For Madagascar farmer Edmond, who goes by one name, it was a

breakthrough. In 2019 he perfected a complicated technique to

grow a rare species of tree known as Dalbergia normandii.

The plants hail from a valuable, and difficult-to-propagate family

of trees known as rosewoods, which have been felled near to the
point of extinction in many parts of Madagascar.

“This year is one of the happiest years of my life because the time I
spent on this technique was not in vain,” said Edmond, 60, who
lives in Ambodimanga village on Madagascar’s eastern coast.
"This time, luck is with me."

Edmond is working on a rosewood conservation project

coordinated by the United Nations Environment Programme
(UNEP). Its aim is to safeguard a group of trees that is the
world’s most trafficked wild product by value and volume. From
Guatemala to Madagascar to Thailand to Zambia, rosewoods have
been targeted by timber traffickers who seek to profit especially
from its growing demand in China and Viet Nam, principally for
furniture.
Source: UNODC

“Over the last decade, the share of total rosewood imports to China
coming from Africa has steadily increased, with a portion of this
share suspected to have been illegally sourced in or exported from
Africa,” says a July 2020 report by the United Nations Office for
Drugs and Crime (UNODC).  

To help reverse this trend, in 2017 UNEP, Madagascar’s Ministry

of Environment and Sustainable Development, and local partners
launched a Global Environment Facility-funded project
titled Conservation of key, threatened, endemic and economically
valuable species. The project, which runs till 2022, seeks to reduce
the threats to 21 economically important but threatened species at
18 sites in Madagascar. The production of large quantities of
healthy new rosewood plants is critical to the project’s success.

The Pointe à Larrée protected area, on the coast in central-eastern

Madagascar, currently managed by Missouri Botanical Garden, is
one of the project sites. It’s home to 13 species targeted by the
project, including six species of Dalbergia, most of
them rosewood. (All species of Dalbergia fall within
the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species
Appendix II.)

Rosewood species “threatened for decades”

“These species have been threatened for decades due to

commercial exploitation for their very valuable `precious wood’
and habitat loss due to slash-and-burn cultivation,” says Adolphe
Lehavana, project manager at Pointe à Larrée and an employee of
Missouri Botanical Garden, an international non-governmental
organization mandated by Madagascar to manage the protected
area.

“Population levels for some species are now critically low and they
seemed doomed to local extinction since isolated trees fail to
produce seeds.

“For example, within the landscape, including the protected area,

researchers have been able to locate just 10 remaining individuals
of Dalbergia maritima and just one remaining individual
of Dalbergia louvelii – all outside the protected area,” he adds.

Through the project, resources are now being mobilized to prevent

the local extinction of these very rare species by reinforcing the
wild population as part of an ecological restoration programme.
Edmond (right) and Nirina (left) are involved in a UNEP project to replant endangered
rosewood trees in Madagascar. So far, the initiative has cultivated more than 2,000
saplings.  Photo by Adolphe Lehavana/Missouri Botanical Garden

In 2019 the team produced 2,328 young rosewood plants using the
technique developed by Edmond, the farmer. Known as air-
layering, it allows conservationists to grow new roots from a
plant’s branches which can then be deposited into the ground. The
rosewoods have been used, with other native tree species, to enrich
around 10 hectares of degraded forest. To date, the survival rate of
young rosewoods has been nearly 100 per cent.

The project contributes to the objectives of the United Nations

Development Assistance Framework in Madagascar (2015-2019),
providing vulnerable populations with employment opportunities
and supporting sustainable development. It is also part of the
broader effort to conserve biodiversity as set out in The Global
Biodiversity Outlook 5, published by the United Nations
Convention on Biological Diversity.
Through activities such as forest enrichment and restoration, the
conservation of endemic species also contributes to Sustainable
Development Goal 15, which aims to safeguard forests and protect
biodiversity.