By Paul Homewood
No S**t Sherlock!!
Capturing carbon by increasing forest cover has become central to the fight against climate change. But there’s a problem. Sometimes these forests exist on paper only – because promises have not been kept, or because planted trees have died or even been harvested. A new effort will now be made to track success and failure.
Dr Jurgenne Primavera is being paddled in a canoe along the coast of Iloilo in the Philippines. It’s an idyllic scene but she is frowning. Six years ago these shallow waters were planted with mangroves as part of the country’s ambitious National Greening Programme, but now there is nothing to see but blue water and blue sky.
Ninety per cent of the seedlings died, Dr Primavera says, because the type of mangrove planted was suited to muddy creeks rather than this sandy coastal area. The government preferred it, she suggests, because it is readily available and easy to plant.
"Science was sacrificed for convenience in the planting."
The National Greening Programme was an attempt to grow 1.5 million hectares of forest and mangroves between 2011 and 2019 but a withering report from the country’s Commission on Audit found that in the first five years 88% of it had failed…..
Tim Christophersen, until this month head of Nature for Climate with the UN Environment Programme, says that of the one billion hectares of landscape that countries have promised to restore worldwide "most" remains a promise rather than a reality.
In some cases, grandiose planting programmes have gone ahead, but have delivered limited results. The BBC has investigated a dozen examples that have flopped – as in the Philippines – usually because insufficient care was taken.
The Philippines government did not respond to requests to comment on the official Commission on Audit assessment that 88% of the National Greening Programme failed.
The local authority that planted what Dr Primavera considers to be the wrong mangrove species for coastal sites disagreed with her, saying that 50% of seedlings had survived in some locations.
In the Philippines at least an audit was published; in many other countries results are unclear.
The Indian State of Uttar Pradesh, for example, has planted tens of millions of saplings in the last five years, but when the BBC went to check new plantations near Banda, it found few alive.
Signs still proudly announced the plantations’ existence, but scrubland plants were taking over.
Prof Ashish Aggarwal of the Indian Institute of Management in Lucknow says India has covered an area the size of Denmark with plantations since the 1990s, but national surveys show forest cover increasing only gradually.
"Even at a survival rate of 50%, we should have seen more than 20 million hectares of trees and forests," he says. "But that hasn’t happened – the data does not show that addition."
According to the deputy director of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Tina Vahanen, this problem is widespread, not confined to India.
"Many of the plantations have been promotional events," she says, "with no follow-up action that is really needed to grow trees."
The BBC found a different kind of problem in Mozambique, which has allowed private companies to plant large monoculture plantations as part of its contribution to the AFR100 forest landscape restoration initiative.
While many plantations have grown successfully, it’s alleged that in some cases mature natural forest has been felled to make space.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61300708
Why any of this should comes as a surprise beats me!
The harsh reality is that most of these third world countries have no interest in global warming, or for that matter forestry. All they are interested in is the money handed out to them either directly or via carbon offsets.
As the BBC report, many of the plantations have been promotional events with no follow-up action that is really needed to grow trees.
Moreover, in many of these places, forests would grow naturally anyway, without the need for politicians’ greenwashing.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
May 16, 2022 at 04:18AM
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