From village land use plans to Key Biodiversity Areas: unlocking Tanzania's hidden conservation potential

Shadrack Achilla Stephene Achilla 

Tanzania's National Land Use Planning Commission holds a fast-growing statutory archive of Village Land Use Plans, with approximately 4,900 approved plans covering roughly 40 percent of the country's registered villages as of mid-2026. Each plan records land tenure, zoning, and natural resource management rules at the village level under the Village Land Act of 1999 and the Land Use Planning Act of 2007. This archive has, to date, rarely been read for what it can offer two processes under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework: narrowing where new Key Biodiversity Area field assessments should happen, and identifying candidate Other Effective Area-Based Conservation Measures. This paper sets out what the archive can and cannot support for each. For Key Biodiversity Areas, village-scale records of tenure, customary boundaries, and zoning cannot substitute for the quantitative species and ecosystem thresholds the Standard requires, but they can help prioritise which villages field teams visit first, particularly in rangeland and forest-agriculture landscapes with little protected area coverage. For OECMs, Village Land Forest Reserves and similar community-managed zones supply governance evidence, legal designation and locally enforced rules, but not the separate evidence of conservation outcomes the criteria also require. The paper argues that Tanzania's narrow Key Biodiversity Area coverage outside gazetted protected areas and its OECM under-reporting reflect institutional invisibility of existing evidence as much as any absence of qualifying sites on the ground, and sets out three changes, a standardised extraction protocol, a data-sharing arrangement with the KBA National Coordination Group, and mandatory field verification of outcomes, that would be needed to make the archive's contribution routine rather than incidental.