African efforts to preserve their vanishing forests received a needed boost at the UN Climate Change conference in Bali, Indonesia, last December. The conference, called to negotiate new curbs on emissions of gases that contribute to global warming, pledged to expand programmes to assist African and other developing nations protect existing forests. But time is running out.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), for example, the vast and ancient woodlands are disappearing at an alarming rate. In fact, all over Africa, indigenous (also known as “old-growth”) forests are being cut down at a rate of more than 4 mn hectares per year — twice the world’s deforestation average. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), more than 10 per cent of Africa’s forests were lost between 1980 and 1995 alone.
Saving Africa’s forests from the chainsaw and axe of encroaching humanity are essential to the health and productivity of much of the continent’s economy, experts say. They point out that forests help to catch water, prevent soil erosion and regulate local weather conditions.
The fate of Africa’s forests could also spell the difference between success and failure in the race against global warming. Trees are among the world’s largest and most efficient living storehouses of carbon monoxide, the “greenhouse gas” most responsible for the earth’s temperature rise and changes in the planet’s climate.
Preserving Africa’s surviving tropical forests and planting new trees to replace those lost to deforestation could help reduce the severity of climate change by absorbing more carbon from the air, and ease the local impact of climate change by regulating local weather conditions.
An even bigger reason for protecting forests is that cutting trees down helps to cause global warming. According to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), 20 to 25 per cent of all carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere each year comes from burning trees to clear the land for farming — more than is produced by the all the world’s cars, planes, ships and trains. Burning trees and brush releases the stored carbon back into the atmosphere.
Estimates of the total amount of carbon stored in the forests vary greatly. One estimate, based on research by the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), put the total at about 1,000 bn tonnes, or about 166 years worth of current global carbon emissions. Africa contains about 15 per cent of the world’s remaining forests.
The conversion of forest land to agriculture, both subsistence and commercial, is by far the most common and most destructive cause of deforestation in Africa and other tropical regions. As demand for farmland grows in response to growing populations, millions of hectares of tropical forests are being burned in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The challenges are formidable. Humans have long appreciated forests for energy, food and medicine, and as a source of wood for construction and other purposes. But the way forests support agriculture, preserve biodiversity, protect water supplies and moderate the impact of climate change are less well understood. The UN estimated that in 2000 some 1.6 billion people around the world, including many of the world’s poorest, got at least some of their food, income or medical needs directly from the forest. Of these, some 70 million indigenous people primarily depended on the forests to survive.
In Africa, the poorest rural people are particularly dependent on forests. Forests generate about 6 per cent of the sub-Saharan Africa’s gross domestic product — triple the world average. Eighteen countries in Africa, including Cameroon and Ghana, depend on forests for 10 per cent or more of their economies.
Environmentalists and advocacy groups have brought international attention to unsustainable, and often illegal, logging in Central and West Africa, but about half of all the wood extracted from Africa’s forests is used domestically as fuel.
“It is generally accepted,” FAO noted in a 2000 report on sustainable forestry in Africa, “that the key to arresting deforestation and to implementing sustainable forest development lies in improved technologies for food production.”
Improving the productivity of African agriculture is a top priority for African governments and features prominently in the continent’s development agenda, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). But transforming the poorly financed and long-neglected agricultural sector is a costly, difficult and long-term goal and appears unlikely to progress quickly enough to prevent further severe losses to the continent’s woodlands.
In the meantime, enhancing governments’ ability to manage forests, expand tree planting programmes and change the way people view forests and calculate the value of the existing forests could be key to the survival of Africa’s deep woods.
It is understandable that people see indigenous forests as “unused” lands that are a safety net during bad times, Christian Lambrechts, a Nairobi-based forestry expert with the UN Environment Programme told Africa Renewal. “People have to rely on forests for things they can’t buy,” he says. “They have no cash. They can’t go to the chemist. They have to go to the forest to get healing plants.”
Such “subsistence” exploitation of the forests is inevitable when local people are very poor and it does no damage when done sustainably, Mr. Lambrechts notes. But when large numbers of people are forced to use forests for food and fuel, “it has a local impact on the degradation of the forests.”
In early 2007 the World Bank announced plans for a $250 million pilot fund to finance “avoided deforestation” projects in developing countries. The idea is controversial, with questions raised about how to calculate the “carbon value” of existing forests. The proposal was approved in early December in Bali, at the first of a series of meetings to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations convention on climate change, which expires in 2012.
However humanity chooses to preserve them, Mr. Lambrechts concludes, the world’s indigenous forests are simply too valuable to lose. “For 10,000 years we have been conquering the earth,” he says. “Now the earth is full and we have no choice but to manage it instead.”