GEO-6 Regional Assessment for Africa


Seed heads of sorghum in a field in Africa. Credit: Shutterstock /ChWeiss


Blein et al. (2013), recent decades have seen large-scale investment contracts in Africa, including 20 million hectares of monocultures of industrial crops such as sugar cane, a landmass equivalent to the arable land area of South Africa and Zimbabwe combined.


The impacts of timber logging on forest cover vary between countries. A common concern of significant importance across Africa is that in many countries timber logging is now reaching the margins of sustainability. Industrial logging represents an extensive land use in the Congo Basin where 44 million hectares of forest is under concession, and this represents 25 per cent of the total dense lowland forest area (Lescuyer et al. 2010). Industrial logging produced 8.4 million cubic metres of timber in 2007 from Gabon, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Lescuyer et al. (2010), however, noted that small-scale artisanal logging is an equally important cause of ecological, economic and social impacts. Artisanal logging covers most of the domestic timber market but has also become part of the informal traffic in biological assets. Artisanal logging


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in the Democratic Republic of the Congo produces five to eight times more than official industrial timber production (Lescuyer et al. 2010). Logging clears canopies and opens linear gaps in the forest, in the process fragmenting habitats for wildlife species by creating small isolated islands (Laurance et al. 2009). Other deleterious impacts of logging on forest species biodiversity include physical disturbance, chemical pollutants, edge effects, and road-related mortality and barrier effects. Infrastructure associated with logging can have major impacts on local soils, hydrology and aquatic ecosystems, leading to upstream flooding and downstream water shortages, which can be lethal for patches of wetland vegetation (Laurance et al. 2009; Saunders et al. 1991). Apart from the habitat fragmentation it causes across the continent, the effects of logging include reductions in primate abundance and diversity in Central Africa (Remis and Robinson 2012), while in Uganda, group sizes for black-and-white Colobus populations have been found to be significantly smaller in cleared forests than in continuous canopy forests (Onderdonk and Chapman 2000). Fragmented Ugandan forests have also been found to have lower seedling density and fewer species of seedlings, which suggests that disrupting the complex interactions between primates and fruiting trees by logging can have negative and possibly cascading effects on ecosystem processes (Chapman and Onderdonk 1998). The effects of logging on Ugandan birds have been documented to last for as long as five decades after logging has ceased (Dale et al. 2000). Similar effects have been reported from other parts of Africa, including in West Africa where habitat fragmentation has affected chimpanzee populations (Torres et al. 2010), and in South Africa where the abundance of some species of bees has been negatively affected (Donaldson et al. 2002), with the potential to impact pollination processes.


Some 80 per cent of African people are dependent on fuelwood – either as charcoal or as wood – as their sole source of energy. This figure increases to more than 90 per cent in rural parts of the continent and particularly in East, West and Southern Africa (Sebukeera et al. 2006), and becomes as high as 95 per cent in countries of the Congo Basin such as Democratic Republic of the Congo (UNEP 2001). This

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