Economics of sustainable land management in north eastern Ethiopia

Abstract

Soil and water conservation efforts can only be productive if their economic feasibility and social acceptability dimensions are considered as great determining factors as their ecological importance. The study examines the impact of sustainable land resource management on household income in North Eastern, Ethiopia. For this study, descriptive statistics and econometrical analysis were applied to analyse the collected data. First, the status of sample household SLM activities had been described through GIZ SLM standards of sustainability of land resource management activities on the household plots in a descriptive way by comparing means and variations. The logit model result indicates that age of the household, marital status of the household, household’s education status, total livestock unit of the household, land size, the distance of resident from land, and membership of watershed user association are significant factors that affect farmers’ decision to practice sustainable land resource management. To capture the impact of sustainable land resource management on households’ income through the Endogenous switching regressions model, the indicator was household total income evaluated at the market price of the survey period 2019. The results show a positive and significant impact of participation in sustainable land resource management had increased participant households' income as compared to non-participant households. This shows how the significant role of sustainable land resource management is in improving the income condition of poor farmers in the study area. The results indicate that land resource management activities have a profound effect on household income improvement. Hence, such activities need to be encouraged and scaled up to other areas and involve more households.