ACCRA, Ghana (PAMACC News) - Twenty-seven nations across Africa have now committed to restore 111 million hectares of degraded land as part of the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100) and the Bonn Challenge – exceeding the 100-million-hectare AFR100 target.
In realizing these commitments, countries will spur climate resilience, economic growth and more.
AFR100 was launched in 2015 in response to the African Union (AU) mandate to bring 100 million hectares of land into restoration by 2030. The initiative is led by the African Union’s NEPAD Agency in partnership with 27 participating countries, 27 technical and 12 financial partners. Founding partners include NEPAD, the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), World Resources Institute (WRI), GIZ, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and the World Bank.
During the 3rd Annual AFR100 Partners Meeting in Nairobi this August, member country representatives, as well as technical and financial partners supporting implementation, reaffirmed that the initiative is a powerful lever to bring forest landscape restoration to scale.
“It is a testament to the continuing political will to restore landscapes across Africa that the AFR100 partnership has exceeded its 100-million-hectare target in commitments. We must sustain this momentum and move from pledges to implementation. There are already many examples of restoration success underway in African communities from which we can collectively learn, to realize these commitments,” said Wanjira Mathai, Senior Advisor, WRI and Co-Chair, Global Restoration Council.
In the margins of the meeting, two countries pledged to restore a combined 19.6 million hectares of land towards the 100-million-hectare target: Burkina Faso (5 million hectares) and the Republic of Sudan (14.6 million hectares). These pledges follow commitments made by Togo (1.4 million hectares) and Tanzania (5.2 million hectares) in the weeks prior to the meeting.
“Sudan is delighted to be able to commit to restore 14.6 million hectares of degraded land as part of AFR100. Restoration in Sudan will support in the reduction of youth immigration and food security for the poorest communities, as well as help the country to respond to international commitments,” said Ali Hamid Osman, Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist for the Sudan Sustainable Natural Resources Management Project and Sudan’s AFR100 Focal Point.
“The fight against desertification and land degradation is a major challenge for Burkina Faso's sustainable development and economic vitality. Our 5-million-hectare commitment to the AFR100 Initiative will improve food security and create more robust livelihoods, both of which are conducive to resilient restoration and productive agro-ecosystems. In our context, special attention and effort should be given to sustainable employment and entrepreneurship for young people and women, to provide economic opportunities through the restoration of our lands and forests,” added Adama Doulkom, Coordinator of the Great Green Wall Initiative for the Sahara and the Sahel, Burkina Faso.
“Indeed, of all the Bonn Challenge’s regional platforms, AFR100 is the most successful, contributing over half of the current global commitment of 170 million hectares. Ideas can only take root if they are owned and while many have contributed to this momentum we must recognize the fundamental role that NEPAD has played in making this an African led and owned initiative, and particularly the inspiring work of Mamadou Diakhite and his team.” stated Stewart Maginnis, Global Director, Nature-based Solutions Group, IUCN.
Restoration is widely understood as a key pathway to meet climate change, desertification, biodiversity and sustainable development goals in Africa, and to secure vital food, water, and energy resources.
“In times of ever-increasing pressure on land, water, and biodiversity, the restoration of degraded forests and lands is more urgent than ever. Bringing back trees into the land offers multiple benefits for sustainable development, the fight against poverty and hunger, for conserving biodiversity and for adaptation to climate change. Restoration is spectacular in that every $1 invested there is the potential for $27-$35 in return. Seeing communities who restore their land reap a share of their restoration proceeds, is an honour,” said Mamadou Diakhite, Sustainable Land and Water Management (SLWM) Team Leader at the NEPAD Agency, home to the AFR100 Secretariat.
“It was a great success that the Global Landscapes Forum conference in Nairobi took place back-to-back with the third annual AFR100 partners meeting at the end of August there. We have sent a strong signal for the integration of reforestation, restoration and sustainable rural development. The broad concept of landscape restoration provides us with strong ideas in the fight against hunger and poverty through implementing the entire Agenda 2030 – and mainly SDG2 (zero hunger) and SDG15 (life on land),” said Bernhard Worm, Senior Policy Officer at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).
Participants of the recent AFR100 meeting also endorsed the motion to have the United Nations
General Assembly (UNGA) declare a UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, first proposed in March 2018 by El Salvador’s Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources – intended to increase the visibility of and resourcing for countries’ restoration efforts.
NAIROBI, Kenya (PAMACC News) - Growing and harvesting bioenergy crops--corn for ethanol or trees to fuel power plants, for example--is a poor use of land, which is a precious resource in the fight against climate change, says a University of Michigan researcher.
Untampered green areas like forests and grasslands naturally sequester carbon dioxide, and they are one of society's best hopes for quickly reducing the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, says John DeCicco, research professor at the U-M Energy Institute.
DeCicco and William Schlesinger, president emeritus of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies have authored an opinion piece in the current edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers call for policymakers, funding agencies, fellow academics and industry leaders to urgently shift their focus from bioenergy to what they call "terrestrial carbon management," or TCM. That strategy emphasizes planting more trees and conserving more wild areas that feed on carbon dioxide.
"The world needs to rethink its priorities about how to use the biosphere given the urgency of the climate problem and the risks to biodiversity," DeCicco said.
The biosphere encompasses all life on Earth, and for climate protection, it particularly refers to trees, plants and the living carbon--microorganisms--in soils.
"Current policies advancing bioenergy contribute to the pressure to convert natural land into harvested forest or cropland," DeCicco said. "But high quality land is a limited resource. For reducing atmospheric CO2, the most efficient use of ecologically productive land is to leave it alone, or reforest it. Let it act as a natural, long-term carbon sink."
The new opinion piece expands on DeCicco's earlier findings that biofuels are not inherently carbon-neutral, as they are widely purported to be, and Schlesinger's long-time research as a leading ecologist and biogeochemist.
The assumption that bioenergy simply recycles carbon--which DeCicco and Schlesinger call a major accounting error--is built into the lifecycle assessments used for energy policy as well as the protocols for international carbon accounting. And it has fostered major R&D investments in biofuels, which, in turn, have been assigned a key role in many climate stabilization scenarios.
The core of that assumption is the idea that producing a biofuel and then burning it for energy moves a given amount of carbon from the biosphere to the atmosphere, and back again in an unending and stable cycle. That's in contrast to the current one-way flow of fossil-fuel carbon from the Earth to the atmosphere.
But here's where DeCicco sees a problem: For bioenergy to be actually carbon neutral, harvesting the biomass to produce it would have to greatly speed up the net flow of carbon from the atmosphere back into vegetation. Otherwise, many decades can pass before the "carbon debt" of excess carbon dioxide in the air is repaid by future plant growth.
"All currently commercial forms of bioenergy require land and risk carbon debts that last decades into the future. Given the urgency of the climate problem, it is puzzling why some parties find these excess near-term CO2 emissions acceptable," the researchers write.
In 2016, DeCicco published a study finding that just 37 percent--rather than 100 percent--of the carbon dioxide released from burning biofuels was balanced out by increased carbon uptake in crops over the first eight years of the U.S. biofuel mandate.
To reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, DeCicco and Schlesinger point out, requires increasing the rate at which trees and other plants remove it from the air. Although they don't rule out possible breakthroughs in algae or other futuristic bioenergy options, they say that for now the best biologically based carbon dioxide reduction strategy is to protect and restore carbon-rich natural ecosystems.
"By avoiding deforestation and by reforesting harvested areas, up to one-third of current carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels could be sequestered in the biosphere," the researchers write.
The researchers said terrestrial carbon management can keep carbon out of the atmosphere for many decades.
513 millions tonnes de nourriture à produire. C’est l’objectif à atteindre sur le continent par le programme TAAT initié par le Banque africaine de développement.
La production agricole explosera en Afrique si les technologies sont mises à la disposition des producteurs, y compris les petits paysans.
Ces technologies doivent donc arriver jusque dans les villages. Cette conviction a guidé la mise sur pied du programme dénommé Technologies pour la transformation de l’agriculture africaine (TAAT). Au niveau de la Banque africaine de développement (Bad), qui en est l’initiateur, les projections sont déjà faites. Jusqu’à 513 millions de tonnes de production alimentaire seront produites d’ici 2025.
Ce qui permettra de nourrir environ 250 millions de personnes sur le continent. Ce sont autant d’Africains qui sortiront de la pauvreté, non seulement parce qu’ils mangeront mieux et bien, mais aussi parce qu’ils gagneront suffisamment de l’argent pour vivre dans la décence.
Le programme TAAT est en train de boucler une année d’activité. Son comité de pilotage s’est réuni à Yaoundé en septembre 2018, le temps de sa deuxième réunion annuelle, après les assises de Cotonou au Benin en mars. C’est ce comité qui valide les technologies jugées performantes, qui sont ensuite vulgarisés auprès des producteurs dans les pays.
Imaginez par exemple que pour une culture comme le maïs, il soit question d’appliquer une concentration de technologies pour résoudre les problèmes qui se posent à diverse étapes : de la sélection des semences jusqu’à la transformation du produit.
En effet, le programme TAAT permettra d’avoir des semences améliorées, d’adopter des pratiques culturales visant à booster le rendement à l’hectare. Puis il y aura des infrastructures pour sécuriser la production dans les champs, pour réduire les pertes pendant et après la récolte.
La question du stockage de la production sera aussi réglée. Enfin la transformation interviendra au bout de la chaîne. A chaque étape, il faudra appliquer des technologies spécifiques. Cela vaut pour l’exemple du maïs comme pour d’autres cultures.
Ainsi, plusieurs problèmes sont résolus dans la chaîne de production agricole. Au Cameroun par exemple, plus de 25% de la production est perdue. Les pertes post-récoltes du maïs représentent 30% de la production.
Avec le manioc, ces pertes se situent à 40%. Ces chiffres ont été rappelés par le ministre de l’Agriculture et du Développement rural, Henri Eyebe Ayissi, à l’ouverture des travaux du comité de pilotage du programme TAAT.
Financement
La première phase du programme est financée à hauteur de 36 millions de dollars, soit un peu plus de 20,2 milliards F.Cfa. « Pour le financement, nous mobilisons les centres de recherche internationaux, les centres de recherche nationaux, le secteur privé et les coopératives de producteurs dans les pays africains », explique Albert Nyaba, chargé du secteur agricole à la représentation de la Bad au Cameroun.
Le comité de pilotage du programme TAAT est présidé par le ministre béninois de l’Agriculture, de l’Elevage et de Pêche, Gaston Cossi Dossouhoui. Les autres membres sont des experts issus des centres de recherche agricole, mais aussi des agriculteurs et des hommes d’action. Le Cameroun est représenté par l'Institut de recherche agricole pour le développement (Irad). Le programme TAAT rentre dans le cadre d’un programme plus vaste qui en dit long sur l’objectif visé. Celui-ci est baptisé « Nourrir l’Afrique : stratégie pour la transformation agricole. »
YAOUNDE, Cameroon (PAMACC News) - The fight against the spread of the Fall army worm in Africa in general and the west and central Africa in particular has moved from the level of planning to concrete action, development and research organisations in the continent have said.
Meeting at a high-level conference on controlling Fall armyworm in west and central Africa in Yaoundé, Cameroon, the different stakeholders agreed it was time to double steps with multiple actions to stop the rapid spread and destruction of the invasive pest.
Reports presented during the conference noted that FAW is expected to spread throughout suitable habitats in mainland sub-Saharan Africa within the next few cropping seasons if not properly controlled. Central, West, Northern Africa and Madagascar are all at risk, the report noted.
With the current rate of spread, Fall Armyworm has become a threat to the food security of over 300million people in sub-Saharan Africa, with rural people most affected.
Agriculture authorities in Cameroon say the larvae of the nondescript gray moths has been spreading rapidly hatching and eating their way through the fields of young maize and millet threatening the food crops supply not only in Cameroon but the entire Central African Economic Commission,CEMAC ,region.
« The damage has been rapid affecting both farmers and business operators in the sector. This is not good news, » Louisette Clemence Bamzok, head of agriculture development at the ministry of agriculture and rural development in Cameroon said.
The authorities are worried the pesticides applied by farmers so far have not yielded the expected results. A new plan of action in collaboration with partners has been launched.
“The pest seem to be resistant to pesticides and other chemical products distributed to farmers. We are working with the Institute of Agricultural Research for Development (IRAD) to find a lasting solution,” says Louisette Clemence Bamzok.
A report by the Food and Agriculture Organisation,FAO , say farmers will need great support to sustainably manage the pest in their cropping systems through Integrated Pest Management.
FAO has launched the Fall Armyworm Monitoring and Early Warning System (FAMEWS) mobile app that will hence provide valuable insights to enable Africn farmers, agricultural workers and other partners better fight against the pest.
According to Jean-Baptiste Bahama of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the operationalisation of National Task Force on fall armyworm is key to efficiently coordinating preparedness and response through contingency planning.
“FAO has responded to the fall armyworm situation in Africa by developing tools, resources, installing capacity for fall armyworm early warning system (FAMEWS), and developing and coordinating pesticide policies at national, regional and global levels” Bahama said.
“The time is now to invest in a sustainable, effective response to FAW in Africa. The only thing missing are the resources to scale-up and scale-out this important work,” he added. To AfDB's country Manager for Cameroon, Solomane Kone and Chrys Akem, TAAT Programme Coordinator at the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA), this is where the AfDB comes in through the Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT) programme.
The government of Cameroon for its part says they are leaving no stone unturned.
« We are multiplying efforts and hope a solution will be found timeously, » Clementine Ananga said at the launch of the new plan in March 2018.
The plan calls for the certification of two pesticides with appeal for financial support and participation of the private sector and international partners.
The Food and Agriculture Organization FAO has already disbursed CFA120 million,the Minister said during the launch.
Government hopes the program to be implemented for 18 months will help put an end to ravages of the fall armyworm.
But these promises and plans seem to do little to quell the fears and anquish of farmers and business operators in the sector.
« We hope the announced government plan in not just another talking therapy. We want to see it implemeted and get the results, » says Bernard Njonga.
