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 to the early dry season -- has generated verified carbon credits for over a decade. 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 approach could be adapted to Southern Africa's miombo woodlands; it was subsequently extended to Zambia, Mozambique and Angola, funded principally by the Green Climate Fund.

A 2025 peer-reviewed study built a bottom-up fuel-load inventory using drone-mounted cameras and Sentinel-2 imagery across five sites in Botswana, Zambia and 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.

This remains a methodology-development and readiness-funding stage: technical feasibility is confirmed by published research, but 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.