Abstract

This study was conducted to appraise or assess the status of forests and woodland resources in Zambia based on an analysis of data from the Integrated Land Use Assessment (ILUA) survey. An attempt was made to provide fresh estimates of the forest biomass and growing stock and other indicators which have the potential to inform policy and decision-making on forest resources and land use in Zambia. The findings show that approximately 49,968,170 ha or about 66% of the land is under forest cover. Over two thirds of the forests are located on customary land. The total above ground and below ground forest biomass over all land uses is estimated at 5.5 billion metric tonnes. The findings indicate that with the current wood stocking estimated at 2.95 billion cubic metres and with proper management, this is sufficient to meet the country’s forests are in good condition and the rates of deforestation are quite modest. Only 5% of the total forests are severely degraded and over 63% of the forests are in good condition. Given that more than two-thirds of all forests are located in customary land and are not formally managed, it is recommended that government should bring more forests under formal management and more importantly devolve and share some forest rights and responsibilities over public forests with local communities, user-groups and the private sector.

Keywords:

Biomass, growing stock, deforestation, integrated land use assessment, land tenure, Zambia,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.