Tackling poverty traps and enhancing safety nets

The crucial role of miombo for poverty mitigation is in spite of the fact that miombo is of low productivity and is not well-endowed with high-value timber resources. This makes them less interesting to commercial concerns, but what matters is their high local value to tens of millions of poor households. Miombo woodlands can sustain livelihoods, act as safety nets in times of emergency and serve as gap fillers in times of seasonal shortages. They also shore up livelihoods in the face of HIV/AIDS, and we would hypothesize that miombo resources there role may change and become even more important as a source of consumption goods in the face of climate change.

The role that miombo plays in shoring up households in the face of illness was convincingly shown by Hegde and Bull, where environmental income increased by 42 percent as a result of illness shocks.

There are few good estimates of the impact of climate change on miombo ecology. Some speculate that miombo is also likely to be negatively effected by climate change