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Africa: Saving the Continent's Forests - The 'Lungs of the World'
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Africa Renewal (United Nations)
ANALYSIS
4 January 2008
Posted to the web 4 January 2008
Michael Fleshman
From the air the forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) stretch as far as the eye can see, broken only by distant, shining ribbons of rivers and streams. Dense, deep, seemingly impenetrable, the forests of the Central African region extend over 200 mn hectares, inspiring awe and sometimes dread among residents and visitors, and providing refuge for everything from rare and endangered plants and animals to ferocious militias accused of brutal crimes against humanity.
It is difficult to imagine that such vast ancient woodlands are at risk of extinction. But they are disappearing at an alarming rate. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), indigenous (also known as "old-growth") forests in Africa are being cut down at a rate of more than 4 mn hectares per year - twice the world's deforestation average. According to the FAO, losses totalled more than 10 per cent of the continent's total forest cover between 1980 and 1995 alone.
Saving Africa's forests from the chainsaw and axe of encroaching humanity is essential to the health and productivity of much of the continent's economy, experts point out. They cite the forests' roles as watersheds, defences against soil erosion and regulators of local weather conditions.
Trees trap 'greenhouse gases'
But the fate of the forests could also spell the difference between success and failure in the race against global warming. Trees, the dominant inhabitants of the diverse and complex ecological systems called forests, 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 (see Africa Renewal July 2007).
Through a chemical process known as photosynthesis, trees and many other plants absorb carbon from the air and combine it with sunlight to generate the energy they need for life. Trees convert the carbon gas into solid form, store it in their trunks, branches and leaves, and release oxygen back into the atmosphere. Because they take carbon from the atmosphere and produce oxygen, forests are often referred to as "the lungs of the world." Carbon dioxide is generated primarily by the burning of oil, coal, natural gas and other "fossil" fuels for industry, power generation and transportation.
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.
But an even greater argument for protecting the forests is the role of deforestation in causing global warming. According to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), between 20 and 25 per cent of all annual carbon dioxide emissions are caused by the practice of burning forests to clear the land for farming - more than is caused by the entire world transportation sector. Burning trees and brush releases the stored carbon back into the atmosphere.
Poor forest management policies - including unrestricted logging, excessive harvesting of firewood and medicinal plants, and road construction - contribute to the problem, as do drought, flooding, forest fires and other natural disasters. The collection of wood for heating and cooking and for making charcoal is a particular problem in Africa, since wood supplies about 70 per cent of domestic energy needs, a significantly higher percentage than in the rest of the world.
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 and is second only to South America in the amount of the dense tropical forests that are the most effective in removing carbon from the atmosphere. The vast forests of the DRC alone are estimated to contain as much as 8 per cent of all the carbon stored in the earth's vegetation.
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 population pressures, millions of hectares of tropical forests are being put to the torch in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
"It is generally accepted," the 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."
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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 (see Africa Renewal July 2006). Reform therefore appears unlikely to progress quickly enough to prevent further severe losses to the continent's woodlands.
Just feel compelled to point out that the primary greenhouse gas stored by trees is carbon DIoxide, not MONoxide.
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