Most of us, as early as in our school days, learnt about the Amazon being the largest rainforest in the world. But there's another forest, about the size of Mexico, in Africa, covered with tropical grasslands, savannas and shrublands. The Miombo forest is the largest dry woodland we probably never heard of.
The forest, about 1.9 million square kilometres, covers parts of Zimbabwe, Angola, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
It is considered the world's biggest mammal migration spot between October and December, as around 10 million bats travel from different parts of Africa and settle inside the Kasanka National Park in Zambia's Miombo woodland.
The Miombo forest is also home to Africa's most iconic megafauna and the continent's endangered elephant species. It provides livelihoods and essential resources to over 300 million people.
Between 1980 and 2020, forest cover in the Miombo decreased by nearly one-third. The protection of the Miombo forest is critical as cutting it down could release a massive amount of carbon into the atmosphere and impact the climate. Until now, the forest helped slow down global warming.
The Miombo woodlands are a unique type of semi-deciduous forest, primarily consisting of trees from the legume family. Stretching across Central and Southern Africa, this ecoregion is the world's largest dry tropical forest. In Mozambique's Niassa Special Reserve, one of Africa's largest protected areas, the Miombo woodlands thrive alongside diverse habitats, including rocky outcrops and seasonally flooded grassy areas known as dambos.
These forests provide essential resources such as thatching grass for roofing, poles for fencing and construction, bark for fibre production, nutrient-rich termite mound soil for agriculture, and firewood for cooking.
A recent study also revealed that it stores more than double the carbon dioxide in its soils and trees than previously estimated, CNN reported.
The Miombo forest stores an extra 3.7 billion metric tons of carbon, more than what China released into the air in 2023.
The storage of additional carbon in the forest is considered beneficial, for it helps in fighting climate change by keeping excess carbon out of the atmosphere.
According to Edwin Tambara, director of Global Leadership at the African Wildlife Foundation, dry forests like the Miombo are often undervalued, understudied, and devalued compared to rainforests like the Amazon and the Congo Basin.
