Forest Day 5: Why forests matter

The focus in the war on deforestation is shifting to Africa, where the next wave of forest destruction is already happening. This is the view of a number of participants at the Forest Day 5 symposium, which was organised as a side event to COP 17 in Durban.

Exhibit at the Durban beachfront for COP 17. Visitors can pedal the training bicycles provided to generate electricity and light up the tree.

With a population of around one billion, Africa is a relatively sparsely populated continent, yet it contains 17% of the world's forest cover.

Helen Gichohi, president of the African Wildlife Foundation, said that deforestation rates in Africa are four times the world average, and accelerating. 9% of the forest cover was lost between 1995 and 2005. "The forests are the lungs of our continent," she said.

Bob Scholes, Systems Ecologist at the CSIR, focused on the role of forests in mitigating climate change. He said that human activity is producing nine petagrams of carbon emissions every year. (Carbon dioxide in the air is measured in terms of carbon 'petagrams'. One petagram equals one billion metric tons, roughly equivalent to one square kilometre of solid carbon. The atmosphere contains some 730 petagrams of carbon.) Yet only half of the carbon emissions due to human activity – 4.5 petagrams – is released into the atmosphere. The other half goes back into the oceans and the land. A large portion of this is captured and stored in the world's forests.

The frightening statistic is that deforestation alone is responsible for releasing 2.94 petagrams of carbon a year, nearly a quarter of all emissions. So by slowing or arresting deforestation, we can make a huge impact on the release of carbon into the atmosphere.

"The next wave of deforestation is happening in Africa, and most important is the dry forest environment because it is the first to be transformed by human activity." He said that the dry forests have half the carbon of the high tropical forests, but they are twice as extensive.

[For the full story, read the article in the December issue of SA Forestry magazine]