COS 260-5 - Social influences on ecological health in sacred forests in Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church forests

Background/Question/Methods

Sacred forests, also referred to as sacred groves, have special cultural or spiritual significance and are protected via religious taboos, sanctions, and cultural customs. Sacred forests directly or indirectly help maintain forested ecosystems. Sacred forests are characterized by the diversity of cultures, institutions, and physical characteristics that shape ecological outcomes. This emphasizes the need to understand how the local institutions and contexts influence the ecological health of sacred forests. In this study, our goal is to understand the relationship between social factors that vary among Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church (EOTC) forest communities and how they affect forest outcomes. We conducted 398 in-depth semi-structured interviews on the perception of church forests and the rules governing their use and protection in 20 of these forests in the South Gondar Administrative Zone. We also measured ecological variables that are indicators of forest health, including soil chemical and physical properties, biodiversity, and regenerative capacity. We analyzed these data through a multistep integrative process tailored to combine social and ecological data. Analyses included principal components analysis and categorical principal components analysis to create ecological and social indexes and generalized linear models to identify the drivers of forest ecological health.

Results/Conclusions

We found that forest ecological health, defined as forests with high species richness and abundance and low disturbance, was associated with higher access to state and agricultural benefits, such as land access and agricultural extension effort, more engagement with state actors, and protection norms that emphasize that church forest protection is a responsibility of the church community and church actors. Interestingly, we found an inverse relationship between forest ecological health and reports of community members breaking forest protection norms. Our results highlight the importance of local-level social network connections in sacred forest governance and how these shape forest outcomes. Broadly, our work uses a methodological approach that allows us to analyze complex social-ecological systems, such as the sacred EOTC forests, and identify relevant complex social and ecological connections. This information can inform evidence-based conservation and development policies of biocultural landscapes.