Blog From memory to map: How communities in Monze, Zambia are turning generations of grazing knowledge into digital maps for a climate-resilient future

Monze District has long been the heartland of livestock production in Zambia's Southern Province. Estimates suggest there are at least 300,000 head of cattle here, alongside similarly large numbers of small ruminants a figure that reflects both the productivity of the land and the growing commercial pressures upon it. A lucrative and expanding export market to the Democratic Republic of Congo has brought renewed government attention to the livestock sector, and with it, intensifying demand on pastures that are already being squeezed by climate change.

Changing rainfall patterns, longer dry seasons, and encroaching land-use pressures are straining a system built on seasonal mobility and deep ecological knowledge. Tensions over pasture access between neighbouring communities, and between pastoralists and the wildlife of the Kafue Flats are rising. To the west and south, the boundaries of Lochinvar National Park and the Kafue Flats Wetland (a designated Ramsar site of international significance) define limits that cannot and must not be breached. The challenge facing communities is real and urgent: how to manage finite resources more efficiently, without sacrificing the ecological integrity that makes those resources possible in the first place.

The workshop opened with participants feeding back on the consultation exercise they had carried out in their home communities since returning from Zimbabwe. Divided into four groups by ward, they laid out the landscape of challenges they faced: pressures on pasture, emerging conflicts, degraded water points, uncontrolled burning. They then worked together to identify potential solutions the first seeds of what, eventually, will become community-developed bylaws for rangeland management.

What emerged from the room was not simple consensus. There was vigorous debate, especially when participants were asked to rank solutions by their likely impact and ease of implementation. Nearly everyone agreed that banning uncontrolled bush burning would have a high positive impact. Almost no one agreed on how easy it would be to enforce. That tension between knowing what is right and finding a way to make it real was not papered over. It was held, discussed, and documented. The exercise was designed not to produce a tidy resolution, but to sharpen communities' ability to think critically about what was realistic.

Day Two opened with presentations from the International Cranes Foundation and the Zambia Wildlife Authority. The focus: the ecological significance of Lochinvar National Park and the Kafue Flats Wetland landscapes that sit at the very edge of the communities' traditional grazing areas, and whose health is inseparable from the health of the pastures beyond their boundaries.

For many participants, this was a moment of renewed recognition. The Kafue Flats is not an abstraction. It is the wet-season refuge for cattle herds, the source of seasonal grasses that sustain animals through the transition from rains to dry season. Understanding it as a formally designated site of global ecological importance added a new dimension to something communities had always known in practical terms: that the land beyond their paddocks mattered.

After the presentations, the room shifted into cartographic mode. Participants took flip charts, pens, and the spatial knowledge stored in their own memories and began to draw. Roads, rivers, boreholes, water points, dip tanks, churches, schools, prominent trees, and paddock boundaries gradually appeared, each group producing a map with its own distinct character and 'signature style.'

High levels of engagement and interaction animated every table. Each person had the opportunity to add what they knew a seasonal stream that only a herdsman who had grazed there in a dry year would remember; a paddock boundary marked by a prominent Acacia that appeared on no official map but was known by everyone in the ward. The individual contributions wove together into something larger: not just a map of the land, but a portrait of the community's relationship with it.

By the end of Day Two, the groups brought their individual maps together, placing them side by side and working collectively to align boundaries, reconcile any discrepancies, and assemble a coherent mosaic of the full grazing landscape.

Day Three was the day the maps changed form. With a projection of Google Maps on the wall and participants gathered around screens, the Alliance technical team worked directly alongside the herdsmen and headmen to transfer what was on the flip charts into a georeferenced digital record. It was painstaking, collaborative work. Every paddock boundary needed to be confirmed. Every water point needed a location. Participants who had drawn the maps now guided the digitisation process pointing, correcting, confirming.

Slowly, the landscape they had always known began to appear in a new form: clean digital polygons, precisely located points, boundary lines that would endure beyond any individual's memory.

For the project team, this was also a moment of quiet recognition. The depth of ecological knowledge carried by these communities accumulated over generations and refined by decades of practical experience was not just an asset to be documented. It was the foundation on which any meaningful adaptation to climate change would have to be built.