Nobel Laureate: Plant Trees on Farms to Fight Climate Change
NAIROBI, Kenya, August 31, 2009 - Tree planting can help the African continent cope with climate change and also provide a long-term solution to the continent's food scarcity problems, experts told the World Agroforestry Congress last week in Nairobi. More than 1,200 global experts gathered to consider growing trees on farms for humanity's survival.
Delegates heard an urgent message from founder of the Greenbelt Movement and 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai, who emphasized the importance of planting trees to help Africa adapt to the extreme weather conditions brought by climate change.
Maathai said that this year's El Nino warming ocean pattern in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean could mean ecological trouble for Africa unless people plant trees right away.
"We need to prepare for El Nino. We need to plant trees and have vegetation covering the soil," Maathai said. "We need to dig trenches and cut off drains that to allow water to go into the ground. It cannot wash away to the rivers, which will then wash away all the top soil. Let's not wait for the governments, let us do it ourselves." Wangari Maathai addresses the World Agroforestry Congress. (Photo courtesy ICRAF) Maathai said that climate change, like a disease, can easily kill a body already weakened by decades of environmental mismanagement.
Currently, Kenya and the surrounding countries are dry. Persistent below-average rainfall has plagued southeastern Sudan, northern Uganda and parts of Ethiopia and southwestern Kenya. Many areas throughout central and eastern Kenya, as well as northern Tanzania are experiencing moisture deficits, resulting in degraded crop and pasture conditions.
In her keynote address, Maathai said, "It is now critical that we expand existing proven and integrated tree-based practices such as combining conservation agriculture with agroforestry — what we might call evergreen agriculture. This would make it possible to achieve environmental benefits and sustainable food security and livelihoods."
But, warned Maathai, forests in Kenya are on the brink of disaster.
In 2007, the government announced it wants to bring back the shamba system, a method used to establish timber plantations through a form of agro-forestry in government managed forests. Under the system, farmers grow both trees and food crops on small plots, tending the trees and harvesting crops until the trees become established.
But Maathai called the shamba system "very destructive" telling conference delegates that it "destroys biodiversity and reduces the capacity of forests to harvest rain water, retain it and release it gradually through rivers and streams."
"The shamba system causes forests to lose the capacity to control rainfall patterns and climate as forests are turned into commercial farms and grazing grounds mostly covered by Kikuyu grass," she said.
"Once forests are opened up in the name of the shamba system, there is no capacity or even the will to police and protect forests," warned Maathai. "It will only take the next political leadership ready and willing to use forests as they have been used in the past, to dish out forests and settle their friends, supporters and tribesmen."
Illegal deforestation in Kenya's Shimoni Forest, July 2009. (Photo by Shawn Bryant) "Nobody will be able to keep away charcoal burners, poachers of trees and wildlife, marijuana growers, human settlements and other destructive activities that often lead to forest fires and destruction," she warned.
"With the increasing population and the challenges of climate change it is suicidal to succumb to pressure from pulp and building industries and re-introduce a system that was largely responsible for the destruction of forests in the past. It is extremely unwise to use watershed areas as farmlands for commercial trees to keep private or unviable public companies in operation," Maathai warned.
"As we all know, it is the poor people in developing countries who will bear the brunt of climate change and suffer most from its negative impacts," she said. "Climate change is increasing inter-annual rainfall variability and the frequency of extreme events, leading to accelerated rates of degradation of soil and water resources upon which farming communities depend for their livelihoods."
Maathai says Kenya must stop removing trees and shrubs from road reserves, riverine areas and local green spaces and instead begin planting trees along roadways. "The potential of road reserves being large reservoirs of biodiversity, slowing down water run-offs and therefore reducing soil erosion and road destruction especially during the rain seasons, is greatly under-estimated," she said.
There is one encouraging development that can bring African communities into the emerging world carbon market, so that agroforesters can benefit financially from the carbon they store in their trees and soil, said Maathai.
In May, the Carbon Benefits Project was launched by UNEP and the World Agroforestry Centre. Funded by the Global Environment Facility, this multi-million dollar project is developing tools for measuring terrestrial carbon storage, particularly on complex landscapes.
The measurement system will help boost carbon trading in developing countries by providing benchmarks for measuring carbon storage in village communities by integrating the latest remote sensing technology and analysis, soil carbon modeling, ground based measurement, and statistical analysis.
The project "could become the key to unlocking the multi-billion dollar carbon markets for millions of farmers, foresters and conservationists across the developing world," Maathai said. "Farming carbon to combat climate change is an exciting prospect."
One tree species emerged as the darling of the World Agroforestry Congress.
With its nitrogen-fixing qualities, the tall, long-lived acacia tree, Faidherbia albida, could limit the use of chemical fertilizers; provide fodder for livestock, wood for construction and fuel, and medicine through its bark, as well as windbreaks and erosion control to farmers across sub-Saharan Africa. A Faidherbia albida acacia tree grows beside a field of maize, fixing nitrogen in the soil that fertilizes the maize. (Photo by Marco Schmidt)
The fast-growing tree demonstrates the benefits of planting trees on farms and is adapted to a wide array of climates and soils from the deserts to the humid tropics, said the scientists at the meeting.
"The future of trees is on farms," said Dennis Garrity, director general of the World Agroforestry Centre. "Growing the right tree in the right place on farms in sub-Saharan Africa - and worldwide - has the potential to slow climate change, feed more people, and protect the environment. This tree, as a source of free, organic nitrogen, is an example of that."
Unlike other trees, Faidherbia sheds its leaves and goes dormant during the early rainy season. Its leaves grow again only in the dry season, so it is compatible with food crops because it does not compete with them for water, nutrients or light.
Faidherbia albida is important for raising bees, since its flowers provide bee forage at the close of the rainy season, when most plants in the Sahel do not.
The Agroforestry Centre says farmers in Malawi testify the tree is like a "fertilizer factory in the field," as it takes nitrogen from the air, fixes it in the leaves and then incorporates it into the soil.
The Agroforestry Centre's research showed that in Malawi maize yields increased by 280 percent in the zone under the tree canopy compared with the zone outside the tree canopy.
In Zambia, unfertilized maize yields in the vicinity of Faidherbia trees averaged 4.1 metric tonnes per hectare, compared to 1.3 tonnes nearby but beyond the tree canopy.
"Thus far we have failed to do enough to refine, adapt and extend the unique properties of these trees to the more than 50 million food crop farmers who desperately need home-grown solutions to their food production problems," said Garrity.
The Faidherbia research was welcomed by Kenyan officials, environmentalists and agronomists at a time when Kenya is asking for emergency food aid in order to prevent widespread famine. Pushed up by shortages, the price of the maize, the staple food here, has doubled over the past year.
With the failure of Kenya's long rains season, the number of drought-affected people has surged to 3.8 million, compared to 2.6 million previously. But Kenya is one of the countries where the UN's World Food Programme has had to cut back on food relief operations because of a funding shortfall.
