Focusing on the role of African

Focusing on the role of African forests in helping mitigate climate change, the report, Protecting and restoring forest carbon in tropical Africa: A guide for donors and funders is the first to explore methods to protect and restore Africa’s forests. African forests store more carbon that those of Southeast Asia and are at greater risk than the tropical forests of both Asia and Latin America, according to the report. In fact, forests in Africa are being cleared at a rate nearly three times the world average: the continent lost 3.7 million hectares of tropical forest each year between 2000 and 2005. Because carbon is released when trees are burned or felled, deforestation accounts for 10-15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

“[There seems to be a] belief that Africa’s tropical forests are much less dense than those in Latin America and Asia. The reality is very different – the forests of Sub-Saharan Africa store 171 gigatons of carbon, 35 per cent more than Asia and only a quarter less than Latin America. In part this is because the total forest area is vast – half a billion hectares, out of a total global forest area of four billion hectares. If all of Africa’s tropical forests were to be deforested, that would release around 627Gt of CO2, about 15 years worth of global annual emissions,” explains Bernard Mercer, co-founder of FPAN, in an interview with mongabay.com.

Unlike deforestation in Southeast Asia and South America, the primary difficulty of forest conservation in Africa stems from the people’s desperate need to utilize forest and land resources to survive, acknowledges the report. Over 80 percent of wood harvested from forests in sub-Saharan Africa is used directly for fuel, and small-scale agriculture is a contributing cause in over 80 percent of deforestation cases in Africa.

However, agribusiness and foreign land deals give increasing cause for concern: "Some participants in these debates argue that you cannot beat economics, so agribusiness expansion is just going to happen, particularly in the savannah areas of the Congo Basin, and in countries like Angola and Tanzania. Our conclusion is that we should all beware of determinism. Donors and funders need to put their weight behind initiatives that seek to achieve a different outcome, in which African agriculture continues to be based on the smallholder model, but with higher yields and improved distribution and food storage systems," said Mercer.

The report suggests that direct action to help Africans meet their fuel needs would indirectly decrease pressure on Africa’s tropical forests. The FPAN found that supporting domestic timber plantations and distributing efficient stoves may be the most effective methods to decrease reliance on forests for cooking fuel. Their calculations suggest that supplying efficient stoves to Kenya’s rural population (6 million households) could reduce annual fuelwood consumption there by 50 percent, preventing 8.4 million tons of carbon from being released every year.

Additionally, if domestic timber plantations were to supply all woodfuels, FPAN determined that demand could be met utilizing an area 5-20 percent the size of forest currently harvested, allowing for the preservation of more tropical forest.

"On the critical question of how poor people can afford to pay for plantation outputs, it’s important to be realistic. This is not a problem that can be solved 100 per cent. If it is easy and free of charge to take forest rather than plantation outputs, then it will be tough to achieve a switch. That’s why we suggest the top plantation priority is to meet urban demand in cities like Dar es Salaam, Kinshasa and Nairobi. The citizens of those cities are usually paying for charcoal or woodfuels, rather than going out into forests to collect wood. In many cases woodfuels and charcoal, especially the latter, are being trucked in to cities from forests that are as much as 100 miles away," Mercer told mongabay.com.

While the FPAN report affirms that Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) is more carbon-friendly than conventional logging, these practices still result in significant carbon loss when compared to strict conservation of intact forests. The report thus advises funding to shore-up existing protected areas, which in tropical Africa are often strapped for resources and unable to provide effective forest protection. Donors could also fund the purchase of forest currently slated for clearing under potential logging concessions, which total around 120 million acres across six Central and West African countries.