Ethiopia's Church Forests — Community Wall-Building to Protect Sacred Afromontane Forest Islands

Northern Ethiopia's forest cover has fallen from about 45% of the landscape in the early twentieth century to less than 5% today, as farmland has expanded across the highlands. The only substantial remnants of native Afromontane dry forest left in much of the region are small patches, often just a few hectares, that surround Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo churches — communities have protected these groves as sacred ground for centuries, with some forests documented at over 1,000 years old.
Since a partnership began in January 2009 between forest ecologist Dr. Alemayehu Wassie, Dr. Meg Lowman and the TREE Foundation, the project has catalogued 106 individual church forests across the Lake Tana region, recording their size (from 1.6 to 35 hectares among surviving forests) and remaining woody-plant species counts (up to 99 species recorded at the Gedamselase forest). Twenty-eight sites identified as holding the highest biodiversity were prioritised for protective dry-stone walls, built by local communities to keep out grazing livestock — locals describe the forest as the church's 'jewellery' and the wall as its 'clothing'. As of the latest tracked data, 17 of the 106 documented forests have completed walls around their full perimeter, with several more partially built.
The biodiversity case for these forests rests on Wassie's peer-reviewed 2007 PhD research at Wageningen University, which surveyed vegetation across 28 church forests in South Gondar and found them to hold a disproportionate share of the region's surviving native and endangered plant species compared with the surrounding farmland.
The practice has real limits: many of the 106 catalogued sites remain unwalled, and several are recorded as already fully deforested (0 hectares of forest remaining), meaning the window for protection has already closed at those churches. No independent data yet quantifies the forests' carbon storage or watershed effects, and the approach depends on continued buy-in from clergy and surrounding communities rather than any formal legal protection.
Read more: https://treefoundation.org/projects/church-forests-of-ethiopia/

Read the full analysis: https://treefoundation.org/projects/church-forests-of-ethiopia/