As a forester and forest landscape restoration expert, Tangu Tumeo is helping to reverse deforestation in her native Malawi by working with rural communities to see the value of their local forests in building more sustainable livelihoods in the East African nation.
Tumeo, a former forestry adviser for the Malawi national government and now a Programmes Officer at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), says 80 percent of Malawi’s forest and agricultural land is degraded and 80 percent of the population there is in the rural areas.
“The need for more farmland is increasing. The patches of forest are getting smaller and smaller,” she says,”Cooking, heat, light and tobacco preparation are all done using biomass.”
Tumeo says in order to restore forest cover in Malawi, a wide range of interventions have been rolled out, including energy-saving cookstoves and reducing waste in the production of charcoal.
“We’re looking at improving the rural livelihood side of things,” she says, “As environmentalists we have, in the past, tended to focus on tree planting or forest management and not really look at the problem in terms of livelihoods.”
Tumeo says rural communities are seeing that if they manage their catchments well and improve planning, they can get better incomes and quality of life .
“We are planting trees and restoring rivers,” she says, “Trees are moving from protected areas to communal lands… For us, that’s not a good thing because we can’t afford to clear trees in protected areas.”
Saturday 5 June 2021 marks the launch of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and Tumeo says that she is optimistic that the world can reach the Bonn Challenge global goal to restore 350 million hectares of degraded or deforested land by 2030.
“We have 10 years to go until 2030, but there are lots of opportunities,” she says, “This year, this is the most optimistic as I’ve ever been: in 2021, we have all the stepping stones coming together to implement what we’ve set up to do.”
Tumeo grew up in a middle class household in Malawi, making visits to her father’s village.
“I always wanted to do something in agriculture because that was the career that would take you outside… I was studying to be an accountant for two years and then I came back and said, no, I can’t sit in an office, just looking at numbers!” she says.
Tumeo would go on to earn a masters in forestry and work for 12 years as a forestry officer. She believes that women have a key role in restoring degraded landscapes, especially in Malawi.
“As a woman, I appreciate the issues that women are facing,” she says, “Having an opportunity to sit with key people that I can have a conversation and make decisions with is empowering and yet we need a lot more of us at the table.”
She says that in some of the cultures in Malawi, women don’t necessarily own the land with decisions being made by brothers, uncles or other male relatives.
“Women are generally more uneducated than men in Malawi, so we need to make sure that women have access, that their voices are heard,” Tumeo says.
Source: The Nation_June 22, 2021_ By Andrew Wight-Contributor