Chittagong Hill Tracts Landscape Restoration

Overview

The Chittagong Hill Tracts hold some of Bangladesh's last significant tracts of natural forest — and some of its most complex land pressures, where shifting cultivation, illegal logging, and infrastructure expansion have fragmented habitat that Indigenous communities have stewarded for generations. This project restores degraded hillside forest while strengthening the traditional agroforestry knowledge systems, known locally as jhum improvement, that these communities have refined over centuries.

Our Approach

SSEAFA partners directly with twelve Indigenous village councils, combining their traditional ecological knowledge of which native species stabilize which slope conditions with modern erosion-control techniques and GIS-based restoration planning. Restoration plans are co-designed, not imposed — each community decides which degraded plots to prioritize and which mix of timber, fruit, and medicinal species best fits their needs.

Impact So Far

Restored hillsides are already showing reduced landslide risk during monsoon season, and several communities have begun harvesting fruit and non-timber forest products from the earliest restoration plots, turning conservation into a source of income rather than a constraint on it.