- Hundreds of thousands of people depend on Malawi’s Elephant Marsh for their livelihoods.
- Despite the name, there are no longer elephants in these wetlands, whose boundaries expand and contract with seasonal rains, but they provide habitat for hippos, crocodiles, fish and more than 100 waterbird species as well as thousands of farming and fishing households.
- The water from floods caused by 2023’s Cyclone Freddy never receded from large parts of the marsh, and this has displaced more than 1,000 farming households.
- Ongoing changes to the landscape upstream and in the marsh itself have destabilized the wetlands’ ability to absorb seasonal flooding. Increasingly frequent storms like Freddy are a further challenge to the ecosystem’s functioning.
NSANJE DISTRICT, Malawi — From his canoe, floating in a shallow channel in a corner of southern Malawi’s Elephant Marsh, Fred Nsema points at two palm trees standing knee-deep in a sprawling cover of water lilies and water hyacinth. Nsema used to shelter from the heat under them, sipping a traditional fermented drink prepared from millet by his wife. But along with more than a 1,000 other families here in the Lower Shire Valley, home to Elephant Marsh, he and his wife lost their farmland to floods caused by Cyclone Freddy in 2023.
“That field was our lifeline,” Nsema says as he uses a long bamboo pole to stop the canoe before it’s drawn into a channel of water rushing past the submerged site of his former farm. “We would harvest half a ton of cabbages there. Beans too, and rice and sweet potatoes. Twice a year for some of the crops. That farm was everything to us.”
Hundreds of thousands of people in the Lower Shire Valley rely on the wetland for their livelihoods. According to the 2018 census, the population of the two districts that Elephant Marsh spreads across is 860,000 — a startling five-fold increase from the population figure recorded 10 years earlier.
“It’s a vital resource for many people here; but that is also why it is under severe strain, because farming has become intensive to feed the growing population,” says Wisely Kawaye, manager for the Shire Valley division of the Department of National Parks and Wildlife.
The operations of the large commercial sugar cane plantations around the edges of the marsh have also changed the landscape, clearing land, extracting large amounts of water for irrigation and likely contributing to the runoff of fertilizer and pesticides into the wetlands.
Kawaye says the wetland is under sustained pressure. Much of the woodland in the area has been cut down, either for the timber itself or to make more space for farmland. A growing number of fishers are found in its waterways; even grass has been drawn into local communities’ search for income.
“There was a time you would not think that grass and papyrus in the wetland would be in danger,” he says. “Now they are, because they are no longer about just thatching a house or feeding a few goats at home as it used to be. They are being harvested for sale for income.”
What is Elephant Marsh?
Elephant Marsh straddles the lower reaches of Malawi’s major river, the Shire, before it enters Mozambique and joins the Zambezi. A century ago, the marsh was home to hundreds of elephants; these were long ago hunted to local extinction, but the wetlands provide habitat for a host of other wildlife, including hippos, crocodiles and more than 100 waterbird species.
The wetland’s boundaries expand and contract with seasonal rains, from around 500 square kilometers (193 square miles) at the end of the dry season in November to as much as 2,700 km2 (1,042 mi2) in the wet season. At this time, the Ruo, a tributary that meets the Shire at the marsh, sometimes swells with such force, driving the larger river back upstream along its own course.
A network of streams and rivers flow into the floodplain, which is a Ramsar site, designating it a wetland of international importance. This network deposits sediments that provide fertile, well-irrigated land for farming in a region where high temperatures, inadequate rains and salty soils make production on higher ground difficult.
“For us, even when rain doesn’t come in this area, Elephant Marsh is a fountain of lives,” says Mavuto Labu, vice chairperson of the Elephant Marsh Association, which gathers “community conservation area” groups set up by the government across the wetland. Labu also heads the area’s disaster risk reduction committee, responsible for providing early warnings to communities coordinating disaster response with local councils and central government officials.
While farmers elsewhere in Malawi plant their main crops around November when rains start, in Elephant Marsh, farmers are able to plant and harvest crops at least twice a year, taking advantage of the moisture retained in their fields after the floods have receded.
Cyclone Freddy causes catastrophic damage
Ayeme Baza has lived near the confluence for all of his nearly 60 years, working the land in sync with the changing seasons. “We always look forward to the water rising in the marsh,” he tells Mongabay in a phone interview. “Because we have been farming here for a long time, we have always thought we know the behavior of the water. In 2023, things were different.”
That year, Cyclone Fredd tore across Madagascar, Mozambique and Malawi. Three days of strong winds and heavy rain caused devastating damage across the country. The rivers feeding the wetlands rose higher than residents had ever seen them, dumping not just water, but soil, logs, debris from damaged infrastructure upstream, livestock carcasses and even human bodies into the marsh.
Previous flooding disasters, including in January 2015, also caused the wetland to expand beyond its familiar limits, but the water receded as usual and people returned to their farmland by April. But, three years on from Freddy, many fields, especially those on the Shire’s east bank and around the confluence with the Ruo, remain under water.
According to Labu, more than 1,000 families have lost their farmland — seemingly permanently.
The lingering water signifies a change in the capacity of the wetlands to regulate floods, says Richard Makwinja, an environmental researcher at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa.
Makwinja has studied two decades of changes in land cover in and around the marsh. The wetlands absorb huge amounts of floodwater each year, he says.
“When you clear natural vegetation within the river catchments, that decreases water infiltration capacity, making the peak flow after a heavy rainstorm and resultant flooding greater than [it] would have been,” he tells Mongabay in a phone interview.
Changes upstream and in Elephant Marsh itself left the river system exposed to the violent test presented by Freddy.
What do the farmers do now?
Many of those that were affected have nowhere to farm, says Chief Nsambo, a traditional leader in Nsanje district. Land rights in Elephant Marsh are governed by customary land rights, which means that traditional leaders like Nsambo allocate land to members of the community to use. But there is no unused land left in the marsh, he says: “I am supposed to give them land to prevent the destruction of forests and biodiversity in the marsh. But I don’t have land to give.”
The chief says the district has witnessed a surge in charcoal production in the past three years as some of those displaced by the cyclone have turned to remaining forests to earn a living.
Kawaye with the Department of National Parks and Wildlife says that the government’s management plan, developed in response to the designation of the marsh as a Ramsar site in 2017, aims to work with resident communities to conserve the wetland while sustaining livelihoods. But the different priorities of the relevant government departments of water, fisheries, agriculture, land and tourism complicates things.
So far, it has left farmers like Baza and Nsema to fend for themselves. Nsema, a father of four, scrapes by with the proceeds from a stall selling groceries at a fish landing site. He supplements this with piecework in other people’s fields and occasional errands at shops at a local town.
“I used to grow enough food for my family. Now I have to buy food on daily basis. It’s difficult,” he says, as he pulls his pole out of the water and starts to guide the canoe back to the landing site.
Banner image: African baobab (Adansonia digitata), Chikwawa district, Malawi. Image by Rob Palmer via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
Malawi’s Elephant Marsh: The challenge of protecting a wetland that sustains thousands
Cite this article
Charles Mpaka (2026). Three years after Cyclone Freddy, farms remain under water in Malawi’s Elephant Marsh. Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-321815
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