AFRICA: TREES VS DESERTS

By Wangari Maathai and - - Reprint | | Print |

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NAIROBI, Jun 30 2008 (IPS) - Conserving the Congo forest, and indeed all of our forests in Africa, and accelerating forestation efforts is vital to our survival on a continent where the Sahara Desert is expanding to the North and the Kalahari Desert expands to the Southwest, writes Wangari Maathai, 2004 Nobel Peace Laureate, Goodwill Ambassador for the Congo Forest, and founder of the Green Belt Movement. In this article, Maathai writes that for this reason the Congo Basin Forest Fund was launched in London on June 17. The Congo Basin Forest is the world\’s second largest forest ecosystem and considered the planet\’s second lung, after the Amazon. It provides food, shelter, and livelihood for over 50 million people. Covering 200 million hectares and including approximately one-fifth of the world\’s remaining closed-canopy tropical forest, it is also a very significant carbon store with a vital role in regulating the regional climate.Today, in the Congo Basin rainforest increased logging, changing patterns of agriculture, population growth, and the oil and mining industries are all leading to ever greater deforestation.

For this reason the Congo Basin Forest Fund (CBFF) was launched in London on June 17. The initial financing of the CBFF comes from a pair of USD 200 million grants from the governments of the United Kingdom and Norway. Ten countries in the Central African region established the Congo Basin Forest Initiative to manage the forest more sustainably and conserve its rich biodiversity.

The Congo Basin Forest is the world’s second largest forest ecosystem and considered the planet’s second lung, after the Amazon. The forests of the Congo Basin provide food, shelter, and livelihood for over 50 million people.

Covering 200 million hectares and including approximately one-fifth of the world’s remaining closed-canopy tropical forest, they are also a very significant carbon store with a vital role in regulating the regional climate. The diversity they harbour is of global importance. Spanning an area twice the size of France, the Congo Basin rainforest is home to more than 10,000 species of plants, 1,000 species of birds, and 400 species of mammals.

Today, the Congo Basin rainforest is coming under pressure. Increased logging, changing patterns of agriculture, population growth, and the oil and mining industries are all leading to ever greater deforestation. This situation is not sustainable for the people who live there, for the countless species that may be driven to extinction, or for the climate. Reversing the rate of deforestation in the Congo Basin is therefore essential both to securing the livelihoods of the people in the region and to maintaining the carbon-storage capacity and biodiversity of the forest.

Forests are indispensable yet we take them for granted. Though they appear inexhaustible, they can perish. The two nations who share the island of Hispaniola

-Haiti and the Dominican Republic- provide a vivid example of what happens when we destroy our environment, and especially forests. The deforestation of Haiti and the subsequent loss of its soil made the country vulnerable to devastation by hurricanes and deepened its poverty and misery. Conditions in the Dominican Republic, which largely retains its forests, are significantly better that the other side of the island.

Perhaps Africa should introduce a tree-planting day or even a season for tree planting. Environmental education should be introduced in primary schools to ensure that our citizens grow up with a full appreciation of the African environment. Without such education, it is quite possible there will be government ministers who advocate destructive policies simply because they have no idea what is the right thing to do. Sadly, the generations that destroy the environment are often not the ones that feel the consequences. It is the following generations who suffer.

While it is important to protect forests in our individual countries, it is also important to recognize the special value of forests that lie elsewhere, like the Congo Basin forest ecosystem. The negative impact of destructive activities in the Congo forest will be felt in countries both within and outside Africa.

What Africa needs is not only to protect her indigenous forests, but also to engage in massive forestation efforts. It is possible for our people to grow the commercial plantations needed by the timber and building industries. But it is wrong to sacrifice forests to generate quick economic benefits from expansive commercial tree farms. When we do that, we undermine the capacity of our children and grandchildren to get water and reliable rainfall for agriculture. They may also not be able to generate hydropower and enjoy the many other uses of water because rivers may dry up. Africa is already considered a water-scarce continent. It cannot afford to sacrifice its watersheds.

In this context, the efforts of President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal deserve particular recognition. He is creating a Great Green Wall from Dakar to Djibouti in an effort to stop the advancing Sahara desert. As President Wade put it: “This project consists in planting trees over a distance of 7,000 kilometres from Dakar to Djibouti to constitute a five-kilometre-wide green strip across the desert to stop any further progress of the desertification process. With the regeneration of biodiversity, we plan to give our planet a new ‘green lung’ and contribute thus to the fight against climatic changes…. We have already identified the course of the Great Green Wall and selected the tree species to be planted according to climatic zones, each country crossed by the Great Wall being responsible for its edification within its borders.” (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)