Sustainable biodiversity management in the Zamfara Sahel, Nigeria

Biodiversity is critical to human health, economies and livelihoods and is an important part of global sustainability. Biodiversity management is critical to protect against hazards and to increase the socioeconomic resilience of people and communities while reducing the decline or disappearance of biological diversity. Generally, biodiversity loss is induced by anthropogenic activities like human population growth, increased consumption and exploitation of natural resources. The exploitation of resources can lead to resource depletion, habitat loss, invasive species, pollution, and land-use change and can make an area more vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Biodiversity loss has been one of the root causes of conflicts in several parts of Nigeria and West Africa (Moritz 2010). Nigeria is richly endowed with biodiversity. Lying between longitudes 3°E and 15°E and between latitudes 4°N and 14°N, Nigeria has diverse ecological zones from mangroves to rainforest, mountains and savanna. The savanna regions can be further sub-divided into Guinea, Sudan and Sahel (Figure 1). According to Nigeria’s First National Biodiversity Report (Federal Republic of Nigeria 2001), the country’s biodiversity endowment includes >7895 identified plant species in 2215 genera and 338 families. The country is also home to at least 22,000 insect species, over 1000 bird species, 1000 fish species, 247 mammal species and 123 reptile species. After a decade of monitoring her biodiversity, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red-listed Nigeria for having over 300 threatened species in the following taxonomical categories – mammals (26), birds (19), reptiles (8), amphibians (13), fish (60), mollusks (10), other invertebrates (14) and plants (168) (Borokini 2014; Imarhiagbe and Egboduku 2019). During the intervening years, several factors have colluded to further deplete biodiversity stocks. Anthropogenic land-use change (changes to the biophysical attributes of the earth’s surface and immediate subsurface) and land-cover change (changes in vegetation types and soil properties) are major threats to biodiversity in the Zamfara Sahel, Nigeria. Nigeria’s biodiversity conservation action plan has been a subject of research for several decades. As in several developing countries, Nigeria’s conservation status and sustainability efforts have been challenged by low political will and a lack of consistent taxonomical statistics. There are no consistent or comprehensive statistics on the current number of species, while the estimated data on the country’s biodiversity richness has not proved convincing in the face of the current reality of climate change and ecological disturbances. Attention has been focussed on the sustainability and conservation of the biodiversity of the savanna zone in recent years. However, a comprehensive database of the zone’s biodiversity richness is lacking, partly due to socio-political and security challenges and partly due to underestimation of the zone’s biological richness (Bello et al. 2019; Salihu and Go 2020). For several decades including the period under review, the biodiversity richness of the Zamfara Sahel has been decreasing due to uncontrolled anthropogenic activities such as mining and agricultural land use for crop cultivation and animal grazing. As communities rely on these activities for economic sustenance and social relevance, there had been a significant biodiversity loss, resulting in land-cover changes and resource depletion. Recent research assessing the awareness of biodiversity among non-professionals and professionals in Nigeria revealed a low-level understanding among the non-professionals and a moderate level of understanding among the professionals (Akindele et al. 2021). The imperative of creating awareness of Sahelian biodiversity to draw the attention of stakeholders to enact sustainable conservation policies for its management is the rationale behind this study.