ISFMI Southern Africa Savanna Fire Management Pilot — Adapting Australia's Carbon Methodology to Miombo Woodlands

Northern Australia's Indigenous-led savanna burning carbon methodology — shifting fires from the more emissions-intensive late dry season to the early dry season — has generated verified carbon credits for over a decade under Australia's national carbon scheme. In 2019 the Australian Government commissioned the International Savanna Fire Management Initiative (ISFMI) to run a four-year feasibility pilot in Botswana, testing whether the same accounting approach could be adapted to Southern Africa's fire-prone miombo woodlands.
The pilot was subsequently extended to Zambia, Mozambique and Angola, funded principally by the Green Climate Fund. ISFMI now runs active GCF readiness projects in Botswana, Mozambique and Zambia, with project preparation under way in Angola, alongside independent assessments of commercial project opportunities, including under the Paris Agreement's Article 6.2/6.4 bilateral crediting mechanisms.
A 2025 peer-reviewed study built a bottom-up fuel-load inventory using drone-mounted cameras and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery across five sites: Tsodilo Hills and Kasane Forest Extension in Botswana, Kafue National Park and the Bovu and Lualaba protected forest areas in Zambia, and Niassa Special Reserve in Mozambique. The resulting fuel model has an error margin of roughly ±27% for surface-level fuel — accurate enough to be judged technically viable — though accuracy drops for coarser woody debris and more structurally variable fuel layers.
This remains a methodology-development and readiness-funding stage: technical feasibility for the approach is confirmed by published research, but as of the latest assessments no Southern African savanna-burning carbon credits have yet been issued or independently verified, unlike the mature scheme it is modelled on in northern Australia.

Read the full analysis: https://www.isfmi.org/africa