From memory to map: How communities in Monze, Zambia are turning generations of grazing knowledge into digital maps for a climate-resilient future
In March 2026, 40 herdsmen and village leaders in Monze, Zambia, worked with partners to transform generations of grazing knowledge into digital maps, helping communities improve rangeland management and adapt to climate change.
- Climate Action
- climate change
- Climate Resilience
From memory to map: How communities in Monze, Zambia are turning generations of grazing knowledge into digital maps for a climate-resilient future
In March 2026, 40 herdsmen and village leaders in Monze, Zambia, worked with partners to transform generations of grazing knowledge into digital maps, helping communities improve rangeland management and adapt to climate change.
The land around Monze does not give up its secrets easily. Stretching across Southern Zambia in a gently undulating patchwork of open grassland, seasonal streams, flood plains, and low scattered hills, this landscape has sustained cattle herders and their families for generations.
The knowledge required to navigate it to know which paddock floods first, which hillside stays green deepest into the dry season, where a seasonal stream can be trusted and where it cannot is not written down anywhere. It lives in the memories of senior herdsmen, passed orally from father to son, tested season after season against a landscape that is itself slowly changing.
That is why, when forty senior herdsmen and Village Headmen gathered in Monze in late March 2026, they came not just as participants in a workshop. They came as the experts.