Land Tenure Motivations for Sustainable Forest Conservation in Southwest Nigeria

Incentive is anything that motivates or stimulates people to act. This paper identifies motivations to sustain forest conservation in South-west Nigeria. Primary data were collected from the following groups of respondents: forest officers, tree takers and villagers from within and around eleven forest reserves selected from seventy eight forest reserves. All the forest officers in charge of the 31 forestry administrative zones in the six States namely: Ekiti (four); Lagos (five); Ogun (four); Ondo (eight); Osun (six) and Oyo (four) and one forest officer from each of the six State’s Headquarters were interviewed using structured questionnaires. In addition,, 97 villagers from randomly selected forest reserves, 10% of registered tree takers comprising 94 timber Contractors, 167 registered Sawmillers and 115 plank Sellers were administered structure questionnaire. Descriptive statistics and Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (D) were used to analyze the data obtained. Result revealed that incentives on land tenure review (D=9.20, p<0.01), long term lease of land (D=9.34,p<0.01), Market service (D= 10.71p<0.01), land for arable farming (D=9.27,p<0.01) and award/prizes for the best managed woodland (D=10.08, p<0.01) had significant relationship with forest conservation. There is need for policy reformation to take cognizance of the motivations identified to boost forest conservation in the South-west Nigeria.