NEWS
The long shadow of colonial forestry is a threat to savannas and grasslands
Tree planting to restore forests , capture carbon and improve the land has gained strong momentum in recent years . The Bonn Challenge and its offshoots such as AFR100 , initiatives focused on forest restoration , have persuaded developing countries to commit millions of hectares of land to these projects . Funding for AFR100 has been secured from international donors with more than a billion US dollars pledged over the next 10 years .
This is a potential threat to drylands , grasslands , savannas and the rangelands they support .
Large areas targeted for forest restoration in Africa , Asia and South America are covered by savanna and grassland . These open ecosystems are incorrectly mapped as degraded forest in the publicly accessible Atlas of Forest and Landscape Restoration Opportunities .
They are in fact ancient , productive and biodiverse and support millions of livelihoods . They also provide many important ecosystem services , which would be lost if converted to forests .
Susanne Vetter
Current Address : Associate Professor in Plant Ecology , Rhodes University Reprinted From : http :// bit . ly / 3rn4mTo
Savanna and grassland store up to a third of the world ’ s carbon in its soils . They keep streams flowing , recharge groundwater , and provide grazing for livestock and wildlife .
Grasslands can store carbon reliably under increasingly hot and dry climates . The same conditions make forests vulnerable to die-back and wildfires . Restoring grasslands is also relatively cheap and has the highest benefit-tocost ratio of all the world ’ s biomes .
Instead of providing guidance on how to restore healthy grasslands and savannas , documents guiding forest landscape restoration focus entirely on increasing tree cover . Rangelands and grassy biomes are barely mentioned on the websites of the Global Partnership
Figure 1 : Grasslands can store carbon reliably under increasingly hot and dry climates . ( Photo : Shutterstock )
on Forest and Landscape Restoration , the Bonn Challenge and AFR100 .
A recent review of forest landscape restoration projects in Africa found no examples of grassland restoration . Projects instead focused on afforestation – planting trees where they didn ’ t previously occur – regardless of vegetation type . This threatens the biodiversity of grasslands and savannas , which is rapidly lost under dense tree cover and is slow and difficult to restore .
Forest targets that aren ’ t based on science
Meeting the international targets for forest restoration requires large-scale afforestation . Nearly half the land pledged for forest restoration is earmarked for plantations , mostly of fastgrowing exotic species . These provide a fraction of the ecosystem services of the natural vegetation they replace . And they store 40 times less carbon than naturally regenerating forests .
Grassroots Vol 21 No 1 March 2021 14