Managing the Miombo Woodlands of Southern Africa - PROFOR

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Miombo woodlands stretch across Southern Africa in a belt from Angola and the Democratic Republic
of Congo in the west to Mozambique in the east. The miombo region covers an area of around 2.4
million km 2 . In some areas, miombo has been highly degraded as a result of human use (southern
Malawi and parts of Zimbabwe), while in others, it remains relatively intact (such as in parts of
northern Mozambique, and in isolated areas of Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo).
From a conventional forester’s perspective, miombo is fundamentally uninteresting. It supports
relatively few good commercial timber species, and the management of these species has been
problematic. The best areas were logged over long ago. Except in a few areas, the remaining
commercially viable stocks are relatively small and diffi cult to access. Public forestry institutions have,
for the most part, failed to establish effective management systems for forests, preferring instead to
limit their role to regulation and revenue collection, rather than to management per se.
Despite the failure of public institutions to set up good forest management practices, miombo’s
global environmental values are not trivial. They have between 10 and 30 percent of the aboveground
carbon found in an equivalent area of tropical moist forests (Keith et al. 2009; Munishi et
al. 2010), but because they are so extensive, they account for a large proportion of the carbon
sequestered in southern Africa. Compared with tropical moist forests, miombo has low faunal
biodiversity and species endemism, though it does provide the habitat for a number of large
herbivores—elephant, rhino, and various ungulates. These mega-herbivores have been central to
some successful community-based wildlife management schemes. Plant biodiversity is signifi cant.
Around 8,500 plant species are found in the miombo region. More than 300 are trees, and around
54 percent are endemic. Mittermeier et al. (2003) suggest that the miombo-mopane woodlands
are one of the fi ve global ecozones that need to be prioritized for biodiversity conservation because
they are irreplaceable in terms of species endemism.
Miombo woodland actually regenerates fairly easily and prolifi cally, provided that regeneration is not
inhibited by late dry season fi res or by cultivation. Permanent forest loss is an issue when woodlands
are cleared for agricultural production. Reasonably good miombo can produce about the same
increment of timber as the coniferous boreal forests of Russia or the deciduous temperate forests
of middle-Europe. What is different between the temperate and boreal forests of Europe and the
miombo of southern Africa is that the former produce commodities that are immensely valuable on
domestically and internationally traded markets, and can be managed with these outcomes in mind,
while the latter produces limited high-value products for which management is extremely diffi cult.
In fact, local value-added comes from miombo’s multiple uses, which may not involve harvesting
large-dimensioned industrial roundwood at all. Indeed, it has proven to be of immense value to
rural people, providing sources of fi rewood and building material, as well as extensive supplies of
wild foods and medicinal plants. It plays a critical role in the management of livestock throughout
POLICIES, INCENTIVES, AND OPTIONS FOR THE RURAL POOR
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