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Mr Abebe Haile-Gabriel (inset) FAO Assistant Director-General and Regional Representative for Africa, addressing participants at the meeting
Mr Abebe Haile-Gabriel (inset) FAO Assistant Director-General and Regional Representative for Africa, addressing participants at the meeting

2 Million hectares degraded land, forest cover to be restored

About two million hectares of the country’s depleted forest and land cover are to be restored under a joint programme of the African Union, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), and other development partners.

Ghana is one of 28 countries, including 10 in West Africa, that will benefit from the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100) aimed at restoring lands that have lost their vegetation cover by 2030.

Under the initiative,100 million hectares of deforested and degraded land across Africa would be restored.

This is to help the beneficiary countries achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 15, and the Paris Climate Agreement, meant to protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, forests, combating desertification, and halting and reversing land degradation and biodiversity loss.

At the fourth AFR annual partnership meeting in Accra yesterday, the FAO Assistant Director-General and Regional Representative for Africa, Mr Abebe Haile-Gabriel, said land degradation remained a worldwide challenge.

“It impacts on the economies and livelihoods of the people of Africa, and has been particularly harmful,” he said at the two-day meeting where partners of AFR100 had gathered to discuss the future of the initiative.Figures

The FAO’s Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) published in 2015, revealed a massive decline in forest area in Africa which had reached 624 million hectares, with a deforestation rate of 2.8 million hectares a year, between 2010 and 2015.

Ghana is estimated to lose some 165,000 hectares of forest cover annually.

The causes of deforestation in the country include mining, logging, agriculture, wildfire, firewood, charcoal and settlements.

In tackling those challenges, the FAO is to support AUDA-NEPAD, host of AFR100 secretariat, to establish an online monitoring and knowledge platform on restoration in Africa, a regional capacity development plan and also embark on resource mobilisation effort.

The regional project will also build on FAO’s technical expertise and ongoing restoration programmes such as an Acacia operations and Action Against

Desertification project in support of Africa’s Great Green Wall, to combat desertification and climate change.

Dr Haile-Gabriel, however, said the new paradigm should be that “peoples and their livelihoods should be at the centre of initiatives.

Farmers and farmer organisations are key towards achieving the AFR100 restoration ambitions”.

The Chief Executive Officer of the African Union Development Authority, Dr Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, in a speech read on his behalf, said forest landscape restoration was more than planting of trees; it included sustainability.

Effects

The Minister of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation, Prof. Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng, said while Africa was not a major contributor to climate change, it bore the brunt of its effects.

He said there were millions of youth across the continent with ideas that could solve its problems but the continent spent more than $4 billion in recruiting expatriates, while 250,000 equally qualified Africans left the continent annually to work for pittance.

“When it comes to the restoration of lands and forest, it is not about tree planting.

If you degrade an area of forest, you cannot imagine what you have lost. It includes the vipers, fungi and insects that are in there. Until penicillin was discovered, people were dying from simple infections.

The antibiotic was developed from mould, something insignificant,” the minister said.

According to Prof. Frimpong-Boateng, the world’s pharmacy and supermarkets were products of the forest, hence it was necessary to save the forest from further destruction.

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