ABSTRACT
This chapter presents insights to aspects of the research regarding woodland changes in resettlement areas. It offers a contribution to the broader debate concerning prospective environmental changes with land resettlement. Woodland resources are known to be a central component of rural livelihoods in the African farming sector of Zimbabwe. Many Zimbabwean writers have presented resource conservation and poor peasant land husbandry as argument for the restricted pace of land redistribution and for agrarian reform in the communal areas (CAs) themselves. The validity of this environmental debate to date has been limited by the general lack of objective data or systematic monitoring concerning the environmental impacts of land resettlement. National studies of deforestation and erosion found a close correlation between resource degradation and land tenure, most degradation being in the densely populated CAs. The chapter highlights a number of challenges for policy and the future management of woodland resources in these areas.
