Mozambique’s Forests and Landscapes at UNFCCC COP21

About 51% of Mozambique territory is covered by forests (40.6 million hectares).The country’s deforestation rate is 0.58%/year, and accounts for an annual forest loss of approximately 220,000 ha. This is almost half of Brazil’s total annual forest loss (480,000ha), despite the fact that Brazil has 12 times more forests than Mozambique. As the country continues its rapid development based on land use activities such as mining, agriculture and unsustainable forestry, the challenge going forward will be to develop the nation economically while maintaining its natural resources.

 

The Zambezia Integrated Landscapes Management Program (ZILMP) demonstrates the commitment of the Government of Mozambique (GoM) to promote sustainable rural development through forests conservation and management, conservation agriculture, biomass energy management and land use planning. The ZILMP is endorsed as a priority by the Government of Mozambique and the Provincial Government of Zambézia. The Program will pilot innovative and decentralized governance arrangements at the National, Provincial and District levels, which integrate government, private sector and civil society stakeholders, with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, while promoting rural development.

 

The ZILMP will be also fully aligned with the government “Estrela” program and the Standing Forest Program, which aims to develop physical and social infrastructure (access to markets, water, energy, finance and knowledge) to catalyze sustainable production in rural areas; and promoting rural development based on forest conservation, with focus on alternative activities to natural resources extraction and good forest management practices respectively. The Standing Forests Program will be the back-bone of the 5th strategic objective of the Government’s Five-Year Plan (2015-2019). In addition, a new Forest Law will establish a “Timber Moratorium” that will begin in 2016 and involve the suspension of certain forest operations for a determinate period of time to allow reorganization of the sector, with a focus on sustainability.

The ZILMP will be located in the Zambézia province, the most densely populated and the fourth most deforested province in Mozambique. The provincial economy is based in agriculture and forest resources, and 70.5% of the population is under the poverty line, and 93% is in the rural area. The ZILMP will cover a total area of 3.8 million hectares, of which 2.3 million are forests. The annual deforestation rate in the program area is 0.68%, and represents a forest loss of 18.000 ha/year.

 

This is an ambitious initiative: (i) it comprises a large population (1,2 million people) that will demand large scale efforts; (ii) as the first ER Program in Mozambique there are significant “lessons to be learned” and numerous capacity and management challenges to be tackled. Experience has proven that when it comes to designing innovative policies that need to be successful, it is safer to “start small, learn well and grow fast”, than to be too ambitious and fail over the course of the program.The ZILMP will be implemented through a cooperative approach combining policies, programs and actions across different levels of the government (national, provincial and districts) and multiple stakeholders (government, farmers, communities, private sector, NGOs, etc,) to maximize funds and institutional capacity. Therefore, there will be a combination of “command-and-control” policies for land use, with “positive incentives” such as access to public funds conditioned on deforestation rates, and incentives for the adoption of sustainable production systems.