The world’s most famous tropical forests found on lowlands, like those of the Amazon or Borneo, are celebrated for their ability to store carbon. The Amazon rainforest itself holds up to twenty years’ worth of fossil fuel carbon emissions in its trees and soil.

While tropical forests can also be found on tropical mountains such as Mount Kinabalu in Borneo, these have long been assumed to store much less carbon. On mountains, temperature decreases with increasing elevation, negatively affecting tree growth. Also, common mountain features such as thick fog, wind and steep slopes tend to constrain tree height.

If trees are smaller, and grow slower, then mountain forests should contain less carbon sequestered from the atmosphere through growth processes: a hypothesis which has been reflected in studies of tropical mountains in the Andes and southeast Asia.

But our research, recently published in Nature, shows that tropical mountain forests in Africa actually store as much carbon per hectare as those found in African lowlands – a finding specific to the continent.

This is because, although African tropical mountain forests have fewer trees (about 450 per hectare compared to 600 in other continents) than their lowland counterparts, they have a greater abundance of large trees (over 70 cm in diameter), whose increased mass means they hold on to more carbon.

We wondered if this unusual finding was thanks to elephant populations resident in many African tropical mountain regions, who eat and destroy smaller tree stems – creating room for others to grow larger – and also transport nutrients which are limited in mountain soils.

But we didn’t find significant differences in tree height between forests with and without elephants, although unfortunately our data only showed us if elephants were present in a given area and not how many were around. Other explanations could include the low frequency of tropical cyclones or active volcanoes in Africa, making it less likely for trees to be destroyed before they grow tall.

Carbon storage

A group of 101 researchers working at different institutions across Africa, Europe, North America, Asia and New Zealand measured 72,336 trees with trunks of over 10cm diameter on 44 mountains in 12 countries within the African continent. For each tree we recorded trunk diameter, species and height.

We used an equation to estimate the carbon stored in these forests, since actually cutting, drying and weighing trees – technically the most accurate method for analysing carbon capture – would rather undermine our aim to mitigate climate change.

We then calculated how much tropical mountain forest had been lost in the African continent over the past 20 years, using data from satellites. We estimated that 0.8 million hectares had been lost, mostly in DRC, Uganda and Ethiopia.

Unexpectedly, given the steep terrains which make logging operations or large-scale farming challenging, we found that in many African countries deforestation rates were higher in the mountains than the lowlands.

So if these mountain forests store more carbon than expected, we are releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than previously assumed. In fact, the 0.8 million hectares of mountain forest destroyed since 2001 has emitted more than 450 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the planet’s atmosphere, accelerating global warming.

Biodiversity loss

African tropical mountain forests are not only carbon-rich: they are also rich in biodiversity. Among their huge trees live elephants, mountain gorillas, chimpanzees, and numerous species of birds, amphibians and snakes found nowhere else in the world. Continued deforestation will push many of these creatures further towards extinction.

These forests also act as “water towers” (like giant water tanks), irrigating agricultural land and supplying numerous vital river systems including the Congo and the Nile. This makes them crucial for local and regional crop growth, hydropower systems providing renewable energy, and inland fisheries supporting nutritious diets and livelihoods for local communities.

Mountain forests often collect water droplets from fog in a process known as “occult precipitation”. This makes local landscapes much more humid than if the forests were not present. Destroying these forests is therefore not only terrible for our global climate, but also for regional weather and biodiversity, since many species require the specific conditions created by this humidity to thrive.

But our study also provides some hope. If these forests store more carbon than previously assumed, it could allow us to increase the economic benefits awarded to developing countries who successfully decrease deforestation, meaning greater incentives for forest conservation – and better futures for those who call the mountain forests home.

Aida Cuní Sanchez, honorary fellow, University of York; Martin Sullivan, Lecturer in Statistical Ecology, Manchester Metropolitan University, and Phil Platts, Research Fellow, University of York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Featured photo by Hamsavani Raja Komaraim/Scopio

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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.

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-to-cost 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 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 fast-growing 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.

Forest restoration initiatives tend to be driven by targets, with little regard for local ecological context. This commitment to fixed areas of forest cover encourages tree plantations in ecologically inappropriate sites and conditions.

For example, Malawi has reportedly pledged 4.5 million hectares to forest restoration. This is over a third of the country’s total area. Planting trees and restoring community woodlots, plantations and riverbanks is presented as addressing food and water insecurity and restoring biodiversity. Yet studies have shown that Malawi’s vegetation has been mostly savanna and grasslands for thousands of years.

The National Mission for a Green India aims to put a third of the country’s area under forest cover, no matter what natural vegetation existed originally. Large areas of natural grassland-forest mosaics have been replaced with commercial plantations. In many areas these species have become invasive and difficult to control.

Why does forest restoration continue to ignore the local ecological context? What is the science that underpins these massive schemes?

The colonial roots of tree planting

Historical research shows that the fascination with tree-planting has its origins in colonial forestry. This in turn was rooted in the centuries-old (and now disproven) theory that forests bring rain and deforestation cause areas to dry up. The colonial forestry approach was to plant trees to make up for deforestation caused by local people. The latter often lost control over their land in the process.

Initially applied in Algeria, this approach was adopted throughout Francophone Africa, Madagascar, and eventually also the British colonies in East Africa and India. Since historical forest cover of Europe was estimated at roughly one-third, this became the target in other places too.

This led to over two centuries of planting forests as a solution for a variety of ills, including drought, warming temperatures, soil erosion and lost biodiversity. It’s remarkable how today’s science-policy platforms continue this narrative.

Promoting appropriate solutions

Forest landscape restoration has become a powerful instrument for guiding global efforts and funding. Its proponents have a responsibility to ensure that the framework is scientifically sound. Rather than setting ambitious but ecologically flawed targets for planting trees, landscape restoration should be appropriate for local social and ecological contexts.

No amount of ecosystem restoration will solve the climate crisis if its underlying causes are not addressed. The clearing of forests and other ecosystems for commodity agriculture and timber urgently needs to be regulated. Emissions from burning fossil fuels need to be drastically reduced.

Rather than targeting developing – and rapidly urbanising – countries for afforestation, incentives should aim to reduce fossil fuel emissions, convert to renewable energy and build energy-saving infrastructure.

Susanne Vetter, Associate Professor in Plant Ecology, Rhodes University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The growing interest in this area means it is more important now than ever before to consider effective tree planting that benefits communities and the environment.

To do this, the right tree must be planted in the right place for the right purpose.

But there are many misconceptions that need to be addressed before the “right” conditions for successful tree planting are met.

“Breaking down the misconceptions about tree planting ensures we do not invest in actions that cause further damage to people and the planet, only to realize these problems after the damage is already done,” says Susan Chomba, a World Agroforestry (ICRAF) scientist, who will speak at the upcoming Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) Tree Planting digital forum on September 29.

She will be joined by Manuel Guariguata, principal scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR); Ramni Jamnadass, co-leader of the Tree Productivity and Diversity unit at ICRAF; and Cora van Oosten, a senior project leader on landscapes, restoration, governance at Wageningen University.

Ahead of the event, the scientists address seven key misconceptions about tree planting and highlight more productive ways of managing these initiatives.

Misconception 1: Any seed is a good seed. Seed quality and sourcing is essential for tree planting success. Tree species are composed of many populations that can be wildly divergent with respect to their preference for the “right place.” Also, some seed sources may have a very narrow range of genetic diversity. One example is Grevillea robusta in East Africa. This tree was originally introduced from Australia, and today millions of these trees are now growing on small farms from Kenya to Rwanda. The entire population of trees all have a small handful of common ancestors and grow perhaps half as fast as they could do had they been from a good seed source with more genetic diversity.

Misconception 2: Once the trees are planted, the job is done. It is important to move beyond tree planting to tree growing. Tree growing means looking at trees as an investment requiring management, protection and realized returns on that investment. A focus on growing trees for the long-term can be particularly beneficial to smallholder farmers who stand to gain the most from realized returns in the form of marketable tree products and ecosystem services. Without this long-term focus, projects risk very low survival rates for seedlings, and wasted resources in the long term.

Misconception 3: All trees are easy to grow. A fundamental misconception is that any tree species can be planted anywhere and will grow easily. Although some smallholder farmers plant native food trees in agroforestry systems to help conserve them and ensure food security, this is not always an effective approach. Many native species are still wild or only partially domesticated, which means they are also under-researched and that optimum methodologies for farming them have not been developed yet. This can lead to major challenges with germination, propagation and management.

Misconception 4: Planting any tree anywhere is better than not planting a tree at all. Ecological niches such as grasslands exist, and these should not be replaced with trees. A diversity of Indigenous trees is also far more likely to restore and support biodiversity than monoculture plantations or plantations with a few species. There are also several niches on farms where farmers can cultivate trees for different uses, including soil fertility enhancement (through nitrogen fixing trees), food and nutritional benefits (e.g. fruit trees) and timber and energy, among other things.

Misconception 5: Tree planting is a top-down process. A common misconception is that successful tree planting initiatives should treat community members like employees who take orders from the top. Many people think that once funding from a big donor is secured, the planting project can simply pay farmers to collect seed, pay them to establish project nurseries and pay them to plant seedlings. That approach disregards the need for small-scale tree planters to have ownership and agency over planting that happens on their land. A sustainable process would ensure that knowledge is the basis for participation. Through capacity development community members can learn more about what a quality tree is; they should know how to source good seeds and seedlings; they should be informed about how they can improve their livelihoods through the trees they’re helping to plant.

Misconception 6: Tree planting is the only way to restore degraded land. The truth is that tree planting is just one of the tools in a well-stocked toolbox of practices. In fact, there are contexts where massive tree planting is a less favorable restoration technique, such as in arid and semi-arid areas where natural regeneration techniques can sometimes offer more effective and cost-efficient options. In arid and semi-arid areas, adding soil, water and livestock management practices increases the chances of success for both tree planting and natural regeneration.

Misconception 7: Climate change, biodiversity loss and food security can be addressed just by planting trees. These are complex challenges that require looking at both the causes (e.g. what is increasing Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions) and the context-specific solutions for each. Natural regeneration, as well as efficient farming and livestock management should also be considered as methods of addressing environmental objectives.  Supporting community-led initiatives, valuing their products and services, and appreciating their efforts through institutional, technical and financial support is more effective than a single-purpose tree plantation.

Source: Forests News
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

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The decree, which was signed mid-July, had sparked outrage among local communities and conservation groups. In total 68,385 hectares of virgin forest would be turned into a forest management unit to be auctioned for timber extraction.

Ebo Forest is one of the last intact rainforests in central Africa, rich in biodiversity and home to the indigenous Banen communities who lived in harmony with this forest and its wildlife. Many species are on the Red List of Endangered and Critically Endangered species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Ebo forest is also an important carbon sink, which is important to mitigate climate change.

The elusive Ebo gorilla is possibly a new subspecies of gorilla. The local chimpanzees are a culturally unique population:  they are the only ones in the world that have mastered to use stones for cracking nuts, as well as using long sticks to catch termites.

Conservationists say logging activities will threaten the survival of these critically endangered species. The people of the region denounced the decision, promising to do everything possible to halt and reverse these plans. Dissatisfied, local people decided to launch a petition with the help of Rainforest Rescue and Greenpeace Africa, supported by the African Conservation Foundation and hundreds of other organisations and individuals.

On the 6th of August, Cameroon’s President Paul Biya instructed Prime Minister Joseph Dion Ngute to withdraw the decree which would allow exploitation of the forest.

Halting logging and exploitation is just a first step. In 2006 the Cameroonian government pledged to turn Ebo Forest into a national park, but this was opposed by local communities who feared their land would become state property. New plans can now be developed for sustainable land-use options and socio-economic activities that generate revenue for Cameroon, supporting the livelihoods of Ebo’s indigenous communities, and protecting this critical rainforest for some of Africa’s most endangered species.

The Congo Basin rainforest covers 200 million hectares, and is the world’s second largest rainforest after the Amazon. Widespread logging threatens these critical ecosystems. Globally tropical forests store carbon emissions produced by humans from the atmosphere, which means they play a major role in slowing global warming and halting climate change.

The post Cameroon government cancels logging concession that threatens wildlife in virgin rainforest appeared first on African Conservation Foundation.

The logging concessions would impact one of Africa’s great biodiversity hotspots. Ebo Forest is the habitat of a possible new subspecies of gorilla, as well as a culturally unique population of chimpanzees: the 700 chimpanzees appear to be the only ones in the world that have mastered both cracking nuts using stones and wooden hammers, as well as fishing for termites using long sticks. In other regions, chimpanzees use only one or the other of these techniques.

Over 40 communities in the region have been living in harmony within and around the forest for generations. The forest has ancestral and spiritual significance as a site for traditional rituals, and contains the gravesites of revered community elders. The local people were not consulted or even informed of the government’s intentions, and their rights to their ancestral land were ignored. If realized, the logging concessions would cost local communities their livelihoods and cultural heritage and make them increasingly vulnerable to new emerging diseases.

In its petition, which is addressed to the President of the Republic of Cameroon, Paul Biya, Rainforest Rescue calls on the Cameroonian government to:

• revoke the logging concessions
• protect Ebo forest and fulfill the promise to declare it a national park and
• respect the local population’s traditional rights and the principles of free, prior informed consent (FPIC) and involve them in any future land use planning process.

Rainforest Rescue co-chair Marianne Klute: “If realized, the logging concessions would cause immense social injustice and impact regional ecosystems as well as the climate. Logging opens the door for the wholesale destruction of the environment, as poachers, settlers, and land grabbers pour into the newly opened areas. We need the Cameroonian government to realize its responsibility for this unique and irreplaceable natural treasure.”

 

View this post on Instagram

 

Cameroon’s #EboForest is home to gorillas, tool-wielding Chimpanzees, Forest Elephants, Presuss’ Red colobus, Drills and many other rare and endangered species. It is one half of the Yabassi #KeyBiodiversityArea, making it a site of global importance to the planet’s overall health. It is also the ancestral land of more than 40 communities that surround it. In a letter to the Cameroonian government, scientists from @global_wildlife_conservation, San Diego Zoo Global Conservation Research Institute, @kewgardens and IUCN Primate Specialist Group, asked the government to suspend plans to create 2 long-term logging concessions in Ebo Forest. They asked that the government develop an inclusive land-use plan with the local communities who would be most affected by logging. Let’s #ProtectEboForest.

A post shared by Leonardo DiCaprio (@leonardodicaprio) on May 5, 2020 at 10:53am PDT

UPDATE

Good news!
Cameroon’s President Paul Biya has ordered the cancellation of logging concessions in the Ebo Forest. A choice for conservation and an example for the world. The rare ebo gorilla and other endangered species can still call this forest home.
Via Regina Fonjia Leke (Broadcast Journalist at Canal 2 International TV)

To view the petition, please visit: https://www.rainforest-rescue.org/petitions/1221/no-to-logging-in-cameroons-ebo-forest

Photo: Francesco Ungaro

The post Help prevent logging and save rare gorillas in Cameroon’s Ebo Forest appeared first on African Conservation Foundation.

Trees are good. Trees are green. Trees suck up carbon dioxide. Ergo: plant as many trees as possible and you solve the world’s environmental and climate change challenges almost overnight. Right?

Not at all, say a growing number of bewildered African ecologists. They worry that Global North-led mass tree planting projects will do very little to contain ballooning emissions of carbon dioxide and other climate-warming gases – and are more likely to ignite conflict over land tenure, food security, conservation and dwindling water resources for generations to come.

That US President Donald Trump has lent his support to mass tree planting rather than to the Paris Climate Agreement may also speak volumes.

At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos earlier this year, Trump signed up to the one trillion tree planting initiative, declaring: “We’re committed to conserving the majesty of God’s creation and the natural beauty of our world.” He avoided any reference to climate change.

Marc Benioff, CEO of the cloud-based software company Salesforce, also pledged to plant 100 million trees, remarking: “Who’s against the trees? Everyone’s for the trees. Trees are a bipartisan issue. I haven’t met any anti-tree people yet.”

Seed bombs

Closer to home, Minister of Defence and Military Veterans Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula also seems to think that trees-for-carbon plans are a great idea, so much so that she has challenged armies across the world to plant at least 75 million trees over the next year to slow global warming.

Soldiers may not even have to dig any holes, as the South African air force and army could simply bomb the country with “seed balls” (tree seeds encased in a tiny ball of fertile soil and clay).

Karishma Rajoo of the Durban-based Global Peace organisation, which is helping to spearhead the campaign, suggests that after crashing down to ground, the seed balls will take root and blossom when good rains arrive.

But several scientists across the world have voiced dismay over “quick-fix” global campaigns to cover the Earth with more carbon-absorbing trees – rather than taking firm action to chop the fossil fuel emissions that heat up the world.

Critics include William Bond, one of the country’s best-known ecologists and former chief scientist of the South African Environmental Observation Network. Speaking at the recent Savanna Science Network meeting at Skukuza in the Kruger National Park, Bond and three fellow scientists presented a sobering critique of global tree-planting campaigns to reduce atmospheric carbon.

Bond and his colleagues – Guy Midgley and Nicola Stevens of Stellenbosch University’s department of zoology and botany, and Caroline Lehmann of the University of Edinburgh and the University of the Witwatersrand – outlined just how much land in Africa has been targeted for afforestation schemes.

The Bonn Challenge – an initiative led by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and the German government – aims to restore forests over 3.5 million square kilometres globally by 2030. This includes about 1 million square kilometres in Africa under the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100) scheme, financed by the World Bank and other donors.

To put these figures into perspective, Bond and his colleagues say that the 2030 global target covers a land mass the size of Europe’s 10 largest countries, about 45% of Australia or about 36% of the USA.

So far, 29 African nations have signed up to the AFR100 scheme, with South Africa pledging to “restore” 3.6 million hectares of degraded land. Kenya committed to restoring 5.1 million hectares. Cameroon has pledged to allocate nearly a quarter of the country to tree plantations, Nigeria about 32% and Burundi hopes to reforest a whopping 72% of its land.

Bond and his colleagues stress that they have nothing against trees per se. In fact, they strongly endorse tree planting to restore closed forests, the retention of remaining intact forests and the planting of trees in urban areas for shade and enjoyment.

Misreading African biomes

However, writing in the science journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, they argue that several mass tree planting campaigns are based on “wrong assumptions” and simply distract global attention from the tougher business of decarbonising the world at source.

From an ecological perspective, they note that Africa is the world’s grassiest continent, supporting pastoral communities and large remaining herds of grass-dependent and sunlight-loving wildlife species.

“The tree-planting plans ignore the fate of the savanna’s current inhabitants. And they bring the risk of raging megafires as well as adversely altering stream flows. By fixing set targets by a set period, they are forcing rapid land-use change on a massive scale. It is surely time to pause and ask questions of tree planting and its consequences,” Bond suggests.

Some maps prepared in support of mass tree planting “erroneously assume that low tree cover, in climates that can support forests are ‘deforested’ and ‘degraded’. The bizarre result is that ancient savannas – including the Serengeti and Kruger National Park – are mapped as deforested and degraded (because tree cover is reduced by elephants, antelope and millions of years of grass-fuelled fires)”.

This “profound misreading of Africa’s grassy biomes” had given rise to schemes such as the Bonn Challenge and AFR100, with financial pledges of more than a billion US dollars over the next 10 years.

“Committing such vast areas to plantations for the next century should raise many questions. An obvious one for industrial countries that are funding these projects is whether afforestation (planting new trees, rather than restoring areas known, historically, to have been closed forests) will work to cool the climate,” they say, citing several scientific reports that suggest that tree planting cannot sequester carbon at the scale needed.

Bond and his colleagues say carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is currently increasing at about 4.7 gigatonnes of carbon per year but the sums committed to tree planting amount to a small fraction of the funds needed.

“Either the funders are short changing African participants, or they do not see afforestation as a serious contributor to carbon dioxide reduction.”

Tree planting was also very land hungry – requiring between 14 million and 47 million square kilometres of tree plantations to sequester the current carbon growth rates.

“For optimistic estimates, you would need to afforest an area 53% larger than the USA or 85% of Russia. For less productive plantations, you would need upwards of one-third of the world’s land area.”

Even if Africa achieved the 100 million hectare target, current carbon growth rates would be mitigated by a mere 2.7% per year.

“If this seems very small reward for afforesting a continent, consider that the coal that drove 200 years of the industrial revolution took 400 million years to accumulate. How can we possibly expect to grow enough trees to stuff all the carbon back in again in just a few decades?”

Issues of land and water

They suggest that in the rush to launch AFR100, there had been too little time spent on exploring the social, economic and ecological costs of converting Africa’s grasslands and savannas to plantations.

“The global scale of tree planting promoted by AFR100 and similar programmes ignores local concerns over land tenure, competition with agriculture and conservation, and imposes this single dominant land use for generations to come. In trading water for carbon, it has been repeatedly shown … that replacing native grasslands with plantations reduces streamflow.”

This reduction of water flow in rivers would create critical impacts on dry-season water supply for local communities already facing water scarcity.

“Far from being deforested and degraded, Africa’s savannas and grasslands existed, alongside forests, for millions of years before humans began felling forests. A better way of supporting Africa’s transition to a future warmer world might be to promote energy-efficient cities in this rapidly urbanising continent so that Africa follows a less carbon-intensive trajectory of development than other emerging economies,” they conclude.

Drivers of the AFR100 plan, however, disagree with suggestions that the reforestation project is simply about planting more trees, as the project also included work to reverse soil erosion and desertification and to restore river catchments.

“Successful forest and landscape restoration is forward-looking and dynamic, focusing on strengthening the resilience of landscapes and creating future options to adjust and further optimise ecosystem goods and services as societal needs change or new challenges arise,” according to the AFR100 website.

The AFR100 secretariat suggests the initiative will attempt to create a mosaic of land uses by establishing new projects on agricultural land, either through new planting or natural regeneration.

According to the World Resources Institute, vast forest areas have been cleared over recent centuries as agriculture has spread and human populations have grown.

“About 30 percent of global forest cover has been completely cleared and a further 20 percent has been degraded.”

The institute says a project to map restoration opportunities had indicated that more than two billion hectares worldwide offered opportunities for restoration – an area larger than South America.

The institute says restoration should complement and enhance food production and not cause natural forests to be converted into plantations, but University of the Free State mountain vegetation and climate-change researcher João Vidal remains sceptical about the benefits.

“This whole idea [of planting more trees across the world] gives me goosebumps. It has a northern hemisphere bias. These people don’t know what they are saying. It does not make sense,” he told researchers at the annual Conservation Symposium in KwaZulu-Natal in November.

The Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries has not responded to email queries on the current state of implementation of the AFR100 project in South Africa, nor whether the original proposals are being revised.

By: Tony Carnie
Read the original article on New Frame.

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Of the eight pangolin species, four are found in Africa. These are the white‐bellied, black‐bellied, giant, and Temminck’s ground pangolin. Three of these species live in Central African forests. The tree-dwelling white-bellied and black-bellied pangolins, weighing approximately 1.5 to 3kg (comparable to a small rabbit), and the ground-dwelling giant pangolin can weigh up to 33kg (the weight of a small Labrador dog).

But little is known about population sizes, mortality rates, and reproductive potential of African pangolins. Mounting evidence suggests that as the availability of Asian pangolins declines, and international trade flows increase, traders increasingly supply the more abundant and less expensive African pangolins to meet demand.

Seizures of pangolins and their scales and skins from Africa, destined for Asia, are increasing with over 53 tons seized in 2013 alone. These estimates likely represent a fraction of all pangolins traded, and an even smaller portion of the number of pangolins hunted.

To better understand how many pangolins are hunted in Central Africa each year, I and a team of researchers collated information on the quantities of animals that hunting villages extract from the forest, from studies conducted over the last 20 years. By doing this we can provide crucial information on regional trends which can be used to inform conservation actions and policy.

What we found

We looked into the number of animals hunted in villages and offered for sale by collating data from research and reports that covered over 100 areas in sub-Saharan Africa between 1975 and 2014.

We extracted information on whether the animal was eaten or sold, how they were hunted, the sex, age category, and price. Other species typically hunted for meat include blue duikers, brush-tailed porcupines and greater cane rats.

For Central African forests in Cameroon, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Democratic Republic of Congo and Republic of Congo, we estimated that at least 400,000 pangolins are hunted annually for meat.

But we don’t yet know whether pangolins can withstand these levels of hunting. This is mainly because we don’t yet have reliable pangolin population estimates for any of the species that inhabit Central African forests. Ideally, we would also need population and hunting data in the same location to be able to understand the levels of hunting that lead to population declines.

Pressures

The pressures on African pangolins are likely increasing for several reasons.

Firstly, increasing deforestation across West and Central African countries has reduced their habitat, particularly for the semi-arboreal white-bellied pangolin and the arboreal black-bellied pangolin, which rely on forest habitats.

As the human populations grow in West, Eastern and Central Africa, this may exacerbate trends in deforestation and wildlife consumption.

Secondly, increases in the accessibility of remote areas to people and extractive industries may lead to more pangolin hunting. For example, a recent study showed that Asian industry workers in Gabon requested pangolins from hunters more than any other species.

 

Finally, the international trafficking of pangolins over the past decade has boomed. They are one of the most trafficked wild mammals in the world. For example, eight tonnes of pangolin scales trafficked from Nigeria, one of the largest ever hauls of scales, was intercepted a couple of weeks ago in Hong Kong.

Time to act

While the media has greatly increased its coverage of the plight of pangolins in recent years, financial and political support for conservation is still greatly needed. This includes support for pangolin population monitoring, identification of pangolin strongholds and areas in need of conservation, and the identification, design and testing of conservation interventions, where needed.

Without these steps we may see the African pangolins follow in the footsteps of their Asian counterparts.

Daniel J Ingram, Researcher in Conservation, UCL

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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In exchange, they became slaves to their appetite. Elephants need huge amounts of food everyday, something like 5-10% of their body mass. A typical three-tonne female could eat 200 kg of plant material in one day. Her family may need to consume more than a tonne of food per day. It is not easy to find so much food, especially in tropical rain forests, where plants have high concentrations of chemical defences (toxins) to avoid being eaten. Elephants spend most of their life eating and looking for food. We can think of them as “eating machines”. African forest elephants are particularly fond of saplings, young trees, and the plants that first grow into newly opened gaps in the forest. These “early succession” plants are specialised in growing fast following a disturbance and they invest less in chemical defences. Early succession trees also have lower wood density than slow-growing late-succession tree species. Elephant eating manners are also remarkable. They feed by breaking stems and branches, pulling down lianas, uprooting whole plants, stripping leaves off twigs, and so on. It is easy to notice their presence because of the mess they leave behind.

How elephant disturbance affects carbon stocks

The key novelty of the new study, by the ecologist Fabio Berzaghi and colleagues, is they include, for the first time, the effect of elephant feeding disturbances in a computer model that simulates demographic processes in forest ecosystems. They found that “elephant disturbance” – all that messy eating – results in forests having fewer, larger trees. Elephants filter out small early-succession (i.e. low wood density) trees, promoting the dominance of late-succession (high wood density) trees, which ultimately leads to long-term increases in the total biomass. Berzaghi and colleagues were able to validate their model predictions with data from real forest plots in the Congo Basin.

By promoting these larger, woodier trees, elephant feeding disturbances therefore mean the forest stores more carbon. These results have important and far reaching implications for elephant conservation and carbon policy. The authors estimate that the disappearance of African forest elephants would result in a loss of as much as 7% of the carbon stocks in Central African forests, which they valued at around US$43 billion, based on a conservative carbon stock price. In short, forest elephants are our allies in the fight against climate change and their existence saves us tens of billions of dollars in climate responses.

Forest elephants could soon disappear

The situation of African forest elephants is particularly dramatic. Once numbered in the millions, their population is now less than 10% of its potential size and, in the decade from 2002 to 2011, as many as 62% of forest elephants might have been killed. This decline is mostly due to poaching to feed Asian demand for ivory as well as increasing human encroaching of their habitats. What a sad reason for a massacre and an ecological disaster.

Scientists largely recognise African bush (Loxodonta africana) and forest (L. cyclotis) elephants as different species. However because of practical challenges (such as dealing with abundant hybrid populations), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which officially tracks endangered species, has kept the two together. The problem is that the more populous bush elephants have masked a drastic reduction in their forest cousins. Berzaghi and colleagues emphasise the need for forest elephants to be finally acknowledged as their own species. This would give them a separate IUCN Red List status – probably marked as “endangered” – and trigger important policies and actions.

Conserving elephants helps fight climate change

Berzaghi and colleagues show that forest elephants produce ecosystem services in the form of climate stability from which we all benefit, including people like you and me who might never visit the forests of Central Africa. If we are all beneficiaries of elephant conservation, we should be also responsible for it. It is very important that more affluent societies assume a bigger share of the responsibility to conserve the elephants and other tropical biodiversity from which we benefit. In the past decade we have learned a lot about how important elephants and other large animals are for functioning ecosystems. It is time to apply this knowledge. Berzaghi and colleagues produced evidence linking the behaviour of a single species – feeding disturbances by African forest elephants – to global-scale climatic impacts. As mentioned earlier, the bad news is that we humans are killing elephants and ruining our planet. The good news is that we could synergise efforts and fight climate change by effectively protecting and restoring forest elephant populations and their habitats. The choice seems obvious to me.

Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz, Professor in Tropical Conservation Ecology, University of Nottingham This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Just as worrying is that the rate of forest destruction caused by new roads in the Congo Basin has risen sharply over time, quadrupling since 2000.

“The situation in the Congo Basin is scary on top of more scariness,” said Professor Bill Laurance, who has worked in Africa for 15 years. “New roads are opening a Pandora’s box of activities such as illegal deforestation, mining, poaching and land speculation.”

Laurance helped lead an international team that exhaustively mapped all roads in the Congo region, using satellite imagery. They found that since 2003, the total length of roads has increased by nearly 100,000 kilometres—from 144,000 to 231,000 kilometres overall.

“Industrial logging is a key economic driver for much of the road building,” said Laurance. “Some logging roads are abandoned, but many are used by slash-and-burn farmers and poachers to penetrate deep into surviving rainforests.”

“As a result, the global population of forest elephants has collapsed by two-thirds over the past decade,” said Laurance. “Elephants, gorillas and chimps hardly have anywhere to hide from poachers now.”

Laurance and his team are especially worried about the vast Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC, the largest nation in the Congo Basin.

“When you build a new road, you get 2-3 times more deforestation in the DRC than anywhere else in the Congo Basin,” said Laurance.

“That’s super-worrying because the DRC has plans to sharply increase logging. Last year, it leased a massive 650,000 hectares (1.6 million acres) of pristine rainforest to aggressive Chinese logging companies,” said Laurance. “And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

However, not all the study’s findings were negative. One promising result is that, outside of the DRC, many roads inside logging areas are being abandoned and the forest allowed to regenerate after the timber is harvested.

“This suggests that there’s considerable scope to make industrial logging less damaging to forests,” said Laurance. “An especially promising strategy is for logging companies to block roads or destroy bridges over creeks after they’ve harvested the timber.”

“Of course, we’d greatly prefer to have pristine forests. But African nations must earn money from their forests, and if better managed, selective logging could provide income and be a lot less destructive.”

Overall, a key conclusion of the study is that much road building in Africa is extremely harmful, destroying and fragmenting forests and destroying wildlife populations.

“Corruption and a massive influx of aggressive foreign developers is the biggest worry, along with rapid population growth,” said Laurance. “It all leads to destructive development and road building.”

“China in particular has the most predatory practices for logging, mining and road building in Africa,” said Laurance. “Many Africans are starting to see this, and I just hope something can be done in time.”

The research is published in Nature Sustainability.

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Children in every corner of the globe can identify an elephant in a wildlife lineup. They are as recognizable as any basic shape and as endearing as any household pet. Yet the same cannot be said for the hundreds of tropical flora and fauna that are liable to disappear should forest elephant populations continue to crash.

“[Elephants] have a disproportionately large impact on their ecosystem and the organisms living in it,” says John R. Poulsen, assistant professor of tropical ecology at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “If people are aware of the potential result of losing elephants […] perhaps they can transfer that understanding to less well known species.”

Poulsen and his colleagues recently published a study in Conservation Biology examining how the loss of forest elephants would impact the rest of their natural habitat. After diligently reviewing dozens of papers on Afrotropical flora and fauna, they predict that the loss of forest elephants will reshape the ecological processes at work in their environment. Species composition will change, in addition to the size and abundance of large tree species — and, by extension, the ability of these ecosystems to store carbon dioxide.

“[The] killing of elephants for their ivory is not only depriving the world of one of its most charismatic species, but might also be making the Earth less inhabitable for humans,” Poulsen says.

A Tale of Two Species

Although many people are familiar with elephant conservation, few know that the African elephant is not one, but two distinct species: forest (Loxodonta cyclotis) and savanna (Loxodonta Africana). The two are different in their anatomy, reproduction, even their social structures.

When most people think of Africa’s elephants they are actually picturing savanna elephants: those that live out in the open, in places like the Serengeti, and are therefore easier to study. Forest elephants are comparatively smaller and weave their way through vibrant Afrotropical forests, such as in the Congo, forging elephant-wide paths as they do so. Scientists looking at genetic markers estimate the two species split between 2 million and 6.5 million years ago; humans and chimpanzees, by comparison, diverged between 5 million and 7 million years ago.

Despite such differences, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) does not currently recognize forest and savanna elephants as distinct species. Both fall under the title of African elephant.

“The two-species question is pretty much accepted by the taxonomists but has yet to be officialized by IUCN,” says Fiona Maisels, surveys and monitoring adviser at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in Gabon.

Scientists generally define species as a group of organisms that can successfully mate and produce fertile offspring. The primary holdup in the case of the African elephant is that forest and savanna elephants can interbreed and produce fertile offspring, and occasionally have. However, this is also the case with wolves and coyotes, which are universally considered distinct species. And many bacteria and plants reproduce without mating at all, which provides further confusion.

But, according to Poulsen, treating the two African elephant species as one has had dire implications for their respective conservation. When forest and savanna elephants are bundled together as “African elephants,” it inflates the true population of each species.

“With a larger population, the conservation status of the ‘African elephant’ can be listed as ‘Vulnerable,’” Poulsen says, “which allows some [southern] African countries the possibility of trading ivory.”

If the IUCN recognized forest and savanna elephants as distinct, both species would be considered “endangered,” likely necessitating stricter rules for trading ivory.

According to Poulsen, the current unified conservation assessment is a barrier to the protection of forest elephants in particular. In Central Africa, 62 percent of forest elephants were lost between 2002 and 2011, primarily due to poaching. However, as they are considered the same species as the savanna elephant, the IUCN recorded a smaller overall loss in the “African elephant” population. A study in 2013 by Maisels found that current forest elephant populations are only at 10 percent of their potential size.

We are losing these elephants without knowing much of what their extinction might mean for Afrotropical forests, for Central Africa, and even for global climate.

“The problem is that elephant populations are doing poorly in most places and allowing the sale of ivory has traditionally grown the demand, rather than saturating it, leading to killing across the entire range of both species,” Poulsen says.

Big Feet, Big Footprint

Forest elephants are ecosystem engineers, meaning their various behaviors heavily alter their habitat.

Their size matters. Although smaller than their savanna counterparts, forest elephants are still just that: elephants. Simply by walking around, they can shape their environment. By moving in herds, their impact is multiplied. By stomping saplings, peeling bark, breaking limbs, clipping branches and trampling vegetation, forest elephants generate trail systems that can stretch tens of kilometers.

All of that elephant activity shapes the forest canopy. Poulsen and his colleagues say that, although destructive, the elephants clear the understory of the forest, allowing large trees to spread their roots and grow to their greatest heights. Without this service, greater competition for light and soil could slow tree growth and reduce trees’ potential size.

Elephants are also the largest fruit-eating animals on the planet, and they aren’t picky about their food. They consume more than 500 plant species in Central Africa. Plants that produce fruit often rely on animals to disperse their seeds far and wide. Since elephants are so large, they can eat and carry seeds that are too big, hard or fibrous for other, smaller animals. Forest elephants, and forest elephants alone, disperse the seeds of at least 43 plant species in Central Africa.

By doing so, they also boost the odds that the seeds will take root. The digestive tract of elephants improves the germination time and growth rates of seedlings that pass through it.

Additionally, the wide swaths of forest floor that elephants open up provide ample space for new seedlings to settle.

Dung is another important contribution from forest elephants. Although poop may seem an unlikely gift, it is a critical ingredient for lush forests. Besides light and water, the most important thing for forest health is nutrients. As elephants chew, swallow, digest and excrete, they unlock and redistribute nutrients like sodium and nitrogen that would otherwise stay put. And when they excavate termite mounds and salt licks, they unearth rare nutrients like potassium, calcium, magnesium and sodium, which would have been previously inaccessible to the rest of the forest. Elephants in the forest unlock and redistribute the building blocks of life, broadly dispersing ingredients both rare and critical throughout the forest.

“I have walked through forests with healthy elephant populations and forests that have been elephant-free for decades. There is a stark difference,” Poulsen says. “Elephant-free forests can have a thick understory and middle story with lots of herbaceous vegetation and thorny vines, visibility is limited and it is difficult to walk through. Forests with elephants can look like a park with good visibility and well-worn trails to walk along.”

Making Molehills of Mountains

The great footprint of the forest elephant doesn’t tread on just Central African forests. Tropical forests are an integral component of global carbon storage. The larger the tree, the more carbon it sequesters over its lifetime.

“While there is a big focus on stopping deforestation, we speculate that the loss of elephants might also affect the ability of forests to store carbon,” Poulsen says.

Because forest elephants are key to the growth and survival of large trees, the loss of elephants means less carbon sequestration by Africa’s forests — and a warmer planet, according to the paper.

To conserve both African elephant species — and every plant, animal and fungus that relies on the ecosystem services they provide — the demand for ivory must end. Poulsen is adamant that the two species must be listed as distinct in order to have the proper restrictions in place for the ivory trade.

Poulsen says the U.S. public can help by expressing concern for elephant conservation to their congresspersons. Although Central Africa may seem distant, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), as well as other federal agencies, delegate a portion of funding to international conservation in the African tropics. Poulsen also encourages speaking out against allowing tusks and elephant body parts to be imported into the United States and elsewhere.

This spring, the Trump Administration allowed elephant parts to be imported via the USFWS on a case-by-case basis.

“The only way to stop the ivory trade and the killing of elephants,” Poulsen says, “is to shut down all trade of ivory, everywhere.”

Citations

Poulsen J.R., Rosin C, Meier A, Mills E, Nuñez C. L., et al. (2018) Ecological consequences of forest elephant declines for Afrotropical forests. Conservation Biology 32 (3). DOI: 10.1111/cobi.13035

Maisels F, Strindberg S, Blake S, Wittemyer G, Hart J, et al. (2013) Devastating Decline of Forest Elephants in Central Africa. PLOS ONE 8(3): e59469. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0059469

https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/evo_41

https://news.mongabay.com/2013/03/62-of-all-africas-forest-elephants-killed-in-10-years-warning-graphic-images/

Article published by Maria Salazar in Mongabay

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