UK: Potential to restore billion hectares of forests around the world
26.11.09
Land areas around the world, bigger than Canada, have been identified as having potential to be restored to good quality, healthy forests, a new study has found. As the global effort to help tackle climate change by reversing the earth’s alarming loss of forests steps up, scientists using satellite mapping have produced a world map identifying areas in which more than a billion hectares of former forest land and degraded forest land has restoration potential. That’s about 6% of the planet’s total land area.
Forests once covered more than 50% of the world's land area, but today that figure is less than 30%. This change has been largely due to the fairly rapid destruction of of forests for timber, conversion to agriculture and urbanisation.
Restoring forests to some of these lands could be achieved without prejudicing other vital land uses, such as food production. The Global Partnership on Forest Restoration (GPFLR) says that the needs and rights of indigenous peoples and others who are dependent on forests must be respected when considering restoration projects. GPFLR will now work with individual countries and local communities to deliver restoration where communities benefit.
Doi Mae Salong in Chaing Rai Province suffered as Thailand increased its export market of timber and furniture. It took a huge flood in 1988 to change the laws on commercial logging on the steep sided slopes.
Here the lands are being restored to make them more resilient and useful for human use.
“With a global population already approaching seven billion, and forecast to increase to more than eight billion by 2025, the pressure on all of our natural resources is immense,” says Tim Rollinson, Chairman of the GPFLR and Director-General of the Forestry Commission.
“At the same time, the Earth’s forests continue to shrink, and what’s left is increasingly being degraded. We know how to restore forests and make them sustainable. We now also know where we should do it, so we should be getting on with it.”
The UK's largest man-made forest is being created in England's Kielder Forest.
Because of decreased timber reserves after WWI mass tree planting occurred on bare land in the UK, but although it replenished commercial stocks it was of little wildlife value.
Native trees are being returned to the landscape, which is being the people and wildlife back.
The findings were announced today in London at an international meeting of the GPFLR, of which IUCN and the Forestry Commission (GB) are founding members.
The assessment has revealed that the potential to restore the world’s lost forests is much greater than the previous estimate of 850 million hectares. The GPFLR partners say that forest restoration can have a significant impact on climate change as well as improving lives, and that urgent action on restoration should be taken hand in hand with efforts to stop the continuing global loss and degradation of forests. Preliminary analysis indicates that by 2030 the restoration of degraded forest lands will make the same contribution to the reduction of greenhouse gases as that which could be expected from avoided deforestation (70 Gt of CO² emissions) and perhaps twice that amount.
Restoring forest in China's Miyun reservoir. Despite tree planting efforts and a logging ban that has been in force since the late 1970s, three quarters of the forests in the watershed - which provides drinking water for the 17 million people of Beijing - are in poor condition.
The restoration of these forests could provide a demonstration case in good practice.
The GPFLR will work with countries over the next year to clarify and refine these figures on a country by country basis. “Forest restoration experiences around the world provide evidence that, while it is impossible to replace a pristine forest once it’s gone, many of the functions it originally provided can be restored,” says Stewart Maginnis, Director of IUCN Environment and Development Group. “Forests provide such vital services, like clean water and fresh air, that we can win on all fronts by bringing them back to life. We need to protect the forests we have left, and restore what we’ve lost.”
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