Forest-based solutions for the Kingdom of Lesotho In the spring of 2012 Lesotho‘s High Commissioner to Canada, Her Excellency Mathabo Tsepa, visited UBC Forestry with an official request for assistance regarding land change and forest management in Lesotho. The Kingdom of Lesotho is a tiny landlocked country entirely surrounded by South Africa. It is afflicted with serious soil erosion and land degradation challenges, is losing woodlots due to cattle browsing and illegal harvesting for fuelwood, and has ongoing land use conflicts with the large numbers of herders who roam the foothills and mountains. At the same time, there is chronic unemployment and poverty in the rural communities, high rates of HIV infection, and declining employment prospects for Lesotho adults in neighbouring South Africa. There are viable opportunities to mitigate these challenges through broad-based forestry-related initiatives. However, this will require significant research, institutional capacity building, training, and business mentoring over several years. Having heard about the successful work that our Centre for Advanced Wood Processing (CAWP) had done in South Africa, and herself
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an alumna of UBC, Dr Tsepa appealed to UBC Forestry to apply our multidisciplinary expertise to the problem. After securing some initial seed funding through CIDA’s University Partnerships Program and Lucara Diamond Corporation, a delegation consisting of Iain Macdonald from CAWP, Joleen Timko from AFRICAD (UBC’s Africa Forests Research Initiative on Conservation and Development) and 3 South Africa-based team members from Stellenbosch University and Furntech (a business incubation organization) traveled to Lesotho in November 2013. The group first toured various woodlots, agroforestry sites, indigenous forest areas, and a wood processing operation, as well as meeting with high-level decision makers in government and the education sector. The group then participated in a 3-day planning forum at which Lesotho stakeholders and the visiting delegation exchanged ideas on forestry-related strategies and activities that would be suitable for application in the Lesotho context. The ultimate goal was to develop an action plan based on the input of all present, and draw from local and international