New Delhi (NVI): Around 18 million hectares of forest are lost worldwide each year – an area roughly the size of Panama, according to a report.
Destruction of tropical rainforest, which stores 210 gigatons of carbon, is the second biggest global contributor to climate change, says the report published by Global Center on Adaptation and World Economic Forum.
At the current rate, up to 28,000 species will go extinct in the next 25 years thanks to deforestation.
In the past 50 years, Ethiopia has lost 98% of its forested areas. To mediate this, it planted an estimated 350 million trees in just a single day in 2019, according to the report. The country has set an example and its success has inspired other countries, like Pakistan, India and China to do the same.
Developing countries from Ethiopia to Senegal to Pakistan are busy demonstrating how humanity can turn over a new leaf, says the report.
Pakistan’s Billion-Tree Tsunami project added 350,000 hectares of trees to the country’s landscape in just three years, while India and China – at one time Asia’s chief deforestation culprits – are leading the way in re-greening efforts, with the former planting 66m trees in 12 hours in 2017 and the latter deploying its army to plant an Ireland-sized area of forest in 2018, the report said.
The west African nation, Senegal, is home to some 1,85,000 hectares of mangrove swamps, but around 45,000 have been lost since the 1970s due to drought and deforestation. To combat this, a public- and private-funded effort run by the environment agency Océanium has seen 1,00,000 people from 350 villages perform a mass-planting scheme which has replaced a total of 79 million trees.
However, besides eye-catching headlines and interesting numbers, the forest and green cover actually plays a great role in the fight against climate change. Besides sequestering carbon, boosting biodiversity and pollinators, promoting rainfall and providing firewood, fodder, jobs and shelter, forests are increasingly being recognised for the crucial infrastructure tasks they perform.
Forests protect priceless arable land from extreme weather events, prevent soil erosion, bind soil together to prevent flash floods, provide natural water filtration systems and even, in snowy areas far from east Africa, shield human settlements from avalanches.
Increasingly, this ‘green infrastructure’ is expected to play a vital role in climate change adaptation and as humanity works to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, according to the report.
Natural infrastructure responses to climate change – known as ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) – are increasingly finding favour as an alternative to human-engineered ‘grey’ infrastructure, which relies on concrete and steel, two of the most environmentally destructive materials on the planet, says the report.
