The fragile forest - relentless march of deforestation, towards a Green Revolution in forestry, and the fuelwood crisis

Before the dawn of agriculture, some 10,000 years ago, the Earth boasted a rich mantle of forest and open woodland covering some 6,200 million hectares. Over the centuries, a combination of land clearing for crop production, commercial timber harvesting, cattle ranching and fuelwood gathering has shrunk the Earth's forests to some 4,200 million hectares-a third less than existed in preagricultural times.

For centuries, this reduction in the Earth's biological stock hindered human progress little, if at all. indeed, the clearing of trees to expand food production and the harvesting of forest products were vital aspects of economic and social development. But the relentless loss of tree cover has recently begun to impinge on the economic and environmental health of numerous nations, mostly in the developing world. Largescale reforestation, combined with concerted efforts to protect remaining forests, now appears essential to Improving the human prospect.

Most tree planting efforts over the last several decades have aimed at increasing supplies of marketable timber, pulp and fuelwood for cities-forest products that yield obvious economic benefit. By contrast, reforestation for reasons that lie outside the monetized economy has been vastly under-attended, Yet trees quite literally form the roots of many natural systems. With the inexorable march of deforestation,the ecological integrity of many areas is disintegrating-causing severe soil loss aggravating droughts and floods, disrupting water supplies and reducing land productivity.

Trees are also a vital component of the survival economy of the rural poor Hundreds of millions of people rely on gathered wood to cook their meals and heat their homes. For them, lack of access to wood translates into reduced living standards and, in some cases, directly into malnutrition. In addition, trees and soils play a crucial role in the global cycling of carbon, the importance of which has been magnified by the emergence of carbon dioxide-induced climate change as arguably the most threatening environmental problem of modern times.

Efforts to slow deforestation certainly deserve redoubled support. But even if forest clearing miraculously ceased today, millions of hectares of trees would still have to be planted to meet future fuelwood needs and to stabilize soil and water resources. Increased planting to satisfy rising demands for paper, lumber and other industrial wood products is also crucial. Expanding forest cover for all these reasons will reduce pressures on remaining virgin forest, helping thereby to safeguard the Earth's biological diversity. At the same time it will mitigate the build-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which gives industrial countries sound reason to step up support for tree planting in developing countries.

Successfully reforesting large areas of degraded lands, however, will require much more than financial commitments from governments and international lending agencies. It will take a shift in emphasis from government foresters establishing and maintaining commercial plantations to the much more complex tasks of starting nurseries in thousands of villages and encouraging the planting of multi-purpose trees along roads, on farms and around houses. Only by garnering the knowledge, support and human energy of rural people themselves-and planting to meet their basic needs-is there any hope of success.

Dramatic changes in regional forest cover historically reflect powerful societal transformations. Beginning in the sixteenth century, the expanding agricultural and industrial needs of Renaissance societies spurred the clearing of large tracts of forest in Western Europe. France, once 80 per cent forested, had trees covering only 14 per cent of its territory by 1789. Both the French and the English so depleted their domestic forest resources that they were forced, by the mid-seventeenth century, to conduct a worldwide search for ship timbers in order to maintain their maritime superiority. Similarly, forest cover in what is now the contiguous United States totalled some 385 million hectares in 1630, around the time when the Pilgrim Fathers arrived. As colonization spread along the eastern seaboard and gradually westward, forests dwindled. By 1920, trees covered 249 million hectares, more than a third less than when European settlement began.

Despite growing recognition of the importance of forests to the economic and ecological health of nations, surprisingly little is known with certainty about the state of forest resources today. Many countries have not fully inventorled their forests and the data that do exist vary widely in quality. A 1982 study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) still provides the best information available on tropical forests, even though much of the data is more than a decade old. Combining FAO's estimates with those of a 1985 forest assessment by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe and with various individual country reports yields a rough picture of the global forest resource base.

Closed forest, where the shade from tree crowns prevents substantial growth of grass, covers nearly 3,000 million hectares worldwide. Another 1,300 mil lion hectares are open woodlands, including, for example, the wooded savannah of Africa and the cerrado in Brazil. Collectively, forested lands cover approximately 4,300 million hectares, an area almost triple that in crops. Shrubland and forest regrowth on temporarily abandoned cropland bring the total area supporting woody vegetation to more than 40 per cent of the world's land. The most worrisome finding of FAO's assessment was that tropical trees were being cut much faster than reforestation or nature were replacing them. For tropical regions as a whole, 11.13 million hectares were cleared annually in the early 1980s, while only 1.1 million hectares of plantations were established. Thus ten hectares were being cleared for every one planted. In Africa, the ratio was twenty-nine to one; in Asia, five to one. Even these alarming figures probably underestimate the extent of forest loss in particular regions, since tree planting Is often highly concentrated, while cutting is widespread.

Recent data for individual countries suggest that forest cover trends in some regions are even bleaker than FAO's sobering assessment indicates. Satellite imagery of five States in Brazil, for example, shows that deforestation in parts of the Amazon has proceeded much faster than estimates for the entire region suggest. Likewise, LANDSAT data released by the National Remote Sensing Agency of India reveal that India's forest cover declined from 16.9 percent in the early 1970s to 14.1 per cent in the early 1980s, an average loss of 1.3 million hectares per year. Fortunately, reforestation is also proceeding somewhat faster than official estimates suggest. Spontaneous tree planting by villagers around farm fields, as windbreaks, or along roadways is frequently not counted. Indeed, forestry statistics typically ignore "trees outside of forests", even though in many areas they are the primary source of fuelwood, fodder and rural construction materials. In Kenya, for instance, the number of trees planted by villagers exceeds the number established in government plantations. And in Rwanda, scattered trees planted by rural people collectively cover some 200,000 hectares, more than the combined area of the country's remaining natural forest and all State and communal plantations.

Nonetheless, the loss of forest cover in tropical countries remains rampant. Conversion of forest to cropland is by far the leading direct cause. Population growth, inequitable land distribution and the expansion of export agriculture have greatly reduced the area of cropland available for subsistence farming, forcing many peasants to clear virgin forest to grow food. These displaced cultivators often follow traditions of continuous cropping that are ill suited to fragile forest soils. Eventually, the soils become so depleted that peasant colonists must clear more forest to survive.

Indigenous "shifting cultivators" clear new fields every few years, allowing forest regrowth to restore soil fertility before they return to clear and plant again several years later But even this once sustainable practice is being undermined as population pressures force farmers to recultivate land before it has recovered. FAO estimates that the breakdown of traditional shifting cultivation patterns is responsible for 70 per cent of closed forest clearings in tropical Africa, nearly 50 per cent in tropical Asia and 35 per cent in tropical America.

Population pressures have also transformed fuelwood collection into an unsustainable practice. Given a choice, villagers generally gather dead wood and branches for fuel; they only cut live wood if nothing else is available or if they are converting wood to charcoal for urban markets. Fuelwood collection is thus an agent of forest destruction primarily in the arid woodlands of Africa, where population density is high and the natural growth rate of vegetation is low, and around large cities of Asia and Africa, where concentrated demand over-taxes available tree stock. Recent LANDSAT data show that in less than a decade forest cover within 100 kilometres of India's major cities dropped by 15 per cent or more; Delhi lost a staggering 60 per cent.

Consumer demand in temperate countries also fosters tropical forest depletion. Industrial countries' appetite for tropical hardwoods has encouraged many governments of developing countries to "mine" their forests to earn vital foreign exchange. As loggers fell commercially available trees species-which sometimes account for less than 5 per cent of any given hectare-they often destroy between 30 and 60 per cent of unwanted trees as well. Roughly twothirds of the logging-and the damage-has occurred in Southeast Asia, although logging is likely to increase in Latin America as Asian forests become depleted.

One additional agent of forest destruction operates in Latin America- the lure of cattle ranching. Between 1961 and 1978, pasture in Central America expanded 53 per cent, while forests and woodlands declined 39 per cent. Much of this conversion was driven by US demand for cheap beef, although in recent years Central American beef exports have dropped in response to declining US beef consumption. Similarly, by the late 1970s an estimated 1.5 million hectares of pasture had been established in the Brazilian Amazon. In 1979, Brazil eliminated some of the incentives that had spurred clearing for pasture; alas, forest clearing continues as a way of establishing claims in Brazil's highly speculative land market.

Pressures on temperate forests have waned substantially following several centuries of clearing for agriculture, Forest cover in most European countries is now fairly stable; in some it has even been increasing as marginal agricultural land reverts to woodland and as conscious efforts are made to plant trees. Since the early 1960s, government and private plantings in the United Kingdom have increased net forest cover an average of 30,000 to 40,000 hectares per year. In France, forest area has risen substantially from its historic low of 14 per cent in 1789. About a quarter of the country is now forested.

Unfortunately, chemical stresses from air pollution and acid rain today place a substantial share of European forests at risk. Trees covering some 31 million hectares in central and northern Europe are showing signs of damage linked to air pollutants. Scientists do not know how extensive the damage will become, but it could substantially offset recent gains made in expanding the continent's forested area.

As in Europe, forest cover in the contiguous United States was comparatively stable during most of this century, following the loss of 136 million hectares between 1630 and 1920. During the last two decades, however, forest area has declined as widening grain export markets encouraged conversion of forest to cropland and as urban and industrial development encroached on woodland. In 1982, forests covered 233 million hectares of the contiguous States - a 10 per cent drop from 1963 and less than existed in 1920, the previous low point.

In the developing countries, nothing in prospect suggests that forest cover will stabilize any time soon as it has in many industrialized countries. The forces behind deforestation remain strong and planting efforts are woefully inadequate to reverse the loss of tree cover.

Towards a Green Revolution in Forestry

Nature employs a wide variety of methods for expanding tree cover- coconuts that float between tropical islands, aerodynamic seeds and luscious fruits that attract animal carriers. Strategies equally diverse and ingenious are needed to mobilize human energy and financial resources for tree planting sufficient to satisfy fuelwood needs, stabilize soil and water resources and slow the carbon dioxide build-up.

Tree planting programmes are most effective when local people are involved in their planning and implementation and perceive their own interest in success. If fodder is a critical need, for example; a project that promotes a non-browsable species like eucalyptus will receive little popular support. Designing a reforestation project without local input is like lefting a doctor prescribe treatment without asking the patient what hurts.

A number of tree planting programmes are meeting with considerable success. In Haiti a project to encourage agroforestry and tree farming has included planting more than 27 million seedlings between 1982 and 1986.

Around the world, women's associations, peasant collectives and church groups have taken up tree planting; in Kerala, India, alone, some 7,300 organizations are involved.

In Kenya, the Greenbelt Movement, sponsored by the National Council of Women of Kenya, has involved more than 15,000 farmers and half a million schoolchildren in establishing 670 community nurseries and planting more than two million trees.

In 1985, annual planting in China doubled to eight million hectares, giving renewed cause for optimism. Tree survival rates that had averaged only 30 per cent may also be improving. China seems unlikely to achieve its ambitious target of 20 per cent forest cover by the year 2000, but the combination of increased planting and better management, if sustained, could mean the nation's tree cover resumes its upward trend.

The late 1985 launch of the Tropical Forestry Action Plan holds promise of elevating forestry to its rightful place among development priorities. Jointly sponsored by FAO, UNDP (the United Nations Development Programme), the World Resources Institute and the World Bank, the Action Plan calls for accelerated investments of $8,000 million over five years in tree-planting projects and efforts to arrest deforestation.

In his development agenda for 1985 to 1990, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi assigned forestry a central place. He almost tripled funding for forestry, reorganized his Ministries to give forestry new prominence and created- a National Wastelands Development Board to spearhead a "people's movement for afforestation".

What is needed in the coming decade is an effort somewhat akin to the agricultural Green Revolution of the 1960s; a dedication to developing

genetically improved tree species and to extending widely the technical and financial resources for reforestation. Forestry's Green Revolution, however, needs to promote indigenous tree species and diversified agroforestry systems and must strive to benefit marginalized populations, including the landless. Accelerated planting that does not benefit the poor only masquerades as success.

The fuelwood crisis

Energy planners in developing countries face a markedly different set of challenges over the coming decades than their counterparts in industrial countries. Many of the developing countries remain tightly wedded to wood as a primary energy source, either in its rawform or after conversion to charcoal. As wood supplies in the countryside and around cities continue to dwindle, growing numbers face a deepening energy crisis. Even after more than a decade of increasing recognition of the problem, only halting progress has been made towards satisfying future fuelwood demand.

More than two-thirds of all people in the developing countries rely on wood for cooking and heating. Rural dwellers depend on wood almost exclusively, even in oil-rich Nigeria. In many countries-including most of Africa-wood not only dominates household energy use, it provides more than 70 per cent of energy used for all purposes.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in 1980 nearly 1,200 million people in developing countries were only managing to meet their fuelwood needs by cutting wood faster than it was being replaced. Nearly 100 million people-half of them in tropical Africa- could not meet their minimum needs even by over-cutting the woodlands around them. FAO projected that by the year 2000 the number of people lacking wood or over-cutting would reach nearly 2,400 million, more than half the projected developing-world population.

The human and ecological costs of wood scarcity are already high. In rural parts of the Himalayas and the African Sahel, women and children spend between 100 and 3 00 days a year gathering fuelwood. Boiling water becomes an unaffordable luxury and quick-cooking cereals replace more nutritious but slower-cooking foods, such as beans. Where fuelwood is critically scarce, people often have no choice but to divert dried dung and crop residues from fields to cookstoves, a practice that diminishes soil fertility and depresses crop yields. In Nepal, for example, this diversion reduces grain yields an estimated 15 per cent.

Rapid urbanization will only magnify the ecological consequences of increasing fuelwood scarcity. City dwellers tend to rely on charcoal rather than wood because its light weight makes it more economical to transport from the countryside. When wood is converted into charcoal in traditional earthen pits, more than half the primary wood energy is lost, This means that every villager who moves to the city and switches from wood to charcoal equals, in energy terms, two people. Even though urban areas have traditionally been less dependent upon fuelwood, urbanization could soon make cities pivotal to national fuelwood strategies. Indeed, the World Bank estimates that by the year 2000 the urban areas of West Africa will account for 50 to 70 per cent of the region s total fuelwood consumption.

Experts generally agree that a successful strategy to meet the fuelwood needs of the developing countries- must include increasing the productivity of natural forests by making better use of wood now wasted, including logging residues and trees cleared for cropland, by raising the efficiency with which the wood is burned and by planting more trees. The World Bank has calculated that fuel substitution and the use of more efficient kilns and cookstoves could reduce fuelwood need's in the year 2000 by about a fourth. Eliminating the remaining gap between projected supply and demand would require planting the equivalent of 55 million hectares of high yielding fuelwood plantations, or 2.7 million hectares per year, given a base yaer of 1980. If the needed number of trees were planted less intensively on farms, around houses and in woodlots, planting efforts would involve an area at least four times as large. Actual planting for fuelwood has averaged about 550 hectares annually, a fifth of what is needed,

More than a decade of experience with so-called communal and farm forestry projects has shown clearly that inspiring large-scale planting of trees is no easy task. The international donor community rightly recognized during the 1970s that villagers in developing countries themselves formed the only labour force large enough to plant trees on the vast areas needed. In many cases, however, rural people were reluctant to participate in communal planting because they had no idea how the resulting benefits would be shared. Perhaps the greatest lesson of the first generation of fuelwood pro'ects was that villagers were rarely motivated to plant trees exclusively for fuelwood.

To outside observers it seems irrational for people faced with an energy crisis to be reluctant to plant trees for fuel. But for most rural dwellers in developing countries, fruit, poles, fodder and shade are higher priorities. They know that wood, in the form of trimmings and dead branches, will be a secondary benefit of plantings for these other purposes. Moreover, people do not always perceive the nationa"fuelwood gap" that so concerns energy planners. They may be cutting wood over and above a sustainable level, yet still not be experiencing an unacceptable shortage. And in rural areas where fuelwood is not part of the cash economy, the cost of increasing scarcity is measured in women's time, something that may have little value to male decisionmakers.

The key to mobilizing villagers is to promote multi-purpose trees that meet their immediate needs while also increasing the woody bIomass available for fuel. Particularly promising is the potential of agroforestry-the combined production of crops and trees to raise crop yields while providing fuelwood and other useful products. Nitrogen-fixing trees planted in shelterbelts or interspersed with crops, for example, can enhance soil fertility, increase soil moisture and reduce eroision.

Agroforestry programmes offer a number of advantages over more traditional approaches to addressing the fuelwood crisis. They typically cost only 10 to 20 per cent as much as governmentestablished fuelwood plantations. Although yields per hectare may be higher in plantations, agroforestry often results in greater wood production per planted tree. Through pruning techniques known as coppicing and pollarding, a single tree can yield five to ten times the wood volume that a plantation tree would yield upon felling. And in contrast to communal woodlot projects, agroforestry does not pose problems with shared work loads, division of benefits or the displacement of other productive uses of common land, such as grazing.

Of course, agroforestry does not address the fuelwood needs of the mil lions of rural people who do not own land. Traditionally they have had to collect wood from common lands or steal it from forest reserves. Providing fuel for the landless may well be the greatest energy challenge facing governments in developing countries today.

In India, the Government of West Bengal addressed this problem by allocating more than 5,000 hectares of denuded forestland to landless families for cash-crop tree farming. Though families were not ceded title to the land, they were granted ownership of the trees. To encourage participation, the Forest Department supplied free seedlings, fertiilizer, technical assistance and insecticide, and it offered small cash incentives based on the number of trees surviving after three years. The families harvested the wood for sale after five years and with the proceeds bought small parcels of land suitable for farming. While the trees matured villagers collected twigs and branches for fuel. Where a strong commercial market for wood exists and sufficient degraded forestland is avail able, such a strategy can bring nonproductive land into use while providing the landless with both fuelwood and added income. Meeting future fuelwood needs will depend as much on managing demand as on increasing supply. Many policies that could significantly reduce demand attack the broader economic and social conditions that underlie fuelwood shortages. If birth rates today in Africa were no higher than those in Asia, for example, Africa's demand for fuelwood forty years from now would be reduced by as much as 30 per cent. crucial. Such efforts will never completely solve the fuelwood crisis as population growth would soon outstrip even the most ambitious dissemination programme. But improved stoves can benefitindividual households while collectively relieving pressures on natural woodlands until tree planting programmes take hold.

Particularly promising are prospects for reducing wood consumption in cities, where rising wood and charcoal prices provide a powerful incentive to invest inefficiency.An improved model of the traditional charcoal jiko in Kenya can halve fuel use. For the average Nairobi family spending 170 shillings (about $8.35) a month on charcoal, the stove pays for itself in )'ust two months.

In rural households, where wood is gathered rather than purchased, no direct economic advantage exists to boost wood-burning efficiency. Yet women, who spend much time collecting wood, have an incentive to construct improved stoves if they can do so from free, locally available materials. A particularly successful programme in Burkina Faso promotes an up-graded version of the traditional three-stone cookstove, surrounded by a cylindrical shield made of mud, dung and chaff, The new model cuts wood use by 35 to 70 per cent, takes only half a day to make and costs virtually nothing.

COPYRIGHT 1989 UNESCO
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group