The Changing Social and Biophysical Relations in Tanzania’s Kilombero– Rufiji Landscape

The multiple roles of Kilombero Valley-Rufiji Delta as a watershed, national hub for food production and a critical landscape for biodiversity protection makes it a highly significant national and international site of interraction between different actors who represent international conservation and development partnerships, private and civil society interests, small-holder farmers and agri-business deallers. Over the years, the role of these actors in translating ecologies into financial values has transformed the social biogeophysical relations of the landscape in ways that raise concerns about the future habitability. The Critical Zone project addresses this concern by focusing on how financialization models leave issues of soil health and water quality unaddressed hence compromising the sustainability of their development interventions. Precisely, the crops are managed solely with an eye on commercial values, which miss the care for soil with agrochemicals and fertilizers increasing productivity in the short term but causing long term damage to soils and water bodies. This has downstream impacts to both biodiversity and agricultural floodplains in the Rufiji Delta. Our key question, then, is: How useful is the Critical Zone approach for improving land-use decisions for Kilombero-Rufiji landscape, in the context of Tanzania’s Green Revolution? We combine spatial and temporal biophysical analysis with bottom-up approaches that draw from people science and policy actor engagements to reflect on the future habitability of the landscape.