Resource information
Miombo woodlands stretch across Southern
Africa in a belt from Angola and the Democratic Republic of
Congo (DRC) in the west to Mozambique in the east. The
miombo region covers an area of around 2.4 million km. 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
DRC). From a conventional forester's perspective,
miombo is fundamentally uninteresting. It supports
relatively few good commercial timber species. The
management of commercial species has been problematic. The
best areas were logged over long ago. Except in a few areas,
remaining commercially viable stocks are relatively small
and difficult to access. Public forestry institutions have,
for the most part, failed to put in place effective
management systems for forests, preferring instead to limit
their role to regulation and revenue collection, rather than
to management per se. The objectives of this paper are
threefold, and the paper is structured around these
objectives. First, in section two, the paper describes some
of opportunities for improving the use and management of
miombo woodlands. Second, in section three, outline some of
the barriers which are preventing households, communities,
and countries from adopting better and more sustainable
woodland management practices. In section four, by exploring
some of the policy opportunities for removing these
barriers, with the objective of strengthening miombo's
contribution to reducing risk and vulnerability of poor
rural households through sustainable forest management.
