Reforestation efforts see progress around the world

Leslie Berliant

Deforestation is responsible for about 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Driven in part by consumer appetite for cheap beef, leather, timber, biofuels, tropical oils and products, as well as paper products, deforestation is proceeding at the rate of an estimated 13 million hectares a year. That translates into 50,000 square miles, an area more than half the size of the United Kingdom, being lost every year.

A new report from Christian Aid concurs that deforestation, along with pollution of local water resources and displacement of local farmers are the main by-products of the current biofuels system.

While there is growing international support for tackling global deforestation - there's even generous support in the Waxman-Markey Bill for the effort - action has been stymied by the overall lack of progress on a global climate agreement. The circumstance is exemplified by the UN's program on Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD). It has only one donor, Norway, and six projects off the ground.

While addressing deforestation has remained difficult, around the world there has been encouraging progress on the opposite process - reforestation and afforestation. Governments, companies, organizations and individuals are putting trees back on some of the lands devastated by deforestation. 

Earlier this month, Pakistan broke a Guinness World Record previously held by India for the most trees planted in a single day – 541,176. There are even reforestation vacations for enterprising travelers that want to get in on the act. But popular events are just the tip of the iceberg of a far more difficult process that is proceeding largely unseen in many pockets around the world.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently put a spotlight on India’s reforestation efforts and credited the country for the $3 billion budget allocation for reforestation. Indian Minister of Environment and Forests, Jairam Ramesh, earlier this month tooted his own horn in the Times of India.

While in the US, under the banner of the Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative (ARRI), a plan was recently floated to reforest an initial 175,000 acres of Appalachian mountains, part of the 1.5 million acres destroyed by mountaintop removal coal mining.

Even the UN, which has a campaign to plant seven billion trees around the world over the next three years, sent an emissary to a Kentucky mountaintop earlier this year to help plant saplings under the auspices of the Billion Tree Campaign.

The Samboja Lestari project in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, is a project of a different nature. It grew out of conservationist Will Smits desire to restore orangutan habitat in Borneo and was supported by $4.5 million in NGO funding.  The amount is a quarter of what the U.S. and Germany just allocated to reforest a similarly sized area in Bangladesh - $19 million for the Chunati Wildlife Sanctuary in Bangladesh.

The SFM-BAM’s Campo Verde project in Peru became the first commercial reforestation endeavour using native species to be validated under the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS) and has planted 919 hectares so far.  SFM-BAM is a Peruvian forestry and environmental services company that owns the land they are reforesting and are currently developing several large REDD projects in various regions of the Peruvian Amazon.

Earlier this month, The World Bank’s BioCarbon Fund announced that it would purchase 500,000 tons of emission reductions from a reforestation project in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The Ibi Bateke Carbon Sink Plantation Project will reforest 4,200 hectares of degraded land and trap an estimated 2.4 million tons of carbon dioxide over the next 30 years.

Whether these efforts at reforestation - both private and public - find long term and larger scale success has yet to be determined. Success in forest maintenance seems to rest with creating economic opportunity for the local community. As Willie Smits reiterates, the key is developing local economic value in keeping forests.

Source: Solve Climate