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The Okavango basin comprises the Cuito and Cubango active catchment areas in Angola, in addition to the Kavango-Okavango non-active catchment in northern Namibia and Botswana. The Okavango River water and its ecosystem resources are critically important sources of livelihoods for people in the basin. Pressures from livelihoods and development are already impacting on the environment. These pressures may increase in the future due to the rapid increase in population, the peace process and associated resettlement activities in Angola, and major development initiatives in Botswana and Namibia. For instance, possible future increase in water abstraction from the Okavango River may affect the long-term environmental sustainability of the Okavango Delta by minimizing channel shifting and thereby reducing spatial biodiversity. The paper argues that while conservation of the natural environment is critical, the pressing development needs must be recognized. The reduction of poverty within the basin should be addressed in order to alleviate adverse effects on the environment. The paper recommends that the development of sustainable tourism and community-based natural resource management initiatives may be appropriate strategies for reaching the Millennium Development Goals of poverty alleviation and achievement of environmental sustainability in the Okavango Basin. These initiatives have a comparative advantage in this area as demonstrated by the performance of the existing projects.

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This paper describes the impacts that three shocks in the Okavango Delta, Botswana, have had on rural livelihoods: the desiccation of river channels, animal diseases, and HIV/AIDS. Primary data was collected from five study areas, using formal questionnaire interviews and focus group discussions. The paper reveals the adverse effects on rural livelihoods. It describes the way households have been exposed to poverty and vulnerability and the various ways they have coped or adapted, such as by re-allocating their labour, liquidating their assets to cover medical expenses and funeral costs, reducing the area ploughed for crops, hiring labour, digging wells and switching from flood recession agriculture to dryland farming. The Botswana government has provided safety nets to help households cope, but this paper recommends that people's responses to these shocks should be taken into account in future policy and programme formulation.

This paper reviews how state policy and regulatory instruments, including protected area alienations and concessions, have altered or denied the access to land and natural livelihood resources of the indigenous Basarwa and minority subsistence-oriented communities in the Okavango Delta (OD) in Botswana. Drawing on field research and guided by a sustainable rural livelihoods framework, the paper provides an overview of key institutional interventions -in particular the setting up of the Moremi Game Reserve, Wildlife Conservation Policy, Tourism Policy, Agricultural Development Policy and the erection of veterinary fences -that have served to privilege a foreign-owned and dominated commercialized wildlife and nature tourism sector and the exportoriented beef industry in the OD. The officially sanctioned barriers to customary and usufructory rights and access, and the non-recognition of historically embedded traditional land uses have decimated already marginalized resource-based subsistence livelihoods, and precipitated intergroup conflicts over preferential rights and access to resources and opportunities, notably wildlife, non-timber veld products, agriculture and community-based tourism schemes. Such outcomes, moreover, will have consequences for the longer-term sustainability of the OD both as a socioeconomic resource base and as a natural ecosystem.

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Climate variability and change have adverse effects on agricultural production and other livelihood strategies of the rural households. The paper hypothesizes that rural households naturally devise means of overcoming the challenges currently posed by climate variability. The research article addresses the question of how rural households apply local knowledge of weather forecasting in adapting to climate variability in the Okavango Delta. It specifically probes, among others, the extent to which climate variability has affected agricultural production over the last 10 years in the area. A multistage sampling procedure was used to select a total of 592 households from eight rural communities. Key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and a stakeholder workshop were used to obtain demographic, socioeconomic, psychosocial, and climatic information. Households used both natural animate and inanimate indicators to predict the weather. To enhance household adaptation to climatic events, indigenous knowledge weather forecasters (ethnometeorologists) engaged in discussions with community members on their observation and interpretation of local weather conditions. Households devised adaptation strategies including the selection and preservation of drought-resistant, early maturing seeds, and shift in farming calendars to overcome the vagaries of weather patterns. Local and farming communities had a favorable perception about the accuracy of indigenous knowledge in weather forecasting (ethnometeorology) and therefore continue to utilize this knowledge system in weather forecasting. Most households perceived that change in weather patterns had a direct relationship with the decline in agricultural outputs over the last 10 years. Households’ experiential knowledge and ability to quantify their losses in farm yields as a result of climate-related problems provide an important insight for policy makers on how to address the impact of climate variability in the Okavango Delta, Botswana, and in similar social ecological contexts.