Environmental Security Factors and Sustainable Natural Resource Management: The Case of Choke Mountain Watersheds, East Gojjam, Ethiopia

Abstract

Through sound governance, accountable management and sustainable utilization of natural resource and environment takes effective steps towards promoting or creating social, economic, and political stability and insuring the common welfare of the country. This paper assesses the existing environmental security and identified critical environmental concerns or issues on bases of natural resource utilization, management and governance. A cross-sectional survey design was employed in this study. Questionnaire survey, key informant interview, focus group discussion, field observation and secondary data sources, were utilized to generate the data required for the analysis. Both qualitative and quantitative analysis approach, descriptive analysis and analytical technique like chi-square tests were employed to analyze the data.Finding of the study revealed that an environmental insecurity (scarcity of natural resource, conflict on natural resource utilization, migration and unemployment) were occurred in the study area. This insecurity happened mainly because of natural resource utilization problem by the community, natural resource management and governance problem by the government are considered as a secondary and third factors respectively.The common critical environmental concern that threats the sustainability of land and forest resources in the study area, (Choke Mountain) in general includes: Scarcity of agricultural land, soil erosion, deforestation, exact district and kebele demarcation problem and poor land use practices.VSTM analysis model has been employed so as to identify major environmental security factors of each critical environmental concerns or issues. These are: for scarcity of cultivation land the major environmental security factor is population pressure, for soil erosion deforestation and slope of the land, for deforestation free grazing scarcity of cultivation land and high demand of fuel wood, for exact district and kebele demarcation problem population expansion to choke mountain and for poor land use practices absence of reaching land use planning implementation document from regional rural land administration office are the main and important security factors for the occurrence of those listed above critical environmental concerns or issues.

Keywords: Critical Environmental Concern, VSTM analysis, Environmental Insecurity