About half of the land targeted by a major technology-backed forest restoration campaign in Africa was never intended to be forest, according to a new analysis. Planting trees in the identified area could actually damage grasslands and savannahs that may have been inadvertently mislabeled as “forests” in need of help, the report concludes.
He paperpublished in the magazine Science Today, he takes stock of AFR100, an initiative supported by 34 African governments and which counts the Bezos Earth Fund and Goal among its main financiers. The goal of AFR100, short for African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative, is to restore at least 100 million hectares of land by 2030. AFR100 disputes the new analysis.
For forest restoration to be successful, the right types of trees need to be in the right places. It's easy to mess that up, and this recent analysis aims to show how big the problem could be on one continent. While it focuses on one initiative, the authors say it is likely emblematic of the major shortcomings of international conservation campaigns.
For forest restoration to be successful, the right types of trees must be in the right places, which is easy to mess up.
“We had suspected this was a threat, but the magnitude of it was absolutely enormous,” says Catherine Parr, lead author of the paper and an ecologist at the University of Liverpool. “In some countries where there weren't even any forests, planning to plant those trees and classify them as reforestation is really a shock.”
Almost a fifth of the total area reserved for restoration (25.9 million hectares) extends across eight countries that naturally lack forest cover, Parr and co-authors from the University of Oxford and Utrecht University found in their analysis. That includes land in Burkina Faso, Chad, Lesotho, Mali, Namibia, Niger, Senegal and Gambia. Eighteen countries in total have committed to “restoring” a larger area than they really should have, according to the analysis.
“The article is riddled with many inaccuracies,” an AFR100 spokesperson wrote to The edge in an email. The Gambia is not currently included in the initiative, according to AFR100, which would reduce the figure attributable to AFR100 countries to 21.9 million hectares. “Even if The Gambia is a member of the AFR100, that small country cannot commit 4 million hectares,” Teko Nhlapho, communications officer at the African Union Development Agency that co-launched the AFR100, said in the email.
To conduct their analysis, the researchers used publicly available information on the AFR100 website and a database of restoration projects maintained by the environmental news organization mongabay. After searching for projects taking place in AFR100 countries, the researchers compared those locations to commonly used biome maps to identify what types of habitats are present. This is how they concluded that many of the areas identified for restoration actually contain grasslands or savannahs. No forests that need more trees.
According to the analysis, around half of the total area committed to restoration in AFR100 countries is in savannas or grasslands, where planting trees could harm the local ecosystem. And since Parr suspects that grassland and savannah cover is underestimated in biome maps, Parr says the analysis's numbers are actually quite conservative.
The authors argue that conservation groups must change the way they identify lands for restoration. Relying on satellite tree cover measurements is one issue. Another is a standard commonly used by conservationists that defines forests as areas with at least 10 percent tree canopy cover. Parr says that process can miscategorize open areas with some trees, often savannas, as forests.
The edge He also contacted the World Resources Institute (WRI), a nonprofit organization mentioned in the document that uses the definition of forests that have 10 percent canopy cover and that maintains a atlas of areas that he considers ripe for restoration. WRI launched AFR100 together with the African Union Development Agency, the World Bank and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development in 2015.
“AFR100 has made clear that native grasslands should not be converted to forests and this is reflected in its principles,” Sean Dewitt, director of WRI's forest restoration initiative, said in an email.
Both WRI and AFR100 said in their responses that the article's authors should not equate all restoration projects with reforestation. “It should be understood that the total area committed to the AFR100 initiative is made up of both forests and degraded lands. Therefore, it will be a mistake to focus only on degraded forests,” Nhlapho said in an email.
WRI's Dewitt says a “vast majority” of AFR100-affiliated restoration projects are actually agroforestry projects. “Agroforestry projects add trees to existing cropland to improve soil fertility, increase water retention, and reduce topsoil erosion,” she writes.
However, almost 60 percent of agroforestry projects use non-native species, Parr's analysis says. “An excellent example of the misapplication of tree-centered approaches is the use of agroforestry in non-forest areas as restoration,” Parr responded in an email. “We agree that agroforestry carries multiple social and economic benefits, but increasing tree cover in non-forest systems is not ecological restoration.”
As tree-planting campaigns have become more popular among brands and consumers conscious of their environmental impact, conflicts like this have been fueled over how effective these types of initiatives really are.
The drama has not deterred some of the major financiers
A 2019 study published in Science over the potential of trees to fight climate change sparked a controversial campaign by the World Economic Forum to plant a trillion trees. Dozens of scientists published his own scathing criticism of that research and the tree-planting projects it spawned, saying the research inflated figures about the potential tree planting has to sequester planet-warming carbon. The trillion tree campaign's chief scientific adviser has since left his post and was apparently “begging environment ministers to stop planting so many trees” at a UN climate conference in December. cabling reported.
The drama has not deterred some major funders. “Our partnership with AFR100 has helped us find and fund more than 150 (locally-led restoration) efforts, and we are enormously proud of the work they are doing,” said Emily Averna, land restoration program officer for the Bezos Earth Fund. In a statement sent by email to The edge. Meta did not respond to a request for comment.
Trees have become a powerful symbol for protecting the environment and stopping climate change, so much so that they could risk overshadowing other wild animals in need of conservation. In the literal sense, the grass withers in the shade of the trees. Its “woody invasion” can displace savannahs. “The lions, wildebeest and zebras of the Serengeti need those open grassland systems,” says Parr. “Trees are great, but the problem is if we put too many in the wrong place, we'll have problems.”
