The signatories of the Maputo Declaration on the Miombo Forest, including the Mozambican government, have already mobilized around 153 million dollars for the creation of a fund to finance initiatives for the sustainable management of the miombo forest, the largest dry tropical forest ecosystem in the world.
The initiative, which was launched in August 2022 by Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi, through the Maputo Declaration, aims at collecting a total of 500 million dollars proposed by the signatory countries.
The signatory countries of Maputo Declaration are mostly from the Southern African Development Community (SADC), namely: Mozambique, Angola, Botswana, Malawi, the Democratic Republic of Congo (RDC), Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
According to the Mozambican Minister of Land and Environment, Ivete Maibaze, speaking on Thursday, in Maputo, at the opening of a meeting of her Ministry’s Coordinating Council which is being held under the slogan “Towards Sustainable and Integrated Management of the Miombo Forest”, “we have raised 153 million US dollars so far, and our target is around 500 million US dollars.”
According to Maibaze, in addition to the International Miombo Conference held last April in Washington, another meeting is due to take place, again in the US, to announce how much has been mobilized through the initiative.
“We used the opportunity of the Washington meeting to publicize this initiative and mobilize resources, and we are already planning to prepare a new conference in New York, where our partners will have the opportunity to tell us about the amount of money mobilized to support this initiative” she said.
The Mozambican government, Maibaze added, has mobilized other partners at national level in order to comply “with our country’s environmental agenda.”
The miombo woodlands cover around two million square kilometers in southern Africa and provide countless goods and services that guarantee the livelihoods of over 300 million inhabitants.
The miombo is a biome that includes tropical and subtropical grasslands, bushlands and savannahs. It also includes four bio-regions and is responsible for maintaining the Greater Zambezi, one of the most important transnational river basins.
Source: AIM
