Joint Action for Environmental Justice: Tree Planting in Zimbabwe (December 2022)

At a workshop convened by JCoR and the Justice and Peace Desk of the Conference of Major Religious Superiors of Zimbabwe (JPIC Zim) in October, a JCoR/JPIC-Zimbabwe network was formed for the purpose of facilitating joint responses from many Catholic congregations to various justice-related concerns in the country. At a team-building gathering of the network’s leadership group in November, the group elected to begin their collaboration with an effort to respond to deforestation in Zimbabwe through a tree-planting campaign that was launched on Zimbabwe’s National Tree Planting Day. This national initiative is celebrated each year on the first Saturday of December, because that is typically the point in the country’s rainy season when soil is primed for seedlings to take root successfully. A large number of tree seedlings were acquired and distributed for this campaign by the Dominican Sisters of Peace and Claretian Missionaries, who are coordinating JCoR’s activities in Zimbabwe. By involving their local communities in the planting effort, the Religious are seeking not only to advocate for reforestation by their good example, but also to raise awareness and mobilise additional advocates in their communities in support of national forest conservation. Photos from the first planting efforts in Harare, Ruwa, and other outposts in that region are below. Additional planting organised by the JCoR/JPIC-Zimbabwe network are continuing throughout the month of December.

To learn more about the issue of deforestation in Zimbabwe, check out these articles from the UN Development Programme: