Sil Lanckriet

• Ghent University

Un nuovo conflitto militare si sta purtroppo svolgendo nel Corno d’Africa. Il 4 novembre 2020 è scoppiato un conflitto militare tra le forze del governo federale dell’Etiopia e il governo regionale del Tigray, nel nord del Paese.Il conflitto si sta intensificando a una velocità allarmante. Ora è diventato un conflitto regionale con notizie secondo...

A new military conflict is sadly unfolding in the Horn of Africa. On November 4th, 2020, a military conflict erupted between the forces of the federal government of Ethiopia and the regional government of Tigray, in the country’s North. However, as scholars who have examined issues related to food security in the region since 1985, we are very conc...

Farm productivity and food security in the coming years is undermined by intensive and repeated tillage (Chap. 26), complete crop residue removal at harvest, aftermath grazing in croplands, biomass burning, use of crop straw and animal dung for fuel, deforestation and monocropping. Recurrent food production shortages are commonly linked to periodic...

The Tigray region has won the UN-backed Future Policy Gold Award in 2017 by demonstrating that “the more people, the less erosion” can be a reality. Behind this success story stands a long-term policy with large-scale investments in soil and water conservation, exclosures and reforestation. Exclosures are areas where trees and vegetation can natura...

The Ethiopian Highlands are one of the places on earth with the oldest agricultural tradition. Archaeological research indicates that the people of Northern Ethiopia have been cultivating tef for several thousands of years. Environmental degradation in the Northern Ethiopian Highlands is often thought to be the result of mismanagement, overpopulati...

The Boswellia papyrifera tree, a source of aromatic frankincense resins, grows in the northern, north-western and north-eastern lowlands of Ethiopia near the Giba, Blue Nile and Tekezze Rivers. Other varieties of frankincense gum resins, found in the Ogaden and Borana regions of Ethiopia, are tapped from B. rivae, B. ogadensis, B. neglecta and B. m...

The natural environment, from rocks and landscapes to animals and plants, often provides key elements of local myths. In Dogu’a Tembien, it is omnipresent in myths and storytelling, testifying to the deep respect the local population holds for their surroundings and the natural world in general. This chapter explores some local myths in relation to...

The Ethiopian highlands have a complex climate pattern due to its distinct physiography, which causes a large horizontal and lateral variability in climate conditions. In the northern Dogu’a Tembien district, seasonality of rainfall is high (70 to 80 % in July-August), but temperature, though not too hot, shows a typical tropical pattern with contr...

This book shows that northern Ethiopia has been suffering from severe land degradation for centuries and became strongly impoverished, but also that many efforts are done to reverse the situation. In this context, generations of students and research assistants have investigated the environment of Dogu’a Tembien, mainly in research projects funded...

Abstract Despite the many studies on land degradation in the Highlands of Northern Ethiopia, quantitative information on long-term land use/cover (LUC) changes is rare. Hence, this study aims to investigate the changes of LUC in the Geba catchment (5142 km2), Northern Ethiopia, over 80 years. Aerial photographs (APs) of 1930s and Google Earth (GE)...

Land degradation is Ethiopia’s biggest environmental problem, as it has an adverse impact on soil productivity, and therefore it threatens food security and livelihoods. In parallel, land reforms and redistributions took place, particularly between the late 1970s and early 1990s. This research aims to investigate the impact of land tenure policies...

Transnational land deals are among the most contested but inadequately understood topics. In this paper, we focus on the features of large-scale transnational land deals (LSTLDs) in the Global South through an examination of Ethiopia. We apply a mixed- method (qualitative and quantitative) research design. Results indicate that in 2005-2015, the go...

Most studies of landscape dynamics in the Ethiopian Highlands offer linear relations of population pressure and periodic droughts as causes of environmental degradation. Such views rely on limited historical information of one or two centuries, which is inadequate for understanding the longer term effects of climatic shifts on landscape dynamics an...

The Simien Mountains house several endangered and endemic wildlife species and provide important ecosystem services. Despite its regional environmental importance, the Simien Mountains are listed as World Heritage in Danger since 1997. This raised the need for an evaluation of landscape changes from before the establishment of the Simien Mountain N...

tThe current study explores transnational land deals from a regional perspective and investigates investor-local people interactions and the factors that underpin them. Empirical analysis utilizes survey datafrom the Benishangul-Gumuz region, a topographically low-lying region of Ethiopia. Descriptive statistics and ordinal regression model (ORM) w...

Land degradation poses a threat to reservoirs due to siltation; hence, sustainable hydropower development necessitates the conservation of upstream catchments. Ethiopia is currently constructing Africa's largest hydropower dam, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), on the Blue Nile. Given the commercialization of large tracts of land in the c...

3) VIVES Hogeschool, Brugge, Belgium High mountain forests, such as the afro-alpine Erica arborea L. forests in Ethiopia, are very important for the livelihood of local communities, in relation to their impacts on the water balance of mountain ecosystems and surrounding agricultural areas. On volcanoes, the dominance of volcanic tuffs on the slopes...

In cold regions, climate change related permafrost thawing is causing geomorphic processes to intensify. This is especially the case in mountain regions, where several studies indicate increased geomorphic activity with the recent thawing of permafrost bodies. In addition to the effect on geomorphic processes, permafrost degradation also results in...

In the Highlands of Northern Ethiopia, land degradation is claimed to have occurred over a long time mainly due agricultural practices and lack of land management. However, quantitative information on the long term land use, cover and management change is rare. The knowledge of such historical changes is essential for the present and future land ma...

With increasing population, producing more food and fibers has led to an expansion of the area under cultivation. For this, much attention is given to low-lying flat areas in search of suitable agricultural lands. The objectives of this paper are therefore: (1) to review the opportunities and challenges of natural resources in the marginal grabens...

Producing more food and fibers has led to an expansion of the area under cultivation. For this, much attention is given to low-lying flat areas in search of suitable agricultural lands. Therefore, the objectives of the paper are to review worldwide experiences about marginal graben resources, show knowledge gaps and priorities in research and devel...

Gully cut-and-fill dynamics are often thought to be driven by climate and/or deforestation related to population pressure. However, in this case-study of nine representative catchments in the North Ethiopian Highlands, we find that neither climate changes nor deforestation can explain gully morphology changes over the 20th century. Firstly, by usin...

Sediments deposited by (paleo) flash floods can hold valuable information on processes of environmental change, land degradation or desertification. In order to assess the suitability of flash flood deposits as proxies for land degradation, we monitored a representative gully segment in North Ethiopia (Ashenge catchment), investigated a sequence of...

Vegetation cover changes in African drylands are often thought to result from population growth, social factors and aridification. Here we show that long-term vegetation proxy records can help disentangling these main driving factors. Taking the case of North Ethiopia, we performed an integrated investigation of land cover changes over the last fou...

The high soil erosion rates in the Ethiopian highlands find their causes in the combination of erosive rains, steep slopes due to the rapid tectonic uplift during the Pliocene and Pleistocene, and human impact by deforestation, overgrazing, agricultural systems where the open field dominates, impoverishment of the farmers, and stagnation of agricul...

Long-term in situ soil and water conservation experiments are rare in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in Eastern Africa. A long-term experiment was conducted (2005–2013) on a Vertisol to quantify the impacts of resource-conserving agriculture (RCA) on runoff, soil loss, soil fertility and crop productivity and economic profitability in northern Et...

Conservation agriculture (CA) is often quoted as a beneficial resource-saving technique for dryland agriculture, but its large-scale implementation is frequently hindered by the lack of farmers’ acceptance. To date, few studies have investigated the impact of spatial factors, costs and benefits and regional agroecosystem differentiation on adoption...

This study presents a method to elaborate atmospheric teleconnections and applies it on the drought-prone region of North Ethiopia. By doing so, the relatively new procedure known as empirical orthogonal teleconnection analysis (EOT) was validated as an effective way for identifying the impact of atmospheric patterns in remote oceanic basins on rai...

Severe environmental degradation in the north Ethiopian Highlands is amongst others the result of mismanagement, overpopulation and droughts. However, here we investigate the linkages of land degradation with the historical dynamics of the political-ecological system and regional land policies. We performed semi-structured interviews with 93 farmer...

This study evaluates the practice of conservation agriculture (CA) in the May Zeg-zeg catchment (MZZ; 187 ha) in the North Ethiopian Highlands as a soil management technique for reducing soil loss and runoff, and assesses the consequences of future large-scale implementation on soil and hydrology at catchment-level. The study of such practice is im...

Highlights ► We simulated implementation of conservation agriculture (CA) in the 187-ha May Zeg-zeg (MZZ) catchment in Ethiopia. ► EdGCM simulation predicts an increase in precipitation of more than 100 mm yr−1 by 2040. ► Annual runoff coefficients in MZZ would decrease from the current 30% to 19% after catchment-wide implementation of CA. ► Sheet...