By Vienna Leigh | Communications Manager, WeForest
External situations and challenges can often affect Forest and Landscape Restoration projects, and the last year and a half has seen armed conflict between the local militia and the government in Amhara, where our Gewocha project is located, creating a volatile and unpredictable situation. The team has been able to travel to the communities to continue the project’s livelihood support and to carry on the restoration of the degraded communal lands, but with continuing tensions that are hard to predict, the team was unable to undertake the larger scale planting inside Gewocha Forest itself. As a result, the majority of planting this year has been focused on agroforestry and communal lands. The native forest planting will resume whenever it is safe to do so, but we are not expecting significant improvements in the short term.
The new Wof Washa project is also feeling the effects of the conflict. 2024 saw the start of restoration activities, albeit with extra care taken due to the situation. The first planting took place earlier this year, with 330 ha of enrichment planting in the forest (approximately 40 500 seedlings), 38 ha of agroforestry systems set up (140 000 seedlings) and 15 ha of degraded common lands planted.
Over in Tigray, where the conflict thankfully ended in 2022, things are calmer. The Desa’a project is set to restore over 4500 hectares this year—taking us beyond the halfway point towards our ultimate goal to revitalize more than 38 000 hectares by 2030 and bring life-sustaining water back to a region on the frontlines of desertification. The livelihoods programme continues to improve life for people like Miheret W. and her family in Kalamin (above), who are eagerly anticipating their first apple harvest after joining in 2021. With five apple seedlings and other tree species, they’ve transformed their homestead into a thriving agroforestry system, providing food, fuel, forage for bees and fodder and shade for their animals.
At the other end of the Great Green Wall, in Senegal’s Ferlo region, our project with AVSF puts pastoralist communities at the heart of restoration. The community members outdid themselves in seed collection this year, gathering a whopping 1900 kg of seeds. Some were nurtured into seedlings in the nursery and others were directly planted in the project’s last planting in phase one, which brings us to our target of 1000 ha restored.
The project’s livelihood strategy – which will make sure that the people living here can raise incomes through sustainable activities that don’t put pressure on forest resources – is now underway, and focuses on organising the communities to collect non-timber products such as animal fodder and fruits and improving market access. These people (below) are harvesting grass from the restoration areas – taking it carefully from between the lines of planted seedlings – which they will use and sell as fodder. It is improved by adding multi-nutritional natural products that are easy to find locally: molasses, gum arabic, salt, water and wheat bran.
Thank you for helping to make all this possible!
By Vienna Leigh | Communications Manager, WeForest
By Vienna Leigh | Communications Manager, WeForest
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