Trees anchor sustainable development

to Harare in December last year, the Mayor of Harare, Muchadeyi Masunda, pledged that the capital city would plant a million trees by the end of 2011 as its contribution towards reforesting the Sunshine City.

In the same breath, the mayor admitted that the gesture by the City Fathers would have very little impact as long as the country’s poor power supply situation persists.
Intermittent power cuts and load-shedding are spurring deforestation at an alarming scale as city residents who cannot afford environmentally friendly alternatives resort to trees for firewood.
Power utility Zesa is grappling to meet the country’s electricity requirements despite the fact that industry is still operating way below installed capacity.

At the moment, the country is producing about 1 200 megawatts against a national requirement of 2 000 megawatts.
The resultant deficit is not only hurting industry and commerce, but the country’s forests as well.
And as if fate would have it, almost all the young trees planted between parking bays in some of Harare’s major streets ever since the mayor’s promise have since been exterminated by vandals and drivers who would not care less.

A few of the trees, now protected by wire mesh, look lost in the concrete jungle and their future remains uncertain in a city where vehicular and human traffic is increasing by the day.
The Forestry Commission of Zimbabwe, a Government regulatory, management, capacity enhancement and revenue generator for the forestry sector, concurs that the country’s energy challenges have largely resulted in people resorting to cutting down trees for use as wood energy.

The organisation also notes that due to the increase in the number of smallholder farmers entering into tobacco production there has been a phenomenal increase in demand for woodfuel necessitated by the lack of financial resources to purchase coal and the high electricity costs.
The shortage of electricity in the country has for now been the major catalyst for deforestation, which is threatening to reach unprecedented proportions.

The Forestry Commission estimates that Zimbabwe is losing its vegetation cover at a staggering rate of 300 000 hectares per annum with the plantation forestry industry losing about 10 percent of their forests to fire, an area of about 15 000 hectares in 2008 while the indigenous demarcated forest areas recorded over 157 000-hectare area loss during the same year.
Although the Forestry Commission says such huge losses in a very short time does affect future national timber supplies, the loss will have a serious cascading effect on the country’s climatic conditions as well.

Despite partnering with other organisations such as the Food and Agriculture Organisation to manage the country’s forests, the Forestry Commission only hopes that a sense of resource ownership grows among the Zimbabwean populace.
And with this sense of resource ownership evidently absent, Zimbabwe is under pressure to exploit opportunities being offered in multilateral agreements such as the Convention on Biological

Diversity and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
While the country is currently feverishly clamouring for resource ownership through the indigenisation and economic empowerment drive there are other simpler way that communities can get benefits from their resources such as the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) programme which seeks to reward developing nations for conserving their forests.

Launched in 2008 the UN programme was initiated after realising that deforestation and forest degradation, through agricultural expansion, conversion to pastureland, infrastructure development, destructive logging, fires and so on account for nearly 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

This, according to the UN, is much more than what the entire global transportation sector emits and second only to the energy sector.
And to constrain the impacts of climate change within reasonable limits, the global average temperatures must be stabilised to within two degrees Celsius, although this will be practically impossible to achieve without reducing emissions from the forest sector, in addition to other mitigation actions.

Because the REDD initiative goes beyond deforestation and forest degradation to include the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks, Zimbabwe stands to immensely benefit.

However, the tree is largely taken for granted by many people in Zimbabwe and is often exploited left right and centre. Many hardly appreciate its role of keeping a good balance on the environment by chiefly producing oxygen and reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and moderating ground temperatures.

While average temperatures not only in Zimbabwe but elsewhere across the world have been on an upward movement over the past 30 years, the ordinary person on the street has hardly linked this to these trees’ increasing failure to cope with reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Research indicates that a healthy tree stores about 2,6 tonnes per acre each year, which translates to an acre of trees absorbing enough carbon dioxide over one year that equals the amount produced by driving a car 41 800 kilometres.

And because it has been observed that Zimbabwe is highly vulnerable to climate and weather variability due to its strong dependency on rainfed agriculture, it is important that the country seriously takes steps to maintain as much vegetation as possible as well as increase it through reforestation.
About FOTE

FOTE comprises like-minded organisations – from the corporate world, government, non-governmental organisations and individuals – that came together in 2010 to support the idea of reforestation through a non-profit-making Trust Fund. The organisation works with the Forestry Commission of Zimbabwe, along with other environmental organisations, with the support of the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources Management.