Bringing back the Rains to Southern Africa — guest post by Bruce Danckwerts

Mr. Bruce Danckwerts from Zambia reports on his efforts to provide local farmers with relevant ecological and climatological information, and to catalyze the recovery of a rain-competent tree cover

It’s one thing to do theoretical research on how natural ecosystems keep the Earth habitable. It’s another to apply scientific findings on the ground to restore degraded habitats. I feel privileged that some of our research appears to be useful in informing better ecological policies, and I’m grateful to Bruce Danckwerts for sharing his experiences in Zambia.

Below is Bruce’s Second 6-Month Report on the activities of Radio4Pasa, a network of radio stations that provides ecological information to farmers. The report covers a range of topics—as diverse as spying for the President for an audience, finding efficient stoves for community use, and disentangling scientific evidence to identify optimal tree recovery strategies. While many communities on Earth are still watching our forests disappear (“fixed”), those already on the brink are making brave efforts to avoid worse. — AM

My point being, our future is largely what we make of it, and, by working together, we CAN restore the rains to the levels we used to enjoy in the 1970s.
Bruce Danckwerts

Introduction

A chairman of the newly formed Herdbook Society of Zambia, once gave what is probably the most succinct Chairman’s Report ever. He stated: “We have made Progress.”

I suppose I could claim the same, but I would have to admit that the amount of progress has been very small. As I plan to be making these reports every 6 months, I thought I should formalize them by using the same format every time. In alphabetical order:

• Community Involvement

• Finance

• Firewood Conversion from Charcoal

• Political Endorsement

• Scientific Evidence

• Tree Restoration

• Weather

Community Involvement

I cannot remember how many people we had on Victor Tangi’s WApp group back in October, when I emailed my first report, but it has grown slightly to 33, with members from Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania and Namibia. I gave a talk recently to the Lusaka Branch of the Wildlife and Environmental Conservation Society of Zambia, which was sparsely attended, but I will add that talk to the website soon, so my effort was not entirely wasted.

I have been trying to involve various Chiefs but, so far, with limited success. I meet next month with three or four Chiefs from the North West corner of Zambia, up against the Angola border, and I hope I can persuade Chief Mukuni from Livingstone to join us. If I can get enough of them on board, I will propose a WApp group for all the Chiefs in Zambia (+/- 150 of them) and they can use it for whatever other issues they are concerned about, but at least I can use it to promote the protection of our “rain trees”.

Finance

We started to try to sell bumper stickers (at about $2 each) to raise a little bit of funding, to at least cover the cost of the stickers and other posters. These have been selling so slowly, that I have told the people (in Zambia, who were selling them on our behalf) to simply give them away. The publicity is more important than the $2. At the same time, I was trying to raise money to sponsor the Radio Stations that I use to broadcast the weekly programs that they broadcast to the Small Scale Farmers.

I launched this campaign to donate money for this purpose in about November 2024 (once I had a payment platform organized) and, so far, we have raised about USD 600 out of an annual requirement of $20,000. So, we will continue to have to run this campaign on a shoestring. Our biggest hope is that, when an actual project takes shape in a community, there will be funding from other NGO’s or from Carbon Credits that can help with the finance.

Firewood Conversion from Charcoal

I feel this is where I (personally) have made the biggest progress. I still believe the Moto waMvula is the most efficient stove I have seen (that can use small stick firewood with the minimum amount of preparation). When I sent the last report I had proposed a means of converting the stove to either different sized pots or into a ‘space heater’ for the social focus of a family, but this conversion required a small frame of angle iron, which would not be readily available to most communities, and, even if it were available, it would raise the cost of the stove considerably. As an alternative, I am proposing some ceramic parts for the stove which could be made out of clay, even clay derived from Termite Mounds (Anthills). A description of these ideas can be found at Ceramic Stoves and Ceramic accessories. I am reaching out to various people with pottery experience to get these made; even investigating the possibility of using Carbon Credits to finance their mass production from ceramic factories, both here in Zambia and in Malawi.

Moto waMvula translates as "Fire for Rain," reflecting the hope that this stove can help alleviate deforestation and drought by enabling cooking with small fire sticks—thus sparing larger trees (the “rain trees”). — AM

At the same time, I have initiated the harvesting of Small Stick Firewood, either from FMNR (Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration) (or, as I prefer to call it here, Konzani Mitengo) or from bush encroachment. To try to create a market for this small stick firewood, we built four Moto waMvula stoves in Choma (my nearest town) but so far, although these people have expressed delight with their stoves, they have not yet agreed to buy more firewood from my harvesters.

Perhaps a better opportunity has arisen because our government, I believe in conjunction with Save the Children, has launched a School Lunch Program, providing schools with mealie meal (cornflour, our staple) and dried beans or fish. Dried beans in particular, need a lot of energy to cook, and almost all schools, even rural ones, face a challenge of enough fuel wood. I have introduced the Moto waMvula to the Choma District Education Department, and they seem genuinely enthusiastic. I have about 4 schools in my neighborhood who are considering them. I am suggesting that they make the building of these stoves a class project for their oldest children as there is nothing like learning by doing. I believe that, when these communities see the efficiency of these stoves, they will adopt them at home – especially in the ‘convertible’ version that allows for a social focal point for the family, as we approach our southern hemisphere winter. The schools are currently on holiday, but I will be pushing them as soon as the children return after their Easter break.

Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration, or Konzani Mitengo, is a practice that encourages selected tree stems to grow stronger and straighter, transforming bushy regrowth into productive woodland. — AM

Political Endorsement

One of the reasons I mailed my first report slightly early was that I was still hoping that I could get either our Minister of Green Economy and Environment, or the Minister of Water to endorse this project at the 60th Anniversary celebrations of Zambia’s Independence. Nothing came of my requests, nor of several other people who claimed to have personal contacts in these Ministries.

I have two friends spying for when our President might fly (by helicopter) to one of his farms in Choma, which he uses as a base to inspect his other farms in the Southern Province. Once I know that he is around, I will wait at that farm for a 10 minute audience with him, to ask him to put a ban on Charcoal production in Zambia by the end of 2026 – to give Zambians time enough to make the change. I will ask him to push for similar bans throughout southern Africa. There are many other issues I would dearly like to discuss with the President, but, if there is time, I will also ask him to promote the Moto waMvula stove throughout the region. Zimbabwe already has a charcoal ban in place, but, if many of the meals are still being cooked on inefficient stoves, the saving in firewood (and therefore trees) won’t be sufficient.

Scientific Evidence

This is another area, where I, personally, have made some significant progress. Following my first report, Judy Schwartz (author of “Water in Plain Sight”) introduced me to several Substack writers who are promoting similar ideas. Through those connections I made contact with Anastassia Makarieva, a Russian scientist who helped promote the concept of a Biotic Pump, whereby trees help to move moisture from the coasts into the interior of otherwise dry continents. In one of her posts, she showed how it had been proven that the trees in the Amazon initiated the rainy season ahead of the arrival of the ITCZ. It seems reasonable that a similar process might work here in southern Africa. The evidence would seem to suggest that, as our tree cover has declined, our rains have started later and later, possibly now awaiting the arrival of the ITCZ – which, regardless of how much actual rain we get, is meaning our growing seasons are getting shorter and shorter. A friend, who is doing more to teach us how to repair our soils than almost any other farmer in Zambia, refused to plant soybeans as his first rain was just too late in the season. Instead he planted sorghum, and even then his season was too short for that! Had he not taken very good care of his soils during the last 15 years, he would not have even harvested a sorghum crop!

I was hoping that I could persuade either the people who run the NASA Climate Model or at the UK’s Hadley Center to run their models with different levels of tree cover for Southern Africa. However, it seems (from the discussions I have had in other circles) that these models don’t even include vegetation or soil conditions in their models. They are preoccupied with the atmosphere, and obviously the CO2 levels. Leaving out soil and vegetation is, I believe, leaving out about half of weather, and is something we need to change.

Tree Restoration

Although there is nothing like enough tree restoration happening in the region, there is at least some significant effort being made, mostly driven by Carbon Credit schemes. In Chief Siachitema’s area (a +/-200,000ha area to the north west of where I live) the Chief did have a plan to plant about 80,000 trees. Not only were most of these trees unsuitable as rain trees (what Anastassia calls “stupid” trees, because, not being indigenous, they would transpire moisture at an inappropriate season of the year) but I doubt that even 1000 trees were planted, and, of those, very few will have survived.

Most of the trees I am planting I am growing from seed, but I did try about 60 truncheons of various species. Although at least 40 of these did sprout some leaves, I don’t think any of them are actually going to grow into a tree. I did plant these truncheons later in the year than was recommended by Roland Bunch (who is keen on the technique) and I will be in touch with him to get better advice ahead of this planting season.

Weather

Although this last season was considered either a La Nina year, or at least a neutral year, and although I believe Zambia will have a much better maize crop than last year, the rainfall was still inadequate. The website,

https://www.zambezira.org

contains useful data on both the flow of the Zambezi and the levels in Lake Kariba – where we would normally get about 40% of our hydro-electric power. The rest of our power comes from the Kafue River, and its storage dam (Lake IteshiTeshi) is also very low.

I have already mentioned that, for some farmers, the season was so short that even a sorghum crop was threatened. We also had, again, a pronounced mid-season drought. It has become a bit of a feature of the last 5 or 6 years, that we often get a long dry spell at some time in February or March. This year was somewhat like that, with my last rain on the 28th February, and then suddenly we got 50mm on the 19th April. Someone (on a livestock management group) stated that he thought these mid-season droughts were a sign of a ‘broken’ system. Such an observation is of little use, unless he also proposed a mechanism by which such a broken system would manifest itself in a “two rains” system. However, the idea probably warrants further investigation.

I am going to end this report with a short story of Musikili School, a small primary school which our community started in about 1985. The country was bankrupt and Dr. Kaunda decided we could no longer afford the foreign exchange to pay for children to attend schools outside of Zambia. The community persuaded his government that, if we built the school, would they at least allow us to find the foreign exchange to employ sufficient foreign teachers to maintain similar standards of education as were being offered by those foreign schools? We were mad to embark on such a project: there really was no future for this country. And yet, 40 years later, we have numerous primary and secondary schools offering an education on a par with any of the schools in the other countries in the region.

My point being, our future is largely what we make of it, and, by working together, we CAN restore the rains to the levels we used to enjoy in the 1970s. Not only would that be an enormous boost to the agriculture in the region (a boost that we will need with our burgeoning population) but it will also go some way in restoring the availability of hydroelectricity in the region.

Keep well, and I look forward to more progress in the next six months,

Bruce Danckwerts, CHOMA, Zambia

More on this can be found at https://radio4pasa.com on the page Bring back the Rains, or on better farming (from a soil point of view) on the Farmers Handbook page.

PS I've just had another reply from a recipient of my report who points our that the Limpopo (between Zimbabwe and South Africa) is recording the biggest flow in 80yrs of records. I'm going to need your help in reconciling that high flow with our narrative of a weakened Biotic Pump, because of declining tree cover.

Nobody said Climate Science was easy!

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