Accra-Ghana, June 13, GNA – While commending the tree-planting initiative under the Green Ghana project, Mr Muntaka Chasant, a researcher and environmentalist, has urged the Government to focus more on protecting existing forests, which are crucial to mitigating climate change.
He told the Ghana News Agency in an interview on Monday that it was important to plant more trees but equally necessary to protect existing forests, which were under threat from human activities, including illegal small-scale mining (galamsey) and commercial agriculture.
It could take up to a decade to benefit from the trees being planted today, and that was why it made more sense to prioritise the conservation of the already carbon-absorbing forests over new growth, he said.
“Climate change now affects almost every aspect of our lives today. Our oceans are heating up, rapidly melting ice sheets are causing sea level rise worldwide, storms are becoming intense and lingering longer, wildfires are blazing everywhere, and droughts are becoming more frequent and severe,” Mr Chasant said.
“Carbon sinks such as oceans and forests, which are crucial in the global carbon cycle, soak up billion metric tonnes of the C02 contributing to many of these extreme events. That’s why tree planting initiatives are good as one among many efforts to slow down all these effects. These help to remove natural and human-causing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.”
“Yet, while trees could give us a fighting chance, planting grids of new ones are not a magic bullet for climate change mitigation, and do not compensate for clearing longstanding forests, some of which are decades and centuries old.”
Tropical forests, which held vast amounts of biodiversity and sometimes sequester carbons for decades and even centuries, were releasing billions of tonnes of carbon back into the atmosphere, thanks to human activities such as illegal logging and clearing of forests for large-scale commodity agriculture.
The researcher and environmental activist called for caution on the attention paid to planting millions of trees within a short period instead of nurturing and growing them.
“Headline-grabbing tree planting based on large numerical targets can distract from the greater priority of protecting existing forests,” he said.
“A growing body of research cast doubt on large-scale tree planting as a fix for climate change. Many well-intentioned target-driven initiatives have been found to result in dead saplings, dry up water supplies, degrade natural ecosystems, and even push people off their ancestral lands.”
“How many of the millions of trees planted in 2022 survived? Are we tree planting or tree growing? What science underpins these initiatives? There seems to be too much emphasis on the number of saplings planted and too little attention to keeping them alive in the long term, which requires resources and years of monitoring.”
Mr Chasant said researchers were paying more attention to letting degraded forests rewild themselves over planting millions of seeds and saplings.
“More attention is now being paid to natural regrowth in the tropics over monoculture that results from mass planting. This is the case where less is actually more,” he said.
Deforestation and forest degradation were shifting the balance in the conversation, he said, and addressed some of the concerns by citing the cocoa sector and the European Union’s (EU) new law that would ban the importation of deforestation-linked products, including cocoa.
While expressing disappointment that the new EU law did not go further to cover other forest types, low income among farmers, and not addressing other human rights issues, Mr Chasant said he saw the regulations as a deterrent measure against deforestation and corrupt practices in forestry management.
“Let’s face it, no amount of reforestation and afforestation efforts will solve deforestation and forest degradation without addressing its underlying causes,” he said.
“The new EU law limiting the trading of products linked to deforestation is an important first step to addressing agriculture-driven forest loss, which is some of the key drivers of climate change and global warming.”
“For me, the law should not be seen as a threat to the cocoa sector but as a strong signal to deforestation-linked industries that their damaging practices, which displace forest communities from their ancestral lands, accelerate biodiversity loss, and increase carbon emissions, are not welcomed.”
Mr Chasant explained that extreme poverty among small-scale cocoa growers was a motivation for agricultural expansion and driving deforestation, where farmers could not be forced to choose between feeding their families and protecting old-growth forests.
“The law definitely falls short of addressing equity and justice issues, including farmer living income, which is one of the main drivers of deforestation.”
He said many initiatives and reports often portrayed happy cocoa farmers, but the real story was usually far from what it seemed, adding that declining yields, pests and diseases, increasing cost of production, and climate change had worsened the situation of cocoa growers.
“As it stands, an initiative such as the Cocoa & Forests Initiative (CFI) doesn’t address a crucial driver of deforestation, that is, agricultural expansion resulting from farmer poverty,” Mr Chasant said.
“Cocoa and chocolate companies still pocket billions of dollars annually, leaving farmers to subside on an average income of about $1 a day, far below the World’s Bank’s adjusted extreme poverty line of $2.15 per day.”
“It is clear landowners do not have incentives to maintain forest cover. Perhaps one way to address cocoa-linked forest loss is to pay farmers more for their crops.”
