- A local community has taken over protecting and managing patches of small evergreen forests, known as mushitu forests, that have recently been subject to illegal logging.
- Forest officers armed with smartphones are going up against the loggers while also enforcing community-driven prohibitions against overuse by locals.
- During times of severe drought, like this year, the forest is a lifeline to villages within the Ndubeni Chiefdom, whose members depend on it not just for water, but for food and medicine.
- The forest has enormous cultural and historical significance, and protecting it is key to protecting the community’s cultural history.
MPONGWE, Zambia – The Chimfuneme swamp forest in central Zambia’s Copperbelt province got its name — which means “hiding place” in the local language, Lamba — long ago when strife tore apart rival clans and those living near this impenetrable natural fortress hid inside it to escape invaders.
These days, the invaders come armed with chainsaws, not spears, and their target is the forest itself. But the local community has a new defense: honorary forest rangers armed with smartphones.
“If they [illegal loggers] are here with a truck, we take the number plate, even capture a picture of their truck, which we send to the office,” says one of the rangers, 21-year-old Rhodah Kabunda. “They will not go anywhere, they [Forestry Department officials] will catch them.”
Recently, she and her fellow rangers, whose full title is honorary community forest rangers confronted a group trying to cut and remove logs in one of the mushitus, as the swamp forests are known locally. They forwarded pictures of the loggers’ vehicle plate number to the local office of the Forestry Department in Mpongwe, 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) away.
The vehicle was impounded and the case is now before the courts.
“Right now I think it [the truck] is at the police station,” Kabunda says.
The vehicles used in illegal logging are seized by the state, and their drivers and loaders face the prospect of jail time or fines. Zambian prosecutors have begun closing loopholes that allow owners to quickly reclaim their trucks and pay off the fines of the men they’ve hired to drive them.
According to the terms of a Community Forest Management Agreement (CFMA), signed in September between the government and the community, authority over the mushitu forests has now been transferred from the state to members of the Ndubeni Chiefdom.
Bornface Katite, a Mpongwe-based project manager for the conservation group WeForest Zambia, says the agreement was the culmination of months of negotiations between his organization, the state Forestry Department and community members.
In 2023, before the CFMA was signed or the honorary forest rangers appointed, loggers illegally entered the largest mushitu forest, which is known as Imanda. They felled large trees and sawed up hundreds of planks, but residents from the surrounding Mulela area tipped off officials. The loggers were arrested and the planks confiscated.
That incident marked a turning point that WeForest and its partners were able to build upon, Katite notes.
“They [community members] were key now in protecting [the mushitu], knowing very well that only a few individuals — those breaking the customary rules — were benefiting through illegal timber logging.”
When Mongabay visited the mushitu forests in early October, it was the height of the dry season and the region was still in the grip of a severe drought. Yet the floor of the Chimfuneme forest patch, that historic hiding place for ancient clan members, was dense with ferns, dotted with large pools of clear water and shaded by a dense canopy of trees whose thick trunks were festooned with vines.
The mushitu forests and their surrounding wetlands and grasslands sustain a wide variety of birds: more than 220 species have been recorded so far. But in a drought year like this one, when farmers in the surrounding chiefdom have suffered severely reduced harvests of the staple corn, the mushitus are also a lifeline.
The tender stems of forest palms, known in the local Lamba language as chisonge, are harvested by some villagers and cooked as a substitute for cabbage. Perennial water, which floods the forest floor at the height of summer rains in February and March, sustains a variety of fish throughout the year that villagers trap for protein.
In recent years, some community members had taken to overfishing the pools and streams. Some used mosquito nets to trap fish instead of traditional fishing baskets, or they used poison, and fish populations weren’t given time to recover.
Tapson Nkata, one of the newly appointed rangers, says the hardships brought about by this year’s drought, and the new external threats posed by commercial loggers, were a much-needed wake-up call for a community whose own stewardship was beginning to slip.
Now in his early 60s, Nkata was born in the capital, Lusaka. But his family moved to this district in 1969, when he was just 6. Back then, things were different.
“We could catch a lot of fish, not as compared to now, and then there were a lot of animals all over,” he says. Today, however, even small antelope like common duikers are scarce. And whereas in the past there were prohibitions on planting crops within the mushitu, now people are clearing big gardens in the heart of the forest patches.
“There are swampy places, so it’s easy for maize to germinate and grow,” Nkata says. Raising public awareness is key to addressing these local threats, and this is currently one of the key tasks of the forest rangers.
“As we talk to them, they are saying, ‘We are understanding you,’” Nkata says. “They know they have been committing offenses.”
Not far from the Chimfuneme mushitu is another known as Misangwa. Its name means “a place where everything can be found,” which is a nod to its natural bounty.
Farmer Ignatius Kakompe points out trees growing here that are used as medicine and food.
There are the broad fluted trunks of mukuyu figs, Ficus sycomorus, whose large fruit are eaten by people and resident troops of monkeys known to locals as insange (Cercopithecus mitis), and mubimbi trees (Rauvolfia caffra), whose leaves are used to treat chest infections. “In the time of COVID-19, we used to cook them in a pot and breathe the vapor,” he says.
But a little farther on, Kakompe finds one area that has been cleared of all but the biggest trees by a local farmer growing vegetables and another nearby clearing where ankle-deep leaf litter has been turned to still-hot ash. Kakompe suspects hunters at the forest edge set it on fire, trying to flush large edible rodents known as cane rats.
Here, among the burnt and smoldering plants are frazzled Chisonge palms. Their tender shoots won’t be feeding families now. The fire has also damaged the bases of some much larger trees, such as those that produce edible grape-sized insombo fruit harvested between November and January.
Looking at the destruction with a farmer’s eye, Kakompe estimates as much as a hectare of forest has been burnt. “This is too bad.”
The community plans to not only make the forest now under its stewardship off-limits to commercial logging, but to also end these kinds of unsustainable practices by locals.
Community members will still be able to search in the forest for medicinal herbs, cut poles for housing, fish in its pools and collect honey from beehives, but they’ll need to pay for permits to do that. A percentage of the money raised will go to support local clinics, schools and the elderly. The intention is to make the distribution of the forest bounty more equitable, explains Katite, the WeForest official.
“If someone is in their old age, it will be difficult for them to access that forest or even get any benefits from there, but with a structure like the Community Forest Management Group (CFMG) in place, they will make sure that those with special needs are given priority,” he says.
Other less-tangible ecosystem services may be gained in the future.
In the Imanda forest patch, close to where the illegal loggers felled a number of large trees last year, small silver labels are tacked at breast height on thick tree trunks and slender saplings. Each of the marked trees is growing within one of 20 monitoring plots, which measure 20 meters by 20 meters (66 feet by 66 feet). WeForest, the Forestry Department and the CFMG are currently measuring the rate of tree growth to work out how much carbon they store.
It’s still early days, but the work hints at possible future carbon capture projects within the mushitu forests.
It’s another reason to keep the trees standing.
And local community members like Kabunda, the 21-year-old honorary forest ranger, are its zealous new defenders armed with nothing but a smartphone, enthusiasm and the full backing of the community.
“I would love even those people who are young to come and see Imanda Forest,” she says. “I don’t want it to be destroyed; I want even young ones who are not yet born to find Imanda Forest [intact] like that.”
Banner image : A tree stump in the heart of the Imanda forest. Image by Ryan Truscott for Mongabay.
Correction: This story was updated on Nov. 15, 2024 to clarify that while illegal loggers’ vehicles are seized, the authorities typically release them to their owners and drivers and loaders are also invariably released upon payment of a fine.
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