from unpredictable rainfall and frequent drought, along with intense rains and flooding. Coastal storms bring stronger winds creating greater wave damage along shorelines. Weather extremes also severely threaten the region’s traditional livelihoods of farming and fishing. In rural areas, people have lost crops and livestock and face hunger and outbreaks of malaria. Climate change is expected to make this and other problems even worse.
Warming seawaters threaten the incredible diversity associated with the regions’ coral reefs, leading to die-offs from bleaching. Coastal erosion threatens the nesting beaches of marine turtles and harms mangrove forests—which are already being battered from increased storm surges, and vulnerable to future sea level rise. Learn about what WWF is doing to help.
Overfishing
Overfishing for local consumption and export to commercial markets poses a major threat to the region. Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing is thought to account for up to 30 percent of total catches in some important fisheries in the region. Foreigners operate large-scale industrial fisheries along the coast, exporting most of the catch, Kenya and Tanzania may have already reached a point beyond which their fisheries can be sustained. If the trend continues, fishermen trying to maintain fish catches are likely to adopt more destructive fishing practices like using dynamite to kill or stun hard-to-catch coral reef fish.
Unregulated and unsustainable timber harvesting
Coastal forests provide a wide range of wood and non-wood products for local use, but are increasingly threatened by expanding agriculture, charcoal production, uncontrolled fires, unsustainable logging and the expansion of settlements. An estimated 60 percent of natural habitats in the EACFE have been converted over time to farmland and urban areas. Degradation and loss of coastal forests and associated habitats and the species that they support is a result of a wide range of natural and man-made causes interacting at different levels and intensities on the east African coastal forest ecosystems.
The commercial logging of coastal forest tree species occurs mainly in northern Mozambique and remote areas of Tanzania, especially to the south, and to a lesser degree in Kenya. Logging using pitsawing techniques occurs in coastal forests where timber trees remain. Many forests have already been logged to exhaustion. Particularly heavy exploitation for round wood export recently occurred in the coastal forests of the Rufiji, Kilwa and Lindi Districts of Tanzania, although this has now been stopped. Similar logging for export to the Far East continues in the northern and the central area of Mozambique. Although some of this logging is undertaken using licences obtained from the relevant authorities, some is illegal. Logging of the valuable trees is often the first major disturbance to a forest, which then progresses to fire wood collection and charcoal burning, and in the worse cases to clearance for agricultural use.
A timber report for Tanzania conducted by TRAFFIC and released in May 2007 showed that an estimated $58 million worth of timber revenue is lost each year because of governance shortfalls due to wasteful harvesting and processing practices, non-collection or under-collection of forestry product royalties and the under-valuation of forest products. Furthermore, the deleterious effects of deforestation on watersheds, hydroelectricity, fire outbreaks and biodiversity are now evident throughout Tanzania.
Wildlife trade
The countries of Coastal East Africa - Mozambique, Tanzania and Kenya - function as major conduits through which large-scale ivory consignments move from the Congo Basin to international markets in Asia. This trade appears to have increased sharply in recent years. Rising demand and weak enforcement has led to increasing ivory markets and elephant poaching. We are currently conducting a nationwide study to access the scale of the ivory trade in Mozambique, the largest unregulated ivory market in Eastern Africa. In both Kenya and Tanzania, there is active suppression of domestic trading of ivory from the interior of Africa. Tanzania, in particular, has recently been implicated as the country of export for a series of large-scale ivory seizures in 2005 and 2006. Collectively a total of 11.5 tons were seized in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Philippines which entered trade through Tanzanian ports.
