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The Sixty Million Tree Planting Project in Malawi is a bold climate action project spearheaded by Andrews Nchessie, to plant a total of 60million trees on 4,000 hectares of land.
Severe floods are one of the main challenges that his school faces. They not only affect his school, but more than 350 other schools in the district and about 300,000 students.
The schools’ buildings such as classrooms, office block, pit latrines and immediate vicinity are flooded and damaged. Children cannot get to the school and school equipment is damaged.
With the severity and frequency of flooding events increasing, it became clear that there was a need to take preventative action. Trees are a vital part of natural flood management because they directly intercept rainfall. Tree roots create channels in the soil known as ‘macropores’ and water from heavy rain infiltrates the soil using these channels rather than flowing over the surface and leading to floods. In compacted soils, tree roots have been shown to improve infiltration by 153% compared with unplanted land. Planting trees provide a long term, natural way of preventing floods.
Impact
The project involves local schools, institutions and communities including 8 public teacher training colleges and 450 teaching practice schools, 67 local communities and 450 primary schools. So far 1,059,487 trees have been planted in 90 hectares and they are looking for funding to buy more seedlings.
Andrews Nchessie has been recognised with a Zikomo National Award for outstanding performance in education in Malawi by the Head of State Dr Lazarus Chakwera, in part for the spearheading of this project.