LONG FALLOWS Project (Lengthening Of swidden Natural-forest re-Growth cycles through Farmer Action, Learning and Leadership Opportunities for Well-being and Social-inclusion)

Long-fallow swidden agriculture and agroforestry underpin millions of farmers’ livelihoods and provide climate, biodiversity and soil ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes. There is a global decline in long-fallow swidden agriculture, contributing to environmental degradation and increased livelihood vulnerability. Taking a research-to-action approach, the project will work with farmers in degraded Tanzanian landscapes to generate evidence and develop innovative technical approaches that integrate sustainable forest management with long-fallow swidden agriculture and agroforestry. Through socially inclusive farmer-led research-to-action, institutional capacity-building and ecosystem-services business development, project learning will deliver more sustainable land management options relevant to millions of small-scale farmers.

Funded by – UK Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office through the REDAA programme https://www.redaa.org/

Impact

Goal: To enable people, nature and climate to thrive from the restoration of degraded East African Coastal forests through improved governance, capacity and knowledge.

Expected outcomes
People

• Enhanced climate change resilience for 7,500 women, men and youth in project villages through improved access to forest ecosystem services and products, and to climate finance;
• Reduced livelihood threats from local climate impacts of deforestation benefiting >100,000 Nachingwea District residents;
• Increased knowledge and capacity of 25 staff in the Ministry for Local Government (PORALG) and 168 village-leaders on scaling-up integrated CBFM-swidden in ways that enhance livelihood resilience, reduce conflict and promote GESI with relevance across Tanzania.

Nature

• Nature-positive forest and land-management modelled across 45,000ha of intact and degraded woodland and 5,000ha of agricultural land.
• Changes in national policy tools to promote scaling-up long-fallow swidden agriculture and integrated agriculture-forest land management with relevance to 21Mha of village-land forests.
• Increased capacity of 168 village-leaders, 21 Government and NGO extension-officers and 30 policy-makers to support: nature-positive agricultural practices; strategies to reduce agriculture-driven deforestation; and natural forest restoration.
• More positive community attitudes to scaling-up CBFM by moving beyond a binary forest-or-agriculture land-use model and leveraging climate finance.
• Increased knowledge on scalable methods to achieve nature-positive small-scale agriculture benefiting wild and agricultural biodiversity.

Climate

• Increased practitioner and policy-maker knowledge on: reducing GHG emissions from agriculture-driven deforestation; sequestering carbon in fallows; mitigating local CC impacts of deforestation; and accessing climate finance.
• Increased capacity of four TARI and TAFORI researchers to investigate integrated forest-agriculture climate solutions through locally-led research-to-action;
• Increased capacity of 21 Government and NGO extension officers, 15 CBO leaders and 168 village-leaders to support agriculture-forest climate mitigation and adaptation solutions;
• ~45,000tCO2e annual net reductions across the 45,000 ha of project area forest, assuming 1tCO2e ha-1 y-1 (based on MJUMITA Lindi REDD+).
• ~25,600tCO2e y-1 in carbon sequestration across 5,000ha of long-fallow regeneration assuming 5.13 tCO2e ha-1 y-1 (Doggart 2023).
• US$0.25million in climate-finance committed for participating villages.
• US$5million in the pipeline for other Lindi Region villages
   

Project website

https://www.tfcg.org/what-we-do/conserve/lindi-region-coastal-forests/