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Today, 21 March 2025, is the International Day of Forests, a moment where the world can take a moment to appreciate – and hopefully commit to protecting – the environment of which we are all a part and upon which we all rely.
The theme of this year’s recognition is ‘Celebrating Forests and Food’, a matter especially close to our hearts at Money for Madagascar.
On this year’s International Day of Forests we would like to highlight not just the work we do with Malagasy communities to help them protect their unique environment, or even why that work and their efforts are so important, but also what our work proves: that development and the environment can progress together, complementing and strengthening one another.
Madagascar is a country of 31.2m people, and one of the world’s four confirmed ‘carbon sinks’ states which remove more carbon from the atmosphere than they emit.
But Malagasy people face serious challenges. Almost 80 (79.9) per cent of the island republic’s people live on or below the global poverty baseline of £1.73 per day.
They are surrounded by a breathtaking and vibrant ecosphere, with rainforests, dry (spiny) forest, and wetlands which support five per cent of the entire planet’s plant and animal life, and in which close to 90 per cent of species are unique to Madagascar.
But in situations of poverty and food shortage, which are being made increasingly worse because of the impacts of a global climate crisis which is in no way their fault, an accident of birth which makes them custodians and guardians of a wonder which helps keep us all alive – the living, breathing Malagasy wilderness – can seem like a burden more than a privilege.
The temptation – further driven by impacts of climate change including droughts and floods which ruin crops, and the erosion of irreplaceable fertile soil by intense rains, all of which reduce food production and increase food shortage – is always there to remove sections of the forest to make way for more farmland, which would be catastrophic for the flora and fauna which live there, as well as for the world as a whole.
Malagasy people – like every person on the planet – want and deserve a decent standard of living, with enough food to eat and income to live in at least a reasonable level of comfort.
They, like all of us, wish to provide for themselves and their families.
Unlike many of us, however, they have also been charged with protecting a resource on which every living thing on Earth relies, and placed in sometimes extremes of food shortage and poverty.
That’s where we come in.
We work with Malagasy men, women and children so they can improve their lives and livelihoods, and at the same time protect, restore and expand the precious, amazing forest and its creatures.
Our RSF programme helps people train in improved farming techniques to increase yields and incomes without requiring more land, to learn and use agro-forestry techniques, in which fruit, leaves and oils can be harvested while trees and other plants grow, to develop, enact and manage their own initiatives, and to work protecting the forest and its creatures, including planting new trees and monitoring animal returns and safety.
And our – and their – work, works.
In the Torotorofotsy Wetland, near the Andasibe Mantadia National Park, we work with community organisation Mitsinjo. The Park, home to iconic, critically-endangered, species such as the golden mantella frog, the greater bamboo lemur and the black and white ruffed lemur, has been seriously damaged in the last decades.
But in the last year alone, in the nearby forest communities of Betombotsirika and Behontsa, we have:
- Replanted 27 hectares of unique indigenous forest, restoring habitat for Madagascar’s endangered lemurs.
- Created 10 local jobs in tree nurseries, producing the wide range of indigenous species needed for our vital reforestation work
- Trained 40 families in sustainable agriculture, helping them develop agroforestry on their land, to improve household nutrition and restore local biodiversity.
- Trained the communities in environmental protection, including protecting newly planted trees and sustainable waste-disposal
Our ‘Youths for Lemurs‘ project in eastern Madagascar has helped young people take a lead in rice cultivation and lemur conservation, reaching thousands of Malagasy people and helping endangered lemur species recover numbers in areas the project has reached.
In three Malagasy Key Biodiversity Areas: the ‘Bank of (the river) Onilahy‘, the ‘Lake Ihotry-Mangoky Delta Complex‘, both in the South-West, and Tsinjoarivo, in Madagascar’s Highlands, our ECCLiM project has helped Malagasy communities save forests and restore wildlife, even as they improved crop yields and incomes.
All three areas host wildlife and plants under threat, many of which are unique to their region, including Onilahy’s spiny forest, in which 53 per cent of plant species and eight full genera are endemic, as are many lemurs, tortoises and birds.
The Lake Ihotry-Mangoky Delta Complex hosts a baobab forest and several endemic plant and wildlife species, particularly water birds, while the Tsinjaorivo area contains at least 11 species of primate, 17 species of tenrec (the highest diversity in Madagascar of a family unique to the island), seven species of rodent, five of them endemic, six carnivores, four of which are endemic, and at least 247 plant species.
Under ECCLiM:
- 75 young leaders, 42 of them women, have trained to provide agro-ecological guidance, improving local governance and livelihoods
- 2,488 people, 60 per cent of them women, strengthened financial resilience and conservation funding
- 77 per cent of participating households at least tripled their crop yields, boosted income by 47 per cent, and reduced farming costs by two-thirds
In all cases protecting and encouraging the return of endangered species, and the woodland which supports and protects them.
In the course of our RSF programme, our projects have helped thousands of people increase their incomes and access to food, plant tens of thousands of plants, restore and protect hundreds of hectares of Malagasy forest, helped departed animals return, and create jobs and opportunities for young people and adults.
Malagasy people are charged with protecting the forests upon which we all rely as a species to survive, and the animals and plants which also rely on, and make up, that vibrant ecosystem.
We help them to develop the means by which they can do so, and live lives closer to those they deserve, without shortage, with improved incomes, and in reasonable comfort.
We – and mostly they – are proving that development and environment can work hand in hand, each helping and complementing the other.
This #ForestDay, we hope you can share in and enjoy the achievements of their work.
To read the address made by MfM CEO Lova Rasoalinoro, at a multi-organisation reforestation event organised and run by MfM in the Fokontany of Ambohimahatsinjo, to mark the International Day of Forests (Friday 21 March 2025), click here.
To read more about the reforestation event, click here.
