MALAWI: CADECOM Urges Communities to Plant Trees
The Catholic Development Commission (CADECOM) has encouraged communities to plant trees and maintain the dependent relationship that exist between humankind and the environment for communities’ resilience to drought and other climate related challenges.
This was said by Mr. Bonface Banda, the diocesan CADECOM Secretary for Lilongwe Archdiocese during a tree planting exercise organized by the commission at Chambukira village in Lilongwe.
“In this tree planting exercise, we have planted both fruit and natural trees and we encourage the communities to continue planting more trees. The community will have fruits from the trees which will help to curb issues of malnutrition and diseases encountered by the communities. Natural trees will help to replace most trees that have been destroyed and help to mitigate climate change problems in the communities,” Banda.
He said that CADECOM tree planting initiative was as a result of the Holy Father Pope Francis’ encouragement through his Encyclical Laudato Si which is a worldwide wake up call to help humanity understand the destruction that man is rendering to the environment and his fellow man.
“We are being inspired to take care of the environment by the Pope’s encyclical message Laudato Si which encourages a fair interaction and relationship between the humankind and the environment. We have to be fair with the environment, we are not there to destroy the trees because we need them and they need us too. That is why we found it necessary that we join hands with communities in the tree planting exercise as we train ad encourage them to keep doing this on their own,” he said.
In ensuring sustainability of the initiative, CADECOM trained the community to produce other trees from the seedlings that were given to them. The results have been encouraging as the communities are able to produce and plant trees on their own.
“About two thousand seedlings were purchased and given to the community, on top of that, there are so many trees which the community itself has grafted from the ones given to them. This is what we want so that even if we pull out from this area, the people will continue planting the trees,” Banda said.
In his remarks, Village Headman Chambukira thanked CADECOM for providing the community with seedlings for both fruits and natural trees which he said will help them replace the trees that have been destroyed due to lack of knowledge on the importance of trees.
“We thank CADECOM for helping us understand that we need trees and therefore we have to plant and take care of them, we lacked this guidance in the past years but now we are so passionate about planting trees as we have experienced problems like continuous dry spell that comes due to inadequate trees. We grafted so many seedlings on our own to make sure we plant many trees which will provide fruits and good rains,” Chambukira said.
This is one of the initiatives CADECOM is implementing to make sure communities are safe and resilient to climatic shocks which are worsening poverty especially in the rural areas of the country.
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