Population change and environmental problems in the Mid-Boteti region of Botswana

The paper examines the significance of population change in environmental degradation with respect to specific resources use changes in the semi-arid Mid-Boteti region in Botswana.In Mid-Boteti, the combination of population change and new land-use practices which exclude traditional multiple communal resource use from large tracts of land, have led to the degradation of the remaining communal lands and a growing number of poor people who have lost access to cattle and to subsistence hunting and gathering.The loss of these resource use options has reduced the ability of the poor to cope with the environmental conditions, in particular with drought, making them not only dependent upon government drought relief programmes but also forcing them to over exploit free resources or to change to environmentally damaging practices such as goat husbandry and dry-land cultivation on marginal soils.When considering population-environment relationships it is crucial to take into account the socio-economic divisions in the society. For the rich there is often not clear link between population growth and environmental problems, because they have the possibility to reserve resources for their exclusive use. For the poor, however, there exists often a clear relation between population growth, reduced access to environmental resources due to exclusion and increased competition and resulting environmental problems which negatively affect their quality of life.Changes in population distribution as well as population growth were found to play a major role in increasing environmental problems related to expanding resource use in the Mid-Boteti region. But there are also other crucial role players such as increased use of technology under conditions of inappropriate management, commercialisation and growing poverty. It is the combination of population change and these factors which causes serious environmental problems.