#064 The Forest Maker

And the largest positive environmental transformation in Africa, with Tony Rinaudo AM

Tony Rinaudo AM is the award winning Senior Climate Action Advisor for World Vision, also known as The Forest Maker. This Australian agronomist revolutionized reforestation in Africa, alongside the communities in which he worked, with a system called Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR).

In Niger alone, where the desert was still expanding 20 years ago, around six million hectares of land have been restored. Having spread to 24 countries in Africa, Tony’s vision is for it to reach 100 countries around the world this decade, and he’s not alone. The movement is fast spreading globally.

“In that instant everything changed, because there was a vast underground forest across the whole country, and in fact across many many developing countries. They don’t have bulldozers, they don’t have mechanised farming. The trees are still there. And the battle lines shifted. I was no longer fighting the Sahara, I didn’t need a big budget, I didn’t need a miracle tree species to resist drought. it was about mindset.”

— Tony Rinaudo

The transformation in Niger has been called "probably the largest positive environmental transformation in the Sahel and perhaps in all of Africa," by internationally acclaimed environmental specialist Chris Reij. Though Tony will tell you the transformation was in the people first, starting with himself. He’ll also tell you that the solutions found in Africa worked because they were low-cost, rapid and scalable. And that the lessons he learnt living on the edge of the Sahara Desert relate to so much of what the rest of the world needs today.

Recognition for Tony’s decades of pioneering work has come in the form of multiple awards including the Commandeur de Merite, Agricole, Rep. du Niger, and the Right Livelihood Award. The latter was “for demonstrating on a large scale how drylands can be greened at minimal cost, improving the livelihoods of millions of people.” The Award went on to say, “What Rinaudo has created is much more than an agricultural technique, he has inspired a farmer-led movement.”

What Tony found was that the barriers to large-scale, rapid regeneration weren’t so much technical, as social. He realised that if it was people who had reduced the forest to a barren landscape, it would require people to restore it—and false beliefs, attitudes and practices would need to be challenged with truth, love and perseverance. And “if the lesson of Niger teaches us anything, it is that impossible changes can become possible with amazing rapidity – given the right conditions and intentions.”

So “what would be possible if all stakeholders—donors, scientists, governments, policy makers, business, NGOs, traditional and religious leaders and farmers—partnered and were serious about land restoration? Technically, there is no reason why simultaneously 5 million hectares of land could not be restored in multiple countries within five years.”

Tony joined me to talk about all this, online from his home in Victoria, Australia.

Note: Sound quality was a little scratchy at times today, perhaps due to the storm at the time of recording. Apologies for that. We managed to improve it as we went.

Title slide: Tony Rinaudo (pic: Silas Kosh).

Pics below (left to right, top to bottom): The moment of Tony's epiphany, when deflating his tyres to get through the sand in the early ‘80s (credit unknown); re-creating that moment decades later (by Johannes Dieterich when bringing The Forest Maker book together); a ‘before and after’ shot in the region in Ethiopia that Tony talks about in the podcast (source from World Vision); Halidou, from a village called Gangara, sitting among the trees (by Tony Rinaudo).