The Rapid and Participatory Assessment of Land Suitability in Development Cooperation

Development cooperation in agriculture aims to contribute to the achieving of a large part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the UN 2030 Agenda, especially the first three, No Poverty (1), Zero Hunger (2), and Good Health and Well-being (3). Development cooperation in agriculture tries to help local communities to increase their awareness, participation, and skills about the management of land and environmental resources, in order to realize sustainable development. In this context, methods of participatory assessment of land suitability have been widely and successfully applied. The present research took place in the framework of a real development cooperation intervention in Nord Kivu (Democratic Republic of Congo) and aimed to implement a rapid participatory assessment of land suitability. In this context, where official and detailed data are not available, the study fostered the active involvement of local experts and used geographical information systems (GIS) to identify the most suitable crops to be supported in different zones of the study area. Toward this aim, the authors used a procedure based on the following steps: the identification of relevant land use types (LUTs), mapping capability factors, describing the responses of each LUT to the different capability factors, mapping potential land suitability for the LUTs, mapping accessibility, mapping land suitability for the LUTs. Resulting maps and tables were used to identify the most suitable areas for the different uses. Globally, forestry was the most suited use (99.6% of the study area is potentially highly suitable), followed by the cropping of manioc, sorghum, banana, oil palm, bean and cattle grazing in decreasing order (62.6% of the study area is potentially highly suitable for grazing). When accessibility is considered, forestry presents the largest decrease in the class of high potential suitability (−34.9% equal to a loss of 24,945.5 ha), while less adaptable uses, such as cattle grazing showed lower decreases in highly suitable class (−11.2%) and larger increases in scarcely suitable class (+9.5%). At a later stage, the comparison between computed suitability and actual land use helped with identifying the areas where forestry should be the only (or most) supported activity and the areas where to push integrated land uses. Our interpretation of the results allows us to recommend the adoption of agroforestry and intercropping as the main methodologies to integrate multiple aims such as the environmental conservation and the improvement of livelihoods.