**7. Conclusion and proposals**

Ecosystem-based management strategies are certainly a necessary approach to ensuring sustainable management of natural resources, and this is particularly so in wildlife protected areas. Although this is generally acknowledged by the conservation community, its adoption has been very difficult due to challenges, chiefly, by humanwildlife conflicts.

Currently, human-wildlife conflicts are Serengeti Ecosystem's major challenge to ecosystem-based planning and management, and these conflicts go back to the time Serengeti National Park was established as a national park in the 1950s. The measures that the government and conservation partners have taken over the years to resolve the various conflicts have, at best, served as temporary respite, and, at worst, they have proved futile. Today, contrary to what would be expected, conflicts have been escalating in certain areas to the extent of requiring emergency action, in addition to ongoing mitigation measures.

In addition to emergency and mitigation measures that are usually directed to specific incident or area, there have been several initiatives specifically aiming at saving Serengeti Ecosystem against HW conflicts. These initiatives have, in turn, been in addition to or in support of the WMAs. The latter, too, have not been successful, in spite of reviewing the strategy on which they are based several times since their inception in 2003. To date, none of the mitigation measures, nor Serengeti Ecosystem conservation initiatives, has been successful in resolving the HWCs. These failures, in the face of rising human-wildlife conflicts and resource degradation, have given rise to the need and calls for a solution towards overcoming challenges to EBM.

On examining the initiatives that have to date been tried out for ecosystem-based management for the Serengeti Ecosystem, both past and present, it appears the conditions listed below constitute constraints to their effectiveness in enabling EBM, largely by curtailing their sustainability.


*Towards Overcoming the Challenges to Adopting Ecosystem-Based Management Approach… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.113998*


Out of the several initiatives I read and consulted about, and the two that I have made a case example out of, the Greater Serengeti Conservation Society seemed to be better placed to provide the solution for overcoming the challenges to adopting the ecosystem-based planning and management strategies for the Serengeti Ecosystem. Below are some of its strengths.


#### **7.1 Proposals**

Based on the experience gained through the initiatives that have been implemented so far towards the management of Serengeti as an ecosystem, against the challenges inherent in managing a complex ecosystem like Serengeti, and those related to integrating the multitude of diverse stakeholder interests, as well as timely coordination of interventions, I propose the following foundation actions towards overcoming the challenges.


d.The Foundation Initiative should, based on SEA, develop a program and schedule that will allow scaling up activities, including increasing the frequency of stakeholder meetings.
