- The Miombo woodlands are a dry deciduous forest spanning 1.9 million square kilometers (726,000 square miles) across Central and Southern Africa.
- Rural communities across the region depend heavily on the woodlands for building materials as well as a large variety of non-timber forest products including fruits, honey, mushrooms, medicine and more; the Miombo is also a significant source of firewood and charcoal, with fuelwood making up three-quarters of energy-use in the region.
- Population growth, agricultural expansion and increasing demand for fuelwood are the primary drivers of deforestation in the Miombo.
- A new initiative spearheaded by the Republic of Mozambique’s President Filipe Jacinto Nyusi aims to reverse deforestation of the Miombo and promote sustainable resource development.
Growing up in the village of Domboshava in central Zimbabwe, Edwin Tambara, the African Wildlife Foundation’s director of global leadership, recalls how the surrounding Miombo woodland was a pharmacy, hardware store and supermarket, all rolled into one.
“You get a cough or sneeze or you have a headache, I remember my grandmother would just say, ‘OK, let me go into the forest,’ and she’ll come back with some leaves. . . It’s either they’re boiled and you have to sniff them or something — and you’d be sorted,” Tambara says.
The Miombo woodlands are a special type of semi-deciduous forest, dominated by trees in the legume family from the genera Brachystegia, Julbernardia and Isoberlinia. The ecoregion covers a broad swath across Central and Southern Africa, making it the most extensive dry tropical forest type in the world.
But the woodlands are shrinking, which is bad news for communities in the region who depend on them for an astounding array of goods.
Those goods include, according to Tambara, thatching grass to roof houses, poles to fence fields and for construction, bark to make fibers, leaves and nutrient-rich termite mound soils for enriching fields, firewood for cooking and more.
But it’s when talking about the Miombo’s wild foods that Tamabara, speaking from Washington, D.C., via video call, gets particularly nostalgic.
When he was a child, termites were one of his favorite snacks. There were also numerous edible mushrooms.
“There are people I knew growing up who would say, ‘I would rather have that type of mushroom than meat or anything,’” Tambara says.
And then there were the fruits of the mazhanje tree (Uapaca kirkiana), a greenish-yellow fruit slightly smaller than a golf ball, which turns brown when fully ripe.
“Goodness, those fruits are really, really nice. Once they are ripe, you can just eat them, just like that,” Tambara says. “When we used to herd cattle, we never needed to even bring food from home. The forest would provide — and that fruit was one of our favorites.”
These ancient woodlands also play a continental and even global role: They protect vital watersheds, including the Zambezi, shelter some of the world’s most iconic large mammals and sequester significant amounts of carbon.
Yet compared with the much more famous Amazon or Congo rainforests, the Miombo hardly registers on international consciousness. Now, with growing alarm over deforestation rates, a new initiative spearheaded by the Republic of Mozambique’s President Filipe Jacinto Nyasi is attempting to propel the Miombo onto the world’s stage.
The Miombo Initiative, launched this April at a conference in Washington, D.C., by Nyasi with partners — including the International Conservation Caucus Foundation, Wildlife Conservation Society, African Wildlife Foundation and Rainforest Trust — aims to mobilize resources to attack the underlying drivers of deforestation and restore this globally significant natural resource, which is inextricably linked to the welfare of the 300 million people who live in the region.
The world’s largest dry tropical forest ecosystem
The Miombo woodlands are massive, covering 1.9 million square kilometers (726,000 square miles) principally in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Mozambique.
The Miombo is a dry and relatively open woodland. The dominant trees grow to 10-20 meters (32-65 feet) in height and lose their leaves in the long dry season, sprouting new growth with the rains. Fire is a fundamental part of the ecosystem, periodically sweeping through the woodlands and creating a balance between trees, shrubs and the numerous grassy patches.
Though the Miombo doesn’t support the same large mammal densities as Africa’s famous savannas, it is unusually biodiverse, says James Deutsch, executive director of the Rainforest Trust.
This includes 8,500 plant species, more than half of them found only in the Miombo, as well as iconic megafauna like lions, leopards, wild dogs and elephants.
“So, from a pure biodiversity point of view, it’s globally important,” Deutsch says.
The Miombo is also extremely important to people.
In fact, the long history of largely sustainable use in the region has led to “socio-ecological relationships that are important to maintain human populations but also the ecosystems,” Natasha Ribeiro, professor of ecological restoration at Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique, writes in an email.
Honey collection is one example of these types of relationships. Honey collectors have a mutualistic relationship with a bird called the greater honeyguide (Indicator indicator). The bird guides the collectors to wild hives, and once the honey collectors extract the hive, the bird feasts on the leftover wax.
Honey collection also helps shape the ecosystem. Before extracting the hive, the honey collectors use smoke to subdue the bees, which can lead to accidental fires. Because honey collection generally takes place early in the dry season, these fires tend to be low intensity, says Casey Ryan, professor of land systems science at the University of Edinburgh. It’s likely these frequent low intensity fires, which burn grasses but not trees, help shape the mosaic of habitats and biodiversity that is characteristic of the Miombo.
The trees in the Miombo woodlands also have a number of ecological characteristics that make them especially suitable for sustainable use.
For starters, the woodlands regenerate very quickly.
“If you so much as sneeze on a tree, it starts sending out loads of shoots,” Ryan says. This includes sprouts from cut branches or trunks as well as suckers that come from the underground root system and pop up aboveground many meters away from the original tree, meaning that the woodlands are extremely resilient to frequent cutting or even land clearance. As long as the underground root structure isn’t disturbed, small patches of cut trees can fully recover in as little as 20-30 years, Ryan says.
As well, the main Miombo tree species are also what’s called “ectomycorrhizal,” having a symbiotic relationship between tree roots and fungi, which, in the Miombo, results in an incredible diversity of edible fungi. For example, one study cataloged 77 types of edible fungi in the DRC and Burundi, at least 15 of which are regularly eaten.
Miombo products are used locally and traded in urban markets. In all, products from Miombo and the related mopane (Colophospermum mopane) woodlands make up a quarter of all cash and subsistence income in rural areas and are valued at approximately $9 billion annually, according to a 2016 study. Wild foods from the Miombo can also act as buffers against poverty and hunger, accounting for up to 40% of calories in years with poor harvests, according to a study in Zimbabwe.
“[People’s] lives are so intertwined with the Miombo that sometimes it’s actually difficult to separate the two,” Tambara says.
As noted, the ecological characteristics of the Miombo means the woodlands are resilient to a certain level of disturbance. But even the forests’ famed resilience is coming up against destruction. Today, booming populations across the region, along with economic development, is upending millennia-old patterns of largely sustainable use. Expanding smallholder and commercial agriculture means people are clearing more Miombo forests for other uses. Perhaps most pernicious is the growing demand for firewood and charcoal in both rural and urban areas. Fuelwood now accounts for three-quarters of energy usage in the Miombo region. Intense cutting is outstripping the Miombo’s regenerative properties. Commercial logging and mining are also driving deforestation in some areas.
From 1980-2020, the Miombo lost 800,000 km2 (309,000 mi2), shrinking the area under forest cover by nearly a third.
This forest loss has “dire consequences” for rural communities because they depend heavily on products gathered in the Miombo, says Luthando Dziba, the regional director for East Africa, Madagascar and the West Indian Ocean for the Wildlife Conservation Society.
It also has global consequences. Because the Miombo is so extensive, it stores globally significant amounts of carbon.
In fact, recent research suggests that Miombo woodlands may store up to 2.2 times more carbon aboveground than previously thought.
The Miombo Initiative
Under the leadership of President Nyusi, 11 African nations signed the Maputo Declaration on the Miombo Forest in 2022, establishing priorities for the sustainable management and governance of the Miombo forest.
The recently launched Miombo Initiative builds on this declaration and hopes to garner sufficient resources and support to stem forest loss.
Details on what this will look like on the ground are still being worked out, but Deutsch says that Nyasi’s leadership on the issue is an extraordinary opportunity.
“It’s really his vision that is driving this forward,” Deutsch says. “Simply by virtue of adding political will to some of those existing efforts, I think it could be a real game changer.”
One critical component will be tackling the energy transition. Experts agree that urban and rural communities will continue to need to depend on the Miombo for firewood and charcoal until they have access to alternative affordable sources of energy.
“I’m convinced, if we solve the energy production puzzle, we have probably solved half the problem we have in conserving Miombo woodlands,” Tambara says.
Dziba hopes that the Miombo Initiative will also bring recognition to the Miombo as a place for investment to achieve positive biodiversity conservation outcomes while highlighting its value in carbon sequestration.
For example, in southern Tanzania, Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) works with communities in the Ruaha-Katavi landscape. Those communities have voluntarily set aside more than 270,000 hectares (667,000 acres) as vital wildlife corridors between Ruaha and Katavi national parks, Dziba says. WCS and other partners already support the communities through alternative livelihood projects like beekeeping, improved livestock health and other projects. But Dziba says they are also trying to develop projects, including carbon credit projects, that can bring in more continuous revenue streams to amply compensate communities.
“They’re … forgoing rights to harvest timber there, rights to cultivate the land and grow food, rights to graze in those areas so their land can contribute to wildlife corridors. And so I think it requires not just WCS but the entire global community that cares about conservation to say, ‘What can we do to make a difference for the communities that have made this type of contribution to conservation?’” he says.
Numerous individual initiatives across the region are also working with communities to reduce pressure on the forest. For example, in Zimbabwe, the use of firewood to cure tobacco accounts for nearly a quarter of deforestation in the Miombo, so the African Wildlife Foundation is working with farmers to design more energy efficient “tobacco barns.”
But given the sheer extent of the Miombo, and its importance to so many millions, Dziba says we also need larger-scale coordinated actions.
“What we hope to achieve is [to] mobilize substantial resources [and] mobilize partners to work together to draw a program of action that basically enables us over time to actually… reduce and maybe eventually stop deforestation,” he says.
There is already a strong national park network across much of the region, though gaps persist in Angola, Mozambique and parts of the DR Congo, Deutsch says. Going forward, the Rainforest Trust plans to focus mostly on supporting community-led conserved areas.
“Unfortunately, the larger part of how we’ve been doing conservation in Africa for decades has been through approaches that actually isolate and alienate people from nature,” Tambara says. “People’s lives, traditions and cultures are intertwined with the Miombo woodlands, so any plans we shape going forward, looking at how we conserve these woodlands, we have to have people at the center.
Banner image: Thatching grass collected in the miombo woodlands. Thatching grass is used to roof homes, woven into fences and for other purposes, and is one of the numerous non-timber forest products derived from the woodlands. Image courtesy of Edwin Tambara, AWF.
See a related feature by this reporter:
34,000-year-old termite mounds in South Africa are still being used
Citations:
Ribeiro, N. S., Syampungani, S., Matakala, N. M., Nangoma, D., & Ribeiro-Barros, A. I. (2015). Miombo woodlands research towards the sustainable use of ecosystem services in Southern Africa. Biodiversity in Ecosystems – Linking Structure and Function. doi:10.5772/59288.
Ryan, C. M., Pritchard, R., McNicol, I., Owen, M., Fisher, J. A., & Lehmann, C. (2016). Ecosystem services from southern African woodlands and their future under global change. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 371(1703), 20150312. doi:10.1098/rstb.2015.0312.
Demol, M., Aguilar-Amuchastegui, N., Bernotaite, G., Disney, M., Duncanson, L., Elmendorp, E., … Burt, A. (2024). Multi-scale LiDAR measurements suggest miombo woodlands contain substantially more carbon than thought. Communications Earth & Environment, 5(1). doi:10.1038/s43247-024-01448-x.
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