Carbon Project

We began working in partnership with local chiefs to establish Community Conservation Areas designed to safeguard the forests of Zambia’s Eastern Province and the wildlife within them. To date, we have extended this work to cover 38 Community Conservation Areas that cover over 1 million hectares of land in a total of 3 provinces. The areas are patrolled by teams of COMACO-trained community forest guards, who identify charcoal-makers and offer them alternative livelihood skills, such as the tools and knowledge to begin a small farm of their own. Over 5,000 farmers have begun keeping bees in the protected areas, which adds a critical off-season income source, and provides a monetary incentive to keep trees standing.

In 2015 we partnered with The World Bank on Zambia’s first large-scale Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) carbon project. Under this pilot initiative with nine chiefdoms, we set in place a monitoring system that determines how much CO2 emissions are saved by avoided deforestation as a result of our Community Conservation Areas. Through a carbon offset scheme, communities are then paid for their conservation efforts. In the first monitoring period, 228,000 tons of CO2 emission reductions were recorded, which paid out $490,000 to the participating chiefdoms. The carbon revenue has been invested in community development projects, such as the drilling of new wells in regions with limited access to clean water, or the launch of additional incomes sources like community poultry farming and bee keeping.

We are currently working with 28 additional chiefdoms to expand the carbon project to serve communities across the Luangwa Valley. Many of the target areas for the project expansion are important wildlife corridors that will connect fragmented forests and greatly aid in the effort to rebuild the Luangwa Valley’s elephant population.