Researcher and environmentalist, Mr Muntaka Chasant, has urged the government to focus more on protecting existing forests which are crucial to mitigating climate change.
While commending the tree-planting initiative under the Green Ghana project, he said 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, he told the Ghana News Agency in an interview last Friday.
“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.
“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 re-growth 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 (EU)’s new law that would ban the importation of deforestation-linked products, including cocoa. —GNA
