Sofala Community Carbon Project
The Sofala Community Carbon Project is an innovative sustainable-development project working with forest communities in the buffer zone of the Gorongosa National Park, Sofala Province, Mozambique.
The project design is to implement forestry and agroforestry activities that enhance sustainable livelihoods, rehabilitate severely degraded forest environments, promote biodiversity and sequester carbon (generate Verified Emission Reductions - CERS).
The projects work with a large number of rural smallholders (i.e. farmers or producers), and promote the adoption of sustainable land use management to plant and maintain trees amongst their crops and around their homesteads. It involves reforesting degraded forest and altering land use patterns in mashambas (areas of land "slashed and burned " for crop planting and left in fallow due to soil degradation) with indigenous Miombo woodland trees, primarily local fruit and bee-fodder species, fruit trees and other selected species along watersheds to help stabilise the riverbanks.
The individual smallholders can choose to adopt mitigation activities from a menu of different land use systems (seven agroforestry and one forestry system). For each of these systems, Technical Specifications have been elaborated, which summarize all relevant information (i.e. establishment, management, site requirements, carbon sequestration potential, etc.).
Environmental Co-Benefits
- Community conservation areas preserve the valuable Miombo woodland
- Planting on watershed stabilizes river bank.
- Biodiversity: Planting of indigenous species in and around farmland improves the matrix for increasing biodiversity.
- Agroforestry reduces the pressure to clear old growth forests.
- Fire management program is in place to reduce run away bush fires through early burning, fire breaks and fire training.
- Soil quality is improved through the planting of Nitrogen Fixing Trees.
Social Co-Benefits
- Direct employment of community members as agricultural extension officers, drivers and project staff
- Those in the local community who are involved are empowered to work towards improving their income; not through deforestation, nor from support from NGOs but using a method that moves towards sustainable livelihood. Their ability to choose from the menu of mitigation activities also increases their autonomy and involvement.
- Increase in community services including:
- Two schools receiving environmental education, 200 laptops and solar cells
- Medicines at the health clinic are part subsidized by carbon finance
- Community carpentry shop
- Sesame oil collective
- Community saw mill with sustainable management plan
- Microfinance initiatives in Bee keeping and drip irrigation systems
- 20 fuel efficient stoves being trialed in the community
- Ecotourism camp run by a partnership of community members with project staff
- Significant agricultural extension through intercropping of nitrogen fixing species, diversification of crops and slash and burn reduction strategies.
- Doubling of yield through improved practice
Community Profile
Name: Felicio Lucas Melo
Residence: Nhambita Ward, Chicare Regulado, Gorongosa District, Sofala, Mozambique
Age: 32
Occupation: Farmer
Mr Felicio Lucas Melo is a member of the Nhambita community in the central Sofala region of Mozambique, one of the world’s poorest countries. Felicio was born near the Pungue River in the buffer zone of the Gorongosa National Park 32 years ago. He farms in the Chicare traditional authority were he lives with his two wives and three children. Felicio and his wives cultivate traditional “shifting agriculture” plots called “mashamabas”. Felicio lives in a region were more than 30% of people die before their 40th birthday and access to basic health care has involved a full day’s walk to a health post.The community has illiteracy levels exceeding 70% and over 80% of the community live below the internationally recognised poverty threshold. In reality poverty in this region is much higher and Sofala has the highest incidence of ultra-poverty in Mozambique, it was devastated by years of civil war and has remained a “Cinderella” region due underinvestment by the central government. Felicio’s community has traded 175,946 tonnes of CO2 livelihood credits in a growing international market of “Payments for Environmental Services (PES) and now has access to 60% of the proceeds of these sales through the Mozambique Carbons Livelihoods Trust that is a custodian for the revenue earned by farmers from these sales.
Over time Felicio’s 1.5 hectares of farmland will sequester over 100 tonnes of CO2 and earn him USD350 in direct payments and an additional 80 USD that will be paid into the community carbon fund. Before the project started the local average annual income was only 50 USD per annum. Felicio and farmers like him can choose various “systems” through the Plan Vivo method to their plots – orchards, boundary plantings and wood fuel lots.
The carbon fund has already co-financed the building of Nhambita’s first permanent school house were his children are taught and a health post that will give his family ready access to primary health care for the first time. Felicio and hundreds of farmers like him are planting back indigenous trees, orchards of fruit and nut trees, wood-fuel lots and reforesting areas which were historically degraded to earn valuable money to finance land-use change and achieve sustainability.
Felicio is planting new crops along with his trees in innovative ways that return nitrogen to the poor soils in this area and substantially raise harvests of vital foodstuffs. Food security for Felicio is an important sustainable livelihood indicator. Here Felicio is pictured in his fields of “Pigeon Pea” – a leguminous shrub that puts valuable nitrogen into the soil when inter-cropped with maize or sorghum and gives a highly nutritious crop of beans that will be used by his family or sold to neighbours.
The money earned gives Felicio bridging finance, an invisible extra crop that tides him over during the transition from the old way of doing things to the new. In doing so he is transforming the lives of his family and community and perhaps even more significantly for us, playing a role in dealing with climate change and the sequestration of harmful green-house gasses.
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