Village Land Use Plans as Climate-Smart Landscape Evidence: Spatial Adequacy, Agroecology and Biodiversity-Sensitive Land Use in Seven Tanzanian Districts

This paper tests whether Tanzania's Village Land Use Plans (VLUPs) can be transformed into climate-smart landscape evidence packages, addressing a gap in how climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is scaled across Africa. CSA scaling has relied heavily on technology packages, extension programmes and farm-level adoption indicators, while the statutory land-use governance systems that determine where interventions can be implemented, and by whom, remain weakly integrated into CSA planning. Using a stratified purposive sample of 36 VLUPs from Chamwino, Mvomero, Kilindi, Mbinga, Songwe, Kaliua and Ludewa districts, the study extracts and recodes land-use allocations, livelihood systems, water-resource evidence, forest and grazing areas, settlement patterns, governance arrangements and data-quality indicators. The 36 cases cover approximately 146,656 hectares and a base population of 100,724 people. The analysis finds that VLUPs already contain substantial CSA-relevant evidence that is not currently structured as CSA data. Agriculture and settlement-agriculture dominate planned land use, ranging from 44.6 percent in Ludewa to 85.8 percent in Kaliua. Grazing allocation is severely inadequate across the sample: Chamwino allocates an area-weighted average of 1.0 percent to grazing, Kaliua 3.7 percent, and 20 of the 36 cases (56 percent) have no planned grazing category at all. Planned forest areas total approximately 15,712 hectares across 29 cases, while planned water and river-reserve areas total approximately 4,752 hectares across 30 cases. The paper proposes a four-stage CSA-VLUP method and argues for a National CSA-VLUP Coding Standard as a statutory pathway for CSA scaling in Tanzania and comparable land governance systems across sub-Saharan Africa. Prepared for the 4th Biennial Africa Climate Smart Agriculture Stakeholders Conference (sub-theme: Policy, Governance and Institutional Pathways for Scaling CSA).