The growing threat of invasive alien plants in Tanzania
Stakeholder workshop
Dar es Salaam, 1st February 2008
The final workshop targeted a wider audience of Tanzanian natural resource managers and decision makers to discuss the project's results and provide a forum for discussion on the way forward for monitoring and managing invasive plants in Tanzania. The workshop brought together 30 managers, decision-makers and conservation scientists representing 18 institutions and 2 national newspapers.
The workshop:
• presented the results from the three-year Darwin project and discussed next steps.
• engaged managers and decision makers from key institutions in Tanzania to discuss monitoring and managing invasive alien plants in Tanzania, to-day and in the future.
• provided a forum for networking among Tanzanian conservation managers, decision-makers and biologists concerned with the growing threats of Invasive Alien Plants in Tanzania.
All the delegates indicated they will be pleased to be involved in future work on Invasive Alien Plants. They commented on the importance of incorporating management, research and collaboration aspects, and helping create awareness among the delegates. The majority of the delegates (89%) felt they were very likely to take ideas from the workshop back to their institutions. The delegates identified the following as key gaps in invasives research and management in Tanzania:
• inadequate knowledge and skills, and sustainable mechanisms for management/control,
• financial and technical constraints,
• inadequate awareness of Invasive Alien Plants,
• lack of a national inventory of Invasive Alien Plants, their impacts, as well as IAPs hotspots.
They recommended:
• the mainstreaming of invasive alien species programmes in other natural biodiversity programmes,
• that more efforts in creating awareness, training and mobilising resources for IAPs work, and
• the packaging of IAPs information for end users.
A major outcome of the workshop is that the Ministry of the Environment announced that it would ensure “recommendations from this project, as well as deliberations from our discussions today are strategically applied in improving how we manage invasive alien plants, not only in the Eastern Arc region, but in Tanzania as a whole”.
pdf of full workshop report
