On February 20, 2025, Wildlife Conservation Society, in collaboration with the Government through the National Directorate for Environment under the Ministry of Agriculture, Environment and Fisheries, held a workshop at the Hotel Cardoso in Maputo city, with the aim of exploring and identifying the main pressures and threats affecting different ecosystems in order to assess the ecological condition of vegetation in Mozambique. The event was attended by 13 participants representing government institutions, academia and civil society.
Participants of the event representing government institutions, academia and civil society.
The workshop was organised as part of the project ‘Building Biodiversity Knowledge for Action in Southern Africa: Spatial Biodiversity Assessment, Prioritisation and Planning in South Africa, Namibia, Mozambique and Malawi’ (SBAPP), funded by the French Development Agency and the French Global Environment Facility. One of the objectives of the SBAPP project is to assess the ecological condition of terrestrial ecosystems in the four countries, with a view to building a data set to inform analysis to update the National Red List of Ecosystems and to serve as a basis of spatial planning for biodiversity conservation.
Mozambique's vegetation map consists of 162 ecosystem types. Because an objective ecological condition assessment for all these ecosystem types would prove challenging, during the workshop it was agreed that analysis would be focused on level three, functional groups, of the Global Ecosystem Typology of the IUCN which consists of 15 groups. Following this process, the experts attending the workshop established an initial list of threats and pressures on ecosystems in the context of Mozambique. Based on this information, the level of severity/importance of the threat will be assessed for each threat, using a quantitative scale but a qualitative scale may also be adopted.
In addition to the discussion on the ecological condition, it was shared that the map of Mozambique's ecosystem types has been incorporated into the world's first Global Ecosystem Atlas, harmonised with the IUCN Global Ecosystems Typology, developed by the Group of Earth Observers and that the respective Red List of Ecosystem is also now available on the IUCN website. Further work will entail gathering information on characteristic fauna species for each of the ecosystem types.
Find more information about the SBAPP project here
Find more information about the national historical vegetation map and the respective assessment of Mozambique's ecosystems here