From Scorched Hillside to Regrowth
By Abebaw Zeleke, Mitiku Zeleke, ORDA Ethiopia, and Nardos Masresha
This blog is part of a dossier on locally-led adaptation, featuring insights and lessons from the Reversing the Flow (RtF) program. RtF empowers communities in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Sudan to build climate resilience through direct funding and a community-driven, landscape approach.
“I have seen the consequences of destruction… I don’t believe we will destroy it now. We have this support, and we own the idea.”
For many people, landscape restoration begins with planting trees.
For the communities of Koti Kebele, in Ethiopia’s Amhara Region, it began with something harder: admitting that they had failed before and deciding to try again, this time on their own terms.
Long before terraces traced the hillsides and grasses returned to the valleys, this landscape told a different story. The hills were stripped bare. Rainwater rushed unchecked down the slopes, carving deep gullies through farmland and carrying fertile soil away with every storm. Springs that once sustained people and livestock gradually weakened, while open grazing prevented the land from recovering. Land that had once been productive and communal became increasingly barren and difficult to cross.
Some villagers even began to believe the land was beyond saving.
“It was heavily degraded and scorched,” one resident recalled during a recent learning and monitoring mission. “In some places, it wasn’t even passable.”
Today, standing on the same hillside, the story is remarkably different. Grass sways across protected slopes. Native trees are beginning to reappear. Gullies that once deepened each rainy season are slowly filling with sediment. Springs are showing signs of recovery. The transformation is striking but perhaps the most remarkable part of the story is not what changed. It is how it changed.
When Restoration Fails
Many restoration stories begin with success. This one begins with failure.
Around seven years ago, communities in Koti Kebele attempted to protect this same landscape through an area ex-closure. The idea was straightforward: temporarily excluding livestock from a severely degraded area to allow vegetation to regenerate naturally.
The effort did not last. Disagreements over grazing rights emerged. Livestock entered the protected area. Enforcement weakened. Eventually, the ex-closure disappeared, and the landscape returned to open grazing. The community lost more than vegetation. It lost confidence. Yet that failure became one of the greatest assets for the second attempt.
Learning from the Land
When the RtF Project began working with communities in Koti Kebele, it did not simply reintroduce the idea of area closures. Instead, the process started with conversations. Community members discussed why the previous effort had failed, what had been lost, and what would need to change if restoration was to succeed this time.
The answers did not come from outside experts alone. They came from people who had lived through the consequences.
“I have seen the consequences of destruction… I don’t believe we will destroy it now. We have this support and we owned the idea.”
That statement captures an important shift. Communities were no longer protecting land because a project requested it. They are protecting it because they are the lead and have experienced firsthand what happened when protection disappeared.
Restoration, One Step at a Time
Rather than attempting to rehabilitate an entire landscape at once, communities in Koti Kebele chose a more practical approach: one area at a time.
The ex-closure visited during the monitoring mission, a roughly 30-hectare stretch of what had been severely degraded shrubland known locally as Ginach, in the Dewol Washaye micro-watershed, was already the fourth established within the sub-village. Before restoration, the site was largely barren, with too little vegetation to hold the soil in place. Flooding and erosion ran off the exposed land into communities downstream, while open grazing left it generating almost no benefit for anyone.
Three volunteer guards now watch over the Ginach ex-closure, and discussions are already underway to compensate them by allowing controlled grass harvesting once the area has sufficiently recovered, using the same practical, locally negotiated logic that has carried other ex-closures in the watershed.
Neighboring micro-watersheds are following a similar pattern of steady, hands-on progress. In nearby Adafit, watershed committee chairperson Shimelash Talie describes how 290 of the sub-village’s 335 households joined the effort, women, elders, and vulnerable households among them, each one building terraces across 60 meters of land, working from the upper ridges downward to stop runoff before it could gather force. “Guided by scientific planning,” he says, “saplings now flourish, and agroforestry is expanding.”
This gradual, community-paced strategy reflects an important lesson in locally led adaptation: communities are often best placed to judge not only what should be restored, but how quickly change can realistically happen.
Rules Written by the Community
Restoration depends as much on governance as on ecology. The people of Dewol Washaye understood that protecting land required more than goodwill. They needed rules.
Working together, community members developed their own bylaws to regulate access to enclosed areas like Ginach. Households whose livestock enter an ex-closure are first given a warning and advised about the rules. Repeated violations are subject to graduated penalties: an initial fine of 100 Birr (~€0.50), increasing to 300 Birr (~€1.50) for a second offence and rising sharply to 2,500 Birr (~€13.00) for repeated violations.
These are not simply enforcement mechanisms. They represent something deeper: communities governing their own natural resources.
Nature Remembers
Ecological recovery often begins quietly. At first, it can be difficult to notice. But over time, the land begins to reveal small signs of resilience.
Grasses now grow densely across areas that were bare only a year earlier. Sediment trapped behind check dams is gradually rebuilding previously eroded channels. Indigenous trees such as acacia are emerging once again from seeds that had remained dormant beneath the soil. Community members also describe springs beginning to flow more reliably below rehabilitated slopes, where rainwater now infiltrates the ground instead of rushing away as destructive runoff.
The pattern repeats across the watersheds, each site with its own local character. In Chincho, committee chairperson Mergeta Tadele Tenagne describes a slope that was once so barren that every rainfall tore it further apart. Today, he says, native plants locally known as tenbelel, kitkita, muja, and qamo have returned, and with them, wildlife: partridges, guineafowl, and duikers are once again part of the landscape.
In Ginach, the same pattern has taken hold. Local species including Quamo, Kitkita, Kilaba, Keret, Dengertita, Atat, Agam, Enbacho, Azamir, Woira (Olea) and Bisana (Croton) have regenerated naturally, alongside grasses and other herbaceous vegetation now providing forage for livestock through controlled, rule-bound use. Run-off, flooding and erosion from the site have visibly eased, and communities downstream describe feeling safer and more resilient than before.
Healthier vegetation reduces erosion, improves groundwater recharge, stabilizes slopes, and creates the conditions biodiversity needs to return. It is more than aesthetic it is an ecosystem remembering how to function.
Engineering That Follows Nature
The restoration effort extends beyond protecting land. Across the watershed, community members have constructed thousands of meters of soil bunds, a number of trenches, and meter cubes of check-dams following the natural contours of the landscape. In Ginach, hillside terraces and trenches were built for exactly this purpose: to conserve soil moisture and slow erosion ahead of the rains. Rather than working in isolated patches, restoration now follows entire watersheds from the upper slopes downward, slowing runoff and allowing water to infiltrate where it naturally belongs.
Vegetation is then integrated into these structures. Grasses stabilize the bunds. Multi-purpose trees including Sesbania sesban, Grevillea, Gesho, and black wattle provide future fodder, timber, and income while strengthening the recovering ecosystem. In Ginach, tree seedlings planted during the 2025 rainy season have taken hold alongside this naturally regenerating vegetation, most of them surviving well. The result is not simply erosion control. It is the gradual rebuilding of an entire landscape.
Rebuilding Livelihoods Too
Restoring the hillside was never only about vegetation; it was also about giving families a reason to protect it. Alongside the conservation work, a community-run revolving loan fund has begun helping households build new sources of income.
In Dewol Washaye itself, Atalo Alamrew, who also monitors the watershed’s water point, received five sheep through the Project’s revolving fund livelihood support and has since begun breeding them, with plans to grow the flock further.
Changing Minds Before Changing Landscapes
Perhaps the most difficult challenge was never technical. It was changing perceptions. Committee members recall that many residents initially resisted ex-closures, fearing they would lose valuable grazing land. Others believed the degraded landscape could never recover.
Visible success gradually changed those views. As grass returned and water became more available, resistance gave way to participation. Community members who once questioned restoration began advocating for it themselves.
In Ginach, that shift found its own voice. “The landscape was once bare, and now it has become green and sparks hope for us,” says Gashahun Chanie, 29, a community member from the Dewol Washaye micro-watershed. “Its beauty and greenery are increasing, and people are surprised by the result.”
Fellow community member Mrs. Habitam, 36, puts it more simply, with the quiet confidence of someone no longer needing to convince anyone: “We are happy for others to come and see.”
For the community, Ginach has become more than a restored area. It has created what people there describe as a “yes, we can” mindset a belief that communities have the knowledge, capacity and collective power to address their own landscape challenges.
A Different Understanding of Locally Led Adaptation
Too often, landscape restoration is described through numbers: hectares enclosed, trees planted, kilometres of terraces constructed. Across Koti Kebele’s six watersheds, those numbers are genuinely striking, some 119 hectares rehabilitated and 107 hectares now under permanent protection in a single first quarter alone in 2026. These indicators matter. Yet they tell only part of the story.
The real achievement in Dewol Washaye is not simply that degraded land is becoming green again. It is that communities who once experienced the collapse of restoration have chosen to try again and this time, to lead the process themselves.
One of the clearest lessons from Ginach is that this kind of restoration does not require large investments. It requires community awareness, collective agreement, locally appropriate rules, commitment, and continued local management. The RtF Project provided support, but the fundamental decisions and ownership came from the community. Adjacent communities have already taken notice and are now considering similar approaches for their own degraded land, while children growing alongside the restored landscape are absorbing its lessons for the next generation.
The hillsides are greener because the rules belong to the people who live there. The gullies are healing because communities decided they should. The springs are returning because neighbors collectively accepted that protecting nature sometimes requires sacrificing short-term convenience for long-term security.
The people of Dewol Washaye are not simply restoring the landscape. They are restoring confidence that communities themselves can shape the future of that landscape. In an era of accelerating climate change, that may prove to be the most valuable form of resilience of all.
