For nearly 2 million square kilometres, Zambia’s Miombo woodlands stretch out in their full majesty, home to an estimated 8,500 plant species, over half of which are found nowhere else. This extraordinary region sustains animal life as diverse as its flora and fauna, including the elephants, lions, hyenas, antelope, and African civets, caught on WeForest’s camera traps.
In 2024, the importance of protecting and restoring this forest gained global attention when a study published in Communications Earth and Environment found that Miombo stores more than twice as much carbon as previously estimated —an additional 3.7 billion metric tons—or more than China emitted in 2023. Yet even as the importance of the forest’s restoration grows for global climate mitigation, increasing climate-crisis-driven droughts, often followed by flash flooding, have shocked the 6.5 million people who depend on the woodlands for survival, many of them smallholder farmers. As the International Water Management Institute has documented, such crop-destructive weather often causes families to clear new farmland or cut down trees for charcoal, intensifying forest degradation.
Because a crisis in the fields quickly becomes a crisis in the trees, restoring forests means going beyond tree planting. By working with farmers who live close to the Miombo woodlands to improve how land is managed, WeForest protects both community livelihoods and forest resilience long term. Here are three ways farmers partnering with WeForest are responding to the climate crisis in their fields, and in doing so, strengthening the forest around them.
Conserving water for healthier soils
Faced with more extreme weather patterns, WeForest works with farmers to change how land is managed, restoring and conserving water so crops can survive erratic rains.
Traditional ploughing with oxen or tractors can create a hard layer in the soil, preventing roots from growing deep and causing rainfall to run off and carrying nutrients away. By contrast, when WeForest partners with farmers, they practise minimum tillage, digging planting basins by hand or creating ripped lines pulled by oxen or tractor attachments. These narrow trenches break the hard soil while leaving the rest of the soil intact. Acting like small reservoirs, the basins and rip lines capture rain when it falls, holding it in place so roots can reach deeper moisture and nutrients.
Enriching the soil to feed the future
Roots cannot draw what the soil no longer holds. Monoculture farming —*growing the same crop on the same land season after season— strips soils of nutrients and organic matter, leaving them depleted. That’s why WeForest works with farmers on cost-efficient ways to nurture soil, thereby both protecting harvests and locking carbon underground. This begins with carefully selecting which crops to plant, when, and how.
Crop rotation—planting different crops on the same land in different seasons—contributes to stop soils from being drained of nutrients. Intercropping—growing two or more crops side by side—improves soil structure and resilience. Farmers working with WeForest often grow legumes and nitrogen-fixing trees such as Musangu and Gliricidia (a legume tree), whose fallen leaves enrich the soil.
When fields are rested, they are planted with shrubs like pigeon pea or Tephrosia, or cover crops such as sunhemp, to rebuild fertility and prevent erosion.
Meanwhile, composting methods like bokashi and liquid ‘leaf teas’ add another boost to degraded soils. Bokashi— a composting method —returns nutrients and organic matter to the soil using materials like manure and crop residues, while leaf teas made from Gliricidia or manure provide quick, natural fertilizers.
Protecting harvests without chemicals
Just as shifting weather patterns have upended seasonal predictability, a 2023 study on Zambia’s major food crops found that the climate crisis is also making the country more susceptible to outbreaks of crop pests and the diseases they carry. In response, WeForest is partnering with farmers to protect their crops while reducing dependence on climate-damaging chemical pesticides.
Climate-conscious pest management depends on three pillars: crop choice, crop diversity, and crop care. Crop rotation not only maintains soil fertility but also disrupts pest life cycles by varying the crops grown in a field from season to season
Just as crop rotation supports soil fertility, so too does it break the life cycles of pests by changing what farmers grow in a field from season to season.
In addition to this, by using the “push–pull” method, farmers sew plants like tick clover (Desmodium) between rows of main crops to “push” stem-borne insects away, while border plants like Napier grass “pull” the pests to the field edges, where they lay eggs that never hatch.
Farmers also plant garlic, marigolds, mustard, or sunflowers around their plots to repel or distract insects. As extra protection, botanical sprays from Tephrosia, garlic, or chili are safe and effective against termites, aphids, caterpillars, and worms.
Thriving farms, thriving forests
Together with water and soil fertility practices, the methods described here form resilient farming systems that both sustain families and protect Zambia’s Miombo woodlands.
Each small intervention— a planting basin, a line of nitrogen-fixing trees, a heap of compost — adds up to landscapes that hold more water, withstand drought, and produce more food. Healthier farms ease degradation on forest land, leading to protected and stronger forests, which in turn, regulate water, shelter biodiversity, and strengthen critical carbon sinks.
Earlier this year, 15 farmers from Mpongwe travelled to Katanino for a hands-on exchange visit, learning how bokashi compost is transforming cabbage farming. Hosted by 10 local farmers, they explored every step – from making bokashi to preparing land, weeding and pest control.
Building resilience, together.
WeForest’s experience in Zambia’s Miombo woodlands demonstrates that systemic risks demand systemic responses. Get in touch for partnership opportunities that invest in resilience: for people, for climate, and for nature.
Together, we can ensure that when the next drought or flash flood strikes, communities and ecosystems alike are better equipped to withstand it.
