Dr. Dennis Garrity, Drylands Ambassador to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification and former director general of the World Agroforestry Centre, shares his favorite drylands restoration success story: the spontaneous restoration by farmers of five million hectares of degraded land in Niger.
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Trees such as Faidherbia albida are planted in fields or pastures as natural fertilizer. In Zambia more than 160,000 farmers plant Faidherbia trees in their fields. Farmers in Niger have been able to make more than 4.8m hectares of land greener and more fertile, thanks to #EverGreenAgriculture.
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“A decade ago this land was dismissed as lost to the desert,” said ecologist Mamadou Diakite. He was smiling beneath the shade of a tree, one of hundreds growing vigorously all around him on land previously abandoned by local millet farmers.
The growth of these trees, and hundreds of millions more in a remote region of West Africa on the edge of the Sahara desert, is the result of local farmers abandoning long-standing advice from government experts to uproot trees on their fields – and to nurture them instead.
What is today called “Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration” is thought to have begun in the mid-1980s in Dan Saga, a village in the Maradi region of Niger, which suffered hugely from Sahel droughts in the 1970s.
The story is that some young men returned to their fields late in the season after working abroad. In a rush, they planted their crops without first clearing their land of woody plants. To their surprise, their grain yields were better than in neighbouring fields that had been cleared. When the same thing happened the next year, the village got the message: Trees were good for their crops.
So from then on, when preparing their land for planting, farmers cultivated stems growing from stumps in their fields. The resulting trees fixed nitrogen, stabilised soils and dropped leaves that maintained soil moisture.
And before long, the trees were providing firewood, animal fodder and other products, as well as shading crops and villages from wind and sun. The message spread. “It was slow to take off, but now they all want to do it,” Diakite said. “The land is coming back into production.”
This version of agroforestry has now extended across 5 million hectares of Niger. The 200 million extra trees benefit yields of millet and sorghum on more than a million farms, which typically gain an income of about $1,000 per year from selling products such as wood, fodder, fruit, pods and leaves.
And there is another, less immediately tangible benefit: The trees capture an estimated 30 million tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere.
Niger’s grassroots revolution – which for a long time was invisible to outsiders – is not an isolated example of people bringing back diverse forests, but has been replicated in different forms in different corners of the globe – from once denuded farmlands in Costa Rica to the foothills of the Himalayas, from the remote Scottish coast to the Xingu basin in the Amazon, and elsewhere.
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Originally published on News Trust.
China plans to plant forests the size of Ireland. Latin American countries have pledged to restore 20m hectares of degraded forest and African countries more than 100m hectares. India is to plant 13m hectares, and on a single day last year 1.5 million people planted 66m trees in Madhya Pradesh alone.
This enthusiasm for a greener world, expressed in trees, is inspiring and overdue. For 200 years forested countries barely knew what to do with their trees. They were treated as expendable and a waste of space. But in a great cultural shift, they have changed from being dark and fearsome places to semi-sacred and untouchable.
And why not? In this new ecological age, we have learned that trees have far more value than providing timber: they keep soils moist, prevent floods and provide shelter, store carbon, beautify landscapes, protect water sources, increase biodiversity, improve conservation and induce human wellbeing. So woe betide councils such as Sheffield that want to cut down trees. From the Newbury bypass protests 20 years ago to today’s battles to save the ancient woodlands along the route of the HS2 rail link, there are few surer ways of angering people than cutting down their trees.
Originally published on The Guardian
Trees are renewable, so why not let them count under the proposed revisions to the EU renewable energy target? Here we answer this and other questions to demonstrate why burning trees for energy is not inherently climate-friendly.
The European Union (EU) Renewable Energy Directive establishes an overall policy for advancing the use of energy from renewable sources in the EU. The current framework requires the EU to meet at least 20 percent of its total energy needs with renewables by 2020. Wood is currently the largest contributor to this renewable energy target, accounting for as much as 45 percent of all renewable energy consumed. Much of the forest biomass currently used consists of industrial and harvest residues and traditional fuelwood. However, these sources are nearing full exploitation and further demand for wood for bioenergy will likely come from additional tree harvesting. Even now, Europe is importing wood pellets from U.S. and Canadian forests. Proposals currently under discussion by the European Parliament for a revised Renewable Energy Directive would increase the share of renewable energy in the EU’s total energy mix from 20 percent to at least 27 percent, and possibly 30–35 percent, by 2030. This proposal would likely increase demand to turn trees into energy as EU countries seek ways to meet these more ambitious renewable energy targets.
There is a common perception that burning trees to generate heat or electricity should be considered “zero emissions” or “carbon neutral” because the carbon dioxide (CO2) released during burning is either recaptured by photosynthesis as trees regrow, or the CO2 already sequestered by trees cancels out the emissions. The reality, however, is more complex for the following reasons:
Originally published on the WRI website.
Vietnam has a significant challenge ahead: power its remarkable economic growth with less polluting and more affordable clean energy.
This is no small task. According to the Vietnam Business Forum, the country’s current energy plan would increase coal use from 14 gigawatts (GW) to 55GW by 2030 and require 10 million tons of coal to be imported every year from 2017 onward.
Yet the government is increasingly invested in changing this trajectory, recently committing to reduce its emissions up to 25 percent from business-as-usual levels by 2030, in part by generating 18,000 megawatts (MW) of power from wind and solar. The private sector, too, is increasingly willing to support the country’s clean energy and greenhouse gas commitments.
Vietnam today is a dynamic place where business and government could chart an unprecedented shift toward towards clean energy — if they can address some key barriers.
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Originally published on the WRI website.
