In mid-2009, ERA began working with two Burundian orginizations to design a large scale ecosystem restoration project in and around the severely degraded Afromontane forests of Kibira National Park.
Kibira National Park is Burundi’s largest remaining intact forest, however the region was among the hardest hit in Burundi’s 30-year civil war, with military land clearance leading to soil erosion, habitat loss, and loss of arable land, all of which harmed the forests and the communities cultivating on adjacent lands. In particular, for the indigenous Batwa communities, who have traditionally hunted and harvested in Kibira, forest survival is closely linked to cultural survival.
ERA’s two partner organizations, ACVE (Action Ceinture Vert pout l’Environement, or ‘Green Belt Action Group’) and FDMR (Fondation pour le Development de la Monde Rurale, or ‘Rural Development Foundation’) have harnessed decades of in house experience with community-based ecosystem restoration, working from the grassroots to the highest levels of government in Burundi. ERA has matched this experience with its own expertise in silvicultural planning and carbon management to embark on a project that will restore overall forest ecosystem health, thereby providing badly needed soil nutrition and watershed health that rural communities depend on.
Specifically, through the community-based re-establishment of a diversity of native afromontane tree species, the project would:
- Greatly reduce surface erosion, and decrease the likelihood of slope failure events within and downstream of the project area;
- Dramatically reduce surface run-off by increased forest crown interception within and downstream of the project area;
- Significantly reduce the level of eutrophication of downstream aquatic ecosystems;
- Develop effective regeneration/revegetation regimes (successional planting system) that will allow degraded lands to revert back to native, afromontane, forest ecosystems over time; and
- Increase forest habitat features for key afromontane habitat species.
All activities would be carried out with local labor, under local supervision and management, and with revenues from carbon offsets returning in part towards local income-generating activities.
ERA and partners have established several tree nurseries which are currently housing over 300,000 afromontane saplings, and are negotiating project plan agreements with the Burundian government.
