May 2012 C&CI • Climate Change • 29
Need to conserve biodiversity
"There are no longer any frontier forests in West Africa for future generations to exploit," they said. Strategies to reduce deforestation and conserve biodiversity in West Africa must focus on transforming agricultural practices from traditional to modern science based methods. "Fertilizers for forest" tech- nology to sustainably intensify production is available and has achieved impressive cocoa yield increases on a limited scale in parts of the GRF. According to the authors, funding could
be made available to help farmers reduce carbon emissions due to deforestation and degradation, and help mitigate climate change (as discussed in the Copenhagen Accord). It could also provide a much-need- ed form of investment in agricultural research and extension, and support the transforma- tion of traditional agriculture in West Africa. The value of avoided CO2
emissions has
been conservatively estimated at US$565 per hectare for achieving the envisaged doubling of yields. A significant proportion of REDD+ funding should be used to increase the adop- tion and level of fertilizer use in a "fertilizers for
The area in West Africa devoted to cocoa has increased, but at the expense of tropical forests
overgrazed rangelands, and conversion to agriculture of grasslands and wetlands have all diminished the resilience of ecosystems." She called for REDD+ funding to move more quickly to save the continent’s forest. Ms Gichohi’s message was echoed by fel-
forest" mitigation programme, the report’s authors believe. "There is a risk that REDD interventions are
only implemented within the forestry sector, while extensive low input agriculture, the fun- damental driver of deforestation in the region and the root cause of most rural poverty, gets neglected. This would be a mistake," they concluded. Earlier this year, CIFOR said a new wave of
deforestation was also threatening Africa’s cli- mate resilience, decimating wildlife and threat- ening the resilience of its ecosystems to with- stand the effects of climate change - especial- ly in the area of food security. "Deforestation rates in Africa… are acceler-
ating," said Helen Gichohi, President of the African Wildlife Foundation during a keynote speech at Forest Day 5 in Durban on the side- lines of COP17. "The disappearing forests the
low keynote speaker, Bob Scholes of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa, who said: "The next major wave of deforestation is already here and it is happening in Africa.
Key role for preventing deforestation
"If we can do something to influence defor- estation we can have a greater effect on everything that has happened so far under the Kyoto Protocol," he said. "This challenge is worth the effort." Mr Scholes described the typical pattern for
deforestation in Africa: loggers come into a forest, they chop the large trees and take out the valuable timber, then charcoal manufactur- ers remove a large proportion of the remaining trees, and then low-input, low-output agricul- ture arrives, which after a few cycles leaves the land degraded and of little value to any- one. C&CI
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