On July 25 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed picked up a spade and started to dig a hole. When he was finished, he gently lowered a sapling into the hole he had dug, and then covered its roots with the loose soil. The tree that he had just planted was one of 350 million planted in Ethiopia that day, part of an unprecedented push to reforest the country — and, in the process, save the world from the climate apocalypse.
AFR100 is a win-win: for foreign donors, who can bolster their green credentials; and for African leaders, who can claim to be fighting climate change while generating a sizeable financial windfall for their governments. That’s why it has been so enthusiastically embraced by the leaders of 28 countries, who together have committed to plant trees on 113-million hectares — comfortably exceeding AFR100’s original target.
Besides, it is far from settled whether planting more trees in Southern Africa’s grasslands would actually have the intended effect. “Several researchers have argued that the grassy biomes targeted for afforestation are better than forests at conserving carbon,” noted a recent paper on this subject in the Trends in“This is partly because forests, especially plantations of eucalypts and pines, are vulnerable to high-severity fires and will become more so as the world warms.
In October, Science published a technical comment from 46 academics from all over the world — including a number from Africa. The comment was a rebuttal of Bastin et al’s methodology, and claimed that the original paper had overestimated the global potential for tree restoration by a factor of five — as well as ignoring crucial local context that undermined their projections.
The publication of this rebuttal was organised in part by the Miombo Network, a regional alliance of academics across Southern Africa who work together to figure out the best ways to manage land in the vast Miombo Woodlands biome, which stretches from Angola to Tanzania and from southern Zimbabwe all the way up to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Especially if the trees are non fruit bearing trees....
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