assessment of levels of community awareness to effects of forest degradationand their environmental management practices in jimma zone, south westernethiopia

This study aimed to assess the levels of community awareness to the environmental effects ofgrowing use of forest product for peoples’ livelihood and their management practices in jimma zone.thus, local farming communities, development agents (da), agriculture and natural resource, forestand environmental protection officials & experts are the participant of this study. the study employeddescriptive survey research design and both qualitative and quantitative methods of data collections wereemployed. to assess community environmental awareness survey questionnaire questions (both open andclose ended) were distributed for 240 sample respondents. an interview with10 key informant interviewswere also conducted with the head of natural resource management offices of selected woredas and sixdevelopment agents (da) in sample selected kebeles and four focus group discussions (fdg) consisted of10 members were also employed to collect qualitative data.the findings show that all the respondentsaware of forest and natural resource degradation about (87%) and (75.4%) were aware of clearing offorest to expand farmland for growing population and cutting trees for fuel wood, charcoal and otherforest productsrespectively. only very few of the respondents were indicate that lack of communityawareness to sustainable use and management of forest resource (44.5%)and lack of clear understandingof forest laws and regulation among the community (40.4%)as a cause of deforestation. therefore, theassessment of community awareness to forest resource degradation survey result shows that all of thefarmers in the study area have been aware of natural resource and environmental degradation. based onthe findings of this study, it is recommended that there is a need of modifying educational/trainingprograms for local communities considering the existing knowledge and practices in a particular area.