Africa’s forests have transformed from a carbon sink to a carbon source, according to research, underscoring the need for urgent action to save the world’s great natural climate stabilizers.
The alarming shift, which has occurred since 2010, means all three of the planet’s main rainforest regions – the South American Amazon, south-east Asia and Africa – have gone from being allies in the fight against climate breakdown to being part of the problem.
The primary cause of the problem is human activity. Farmers are clearing more land for food production. Infrastructure projects and mining are driving vegetation loss and global warming due to the burning of gas, oil and coal – reducing the resilience of ecosystems.
Scientists found that between 2010 and 2017, African forests lost about 106 billion kilograms of biomass per year, equivalent to the weight of about 106m cars. Most affected were the tropical moist broadleaf forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Madagascar and parts of West Africa.
The study, published Friday in Scientific Reports, was led by researchers from the National Center for Earth Observation at the universities of Leicester, Sheffield and Edinburgh. Using satellite data and machine learning, they tracked changes over a decade in the amount of carbon stored in trees and woody vegetation.
They found that Africa gained carbon between 2007 and 2010, but widespread forest loss since then has upset the balance, so the continent is contributing more CO.2 In the environment.
The authors said the results show that urgent action is needed to halt forest loss or the world risks losing one of its most important natural carbon buffers. He says Brazil has launched an initiative, the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), which aims to raise more than $100 billion (£76 billion) for forest conservation by paying countries to leave their forests untouched.
However, so far only a few countries have invested a total of $6.5 billion in the initiative.
Professor Heiko Balzter, senior author and director of the Environmental Future Institute at the University of Leicester, said the study showed the importance of rapidly scaling up TFFF.
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“Policymakers must respond by taking better protection measures to protect the world’s tropical forests,” Balzter said.
“Four years ago, at Cop26 in Glasgow, world leaders announced their intention to end global deforestation by 2030. But progress is not happening fast enough. The new TFFF aims to pay deforested countries to keep their trees rooted in the ground. It will make it easier for governments and private investors to combat the drivers of deforestation, such as mining for minerals and metals, and land grabs for agricultural land. There is a way. But more countries need to pay into it to make it work.”
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