Across Zambia, farmers are earning income by growing trees, preventing fires and restoring the Miombo woodlands around their communities. The Ecopreneur Movement is showing what can happen when restoring nature creates opportunities for the people doing the work.
Paul Chimusanya’s farm in Zambia is where he grows maize, vegetables and sunflowers, keeps livestock and supports his family from the land.
More recently, the farm has become a place for growing something else too. Through the Ecopreneur Movement, Paul has trained in nursery management and raised more than 20,000 seedlings for planting across the surrounding landscape. The additional work has provided another source of income and allowed him to employ people locally.
Paul is one of thousands of farmers taking part in a much bigger effort to restore Zambia’s Miombo woodlands.
A landscape people depend on
Stretching across southern and central Africa, the Miombo is the world’s largest dry forest ecosystem. Its trees hold carbon, and its woodlands give rural communities food, fuel, medicines and livelihoods. Repeated fires, woodland clearance and pressure on the land are gradually weakening the woodland.
The Ecopreneur Movement, developed by Community Climate Solutions (CCS) in partnership with Climate Impact Partners, pays farmers for activities that help the woodland recover while supporting their livelihoods.
More than 49,000 farmers are now signed up across the project’s different activities. Within that wider community, 10,697 farmers took part in tree planting during the 2025/26 season, planting 1.6 million trees.
But participation reaches well beyond planting.
Changing the economics of fire
Sylvia Daka is a Lead Farmer working with 20 other farmers. This year, Sylvia expects to oversee the planting of around 4,000 seedlings, while caring for 200 trees on her own farm. The composting techniques she has learned through the project are now being used across her other crops too.
Fire prevention is another important part of her work.
Frequent fires can damage young trees before they become established. Communities can receive payments linked to areas that remain fire-free, while work such as grass slashing and creating firebreaks provides local employment and helps reduce the risk of uncontrolled fires.
Sylvia has seen the difference in her own community:
Since CCS came to our area, we have seen a reduction in wildfires. People do not want to burn because they fear losing out on the non-burn payment. And the fire work has brought jobs to our community, slashing the woodland and making firebreaks. CCS is helping our land and our families at the same time.
Fire has long shaped this landscape: historically, more than 60% of the project area has burned each year. During the 2025 fire season, thousands of fire-management interventions took place across the project, with early analysis showing a relative reduction in fire of up to 7.5% compared with counterfactual areas.
Growing trees that last
The scale of the tree-planting effort is growing quickly.
During the 2025/26 season, farmers planted 1.6 million trees through 60 community nurseries. Next season, CCS expects more than 2.5 million trees to make it into the ground, with between 17,000 and 20,000 farmers expected to participate in planting.
The work begins months before the rains arrive. Farmers prepare nurseries, make compost and get the land ready. Planting begins when the rains have given young trees the best possible chance to establish before the dry season.
Support continues after planting. Lead Farmers receive tree-survival guidance, participating farmers get regular practical advice and demonstration plots show recommended techniques in practice. Trees are later checked for survival and growth, and the results are used to calculate each farmer’s survival payment. The better the trees do, the more a farmer earns.
CCS also funds project operations and ecosystem-service payments before carbon revenues arrive, so farmers don’t have to wait years to earn from the work. When carbon revenue starts to flow, the project is designed to share 60% of what remains after standard registry and regulatory fees with farmers and communities.
For the benefit of tomorrow
Across nearly 900,000 hectares, the Ecopreneur Movement brings together tree planting, fire prevention and improved land management.
Behind that scale are thousands of individual decisions. The project is built on the idea that restoration has a better chance of lasting when those decisions also make economic sense for the people making them.
A farmer caring for young trees through the dry season. A Lead Farmer passing new skills to neighbors. A community cutting firebreaks before the dry grass catches fire.
For Paul, it means raising seedlings that will eventually leave his farm and grow across the surrounding landscape. For Sylvia, it means seeing fewer fires while new work is created in her community.
These changes are happening today, while helping shape what this landscape can become in the years ahead.
Paul puts it more simply:
People should know that what we’re doing is for the benefit of tomorrow.
