Restoring Trees and Livelihoods in Zambia
About
This project aims to scale up current efforts for sustainable systems change, building more productive and reliable farming and pastoral systems, restoring degraded landscapes, and ensuring sustainable collaborative management of natural resources for all local stakeholders. Through the application of EverGreening practices (which include agroforestry and the managed natural regeneration of trees on farms, rangelands, degraded forests, and communal lands), the most effective ecosystem-based adaptation techniques are utilized to sustainably restore land and soil fertility, and enhance climate change adaptation and resilience, while reducing emissions through long-term storage of carbon in landscapes.
This project will address the challenges of poverty and climate resilience for rural families living on communal land areas across the western side of the Luangwa Valley catchment extending from Chinsali Province to Central Province in Zambia. It will work at a district level to establish a sustainable community-driven model, supporting at least 62,500 small-scale farmers to work through 31 multi-purpose farmer cooperatives to improve over 20,000 hectares of community managed agricultural land, according to prescribed guidelines of sustainable farm and land management encouraging adoption of low carbon impact practices.
At the same time, this project will support up to 30 million surviving agroforestry tree plantings and contribute to the management of over 600,000 hectares of community-protected forests, currently 40-50% intact. This project will enable the transformation of these rural farming communities into viable cooperative organizations becoming financially self-reliant and developing their own local conservation plans. This program is coordinated by the Global EverGreening Alliance (GEA), and implemented on the ground by GEA's member organisation, COMACO (Community Markets for Conservation).
First tree planted
April 20, 2021
Employees
277
Planting seasons
May, June, July and August.
Main challenge
Zambia’s rural landscape suffers from weak environmental governance, which has allowed prevailing market forces to promote agricultural systems that are over-reliant on maize, harmful to the soil, dependent on chemicals, and susceptible to climate variability.
Site ownership
Communal Land.
Since 2021
Cause of degradation
Extreme climatic variability is exacerbating droughts and rainfall unreliability, directly causing land degradation and soil depletion. Poor land management practices such as slash and burn agriculture, the high rates of deforestation are placing further pressure on already degraded ecosystems.
Why this site?
Previous work carried out in the region has laid the foundation for the scaling up of existing efforts, leveraging the presence of already established offices, as well as the geographical proximity to Tanzania which aids markets’ engagement for value-chain development.
Long term protection
Efforts to incentivize small-scale farmer adoption of evergreening farming practices with agroforestry through secure, premium-valued crop prices will help make farmers more sedentary while sustaining increased yields at reduced costs.