Rethinking reforestation in Africa

Guinea’s Kissidougou prefecture is a sea of verdant grasslands dotted with towering islands of palm forest. Nestled within these tree islands are thriving human settlements.

Ever since the French occupied the area in the 1890s, Western "experts" assumed that these enclaves were the last remnants of a once-giant forest expanse that had been progressively denuded by generations of reckless Africans.

That all changed with James Fairhead and Melissa Leach’s 1996 book, Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic, which showed in painstaking detail how the forest islands had actually sprouted from the savannah due to conscious actions by African farmers.

In a world that is mildly obsessed with reforesting the supposedly degraded African landscape, Kissidougou is a reminder that the West seldom knows best.

In July 2019, Ethiopia was celebrated by the global news media, Guinness World Records and the UN Environment Programme for planting 350-million trees in a day. But experts, including Rhodes University botanist Susanne Vetter, warn that the country’s Green Legacy Initiative could do more harm than good.

William Bond, emeritus professor of the University of Cape Town (UCT) biological sciences department, has levelled similar accusations at the UN’s African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative, or AFR100, which hopes to "restore" 100-million hectares of "degraded forest landscapes" in Africa by 2030. That’s an area as big as France, Germany and Portugal combined.

The problem is that much of the area targeted by these projects has always been savannah — including the Kruger Park and the Serengeti.

And even when they are planting trees in the right places, much of the planting will be rowed plantations of fast-growing alien species that, as Vetter writes, "typically provide a fraction of the ecosystem services of the natural vegetation they replace … and can negatively impact on local livelihoods".

A rowed plantation also sequesters between seven and 42 times less carbon than dense natural forest.

Of course, deforestation is a major threat in some parts of Africa. And the narrative is complicated by the continent’s fraught environmental historiography.

"Until the 1990s, Africa’s environmental past was largely described as one of degradation," says Prof Timm Hoffman, the director of UCT’s plant conservation unit and an expert in comparing then-and-now landscape photographs from the rePhotoSA project to shed light on historical changes in environments.

"Then a number of books came along which flipped this argument on its head and ascribed much of the degradation to colonial policies."

Often, Hoffman says, these books "overstated the alternative interpretation". A case in point is Fairhead and Leach, who argued that what had happened with manmade forest islands in Kissidougou could also explain forest-savannah mosaics in other parts of West Africa.

But access to satellite imagery from the 2000s onwards challenged this theory. In the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon, the data showed, human deforestation was a serious threat to the natural landscape. More recently, the Global Forest Watch website, which provides almost real-time measurement of forest loss anywhere in the world, has shown that large parts of Africa are at risk.

Karoo dreaming

Closer to home, the Karoo also lends itself to misreading. Take one look at the sparsely vegetated rocky koppies and it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking overgrazing and climate change have taken their toll on this delicate environment.

But historical records and photographs tell a different story.

In places such as Graaff-Reinet — in much of the eastern Karoo, in fact — the landscape is significantly more vegetated today than it has been at any point in the past century.

Retired Oxford professor William Beinart (originally from SA) has shown that in the 19th century, livestock farmers in the Cape colony generated more wealth than the diamond mines of Kimberley. The agricultural exploitation reached a peak in the 1920s and 1930s, when thousands of mostly white farmers crammed 11-million sheep (and at least 2-million donkeys, goats and horses) into a region that comprises 30% of SA’s surface area.

Says Hoffman: "They soon learnt — the hard way — that the landscape can only sustain this kind of intensive farming for a short while."

When a drop in wool prices, brought about by the Great Depression in the early 1930s, coincided with a crippling drought, millions of sheep died. Some farmers and bywoners (labour tenants) had to leave the land to find work in the cities.

The 1923 drought investigation commission had already warned of the danger. It had found that the kraaling of livestock, which meant millions of animals were moved daily between the farmyards and distant pastures, was devastating for the environment and should stop.

Fenced pastures, in which the sheep could stay out at night, would prevent this endless "tramping" while also keeping the jackals out.

Fencing with barbed wire had begun earlier but accelerated at this time. So by the 1960s, most of the large livestock farms were fenced — not only around their perimeter, but also divided internally into camps. "It was a huge undertaking," says Beinart.

In the 1960s, a stock-reduction scheme was introduced, under which farmers were paid to sell their stock.

But weather patterns also seem to be changing, affecting the landscape. "The Karoo was very dry until about 1980," says Hoffman. "Since then, rainfall has been higher. And, with only 3-million sheep in the Karoo, the veld has never looked better."

Migrant labour pains

As the crow flies, Mpondoland is only about 250km from Graaff-Reinet. But the two are worlds apart. With none of the Karoo’s temperature extremes and almost three times as much rainfall, Mpondoland is better suited to intensive agriculture.

However, its history — first as a "native reserve" and then as an apartheid-era bantustan — has given rise to other problems. The migrant labour system that began in the 1890s has had a crippling effect on the agricultural output.

But Beinart, who still visits the University of Fort Hare regularly, says the impact has not always been as negative as one would expect.

In the early days of the migrant labour system, the wages men sent back home led to an increase in agricultural productivity. Women had always been heavily involved in farming, and the economic stimulus allowed families to invest in seed, livestock and equipment.

Gradually, from the 1960s (as apartheid did its worst to these societies) rural smallholders’ capacity to feed themselves declined. The combination of strong rains and overgrazed lands often resulted in terrible erosion.

The region is still among the poorest in SA. But it is no longer as sparsely vegetated.

"In some areas where arable farming and livestock numbers have declined, grasses, shrubs and bushes are reclaiming the land," says Beinart. "Some dongas remain, but the landscape is woodier than it’s been in years."

It’s complicated

Planting trees isn’t always a good idea. But all the experts the FM consulted were also at great pains to point out that every square mile has its own unique environmental history and, as Hoffman puts it, "a hundred years is a very long time and a lot of different things can happen in it."

Beinart adds that even when you have homed in on one small area, it’s "important to try to look for answers that don’t just invert what has gone before. The challenge of understanding environmental change is to get an overview of socioeconomic and natural dynamics."

None of that really chimes with projects which view Africa as a parched spot on the map that needs to be made greener. Though probably well-intentioned, the people behind such projects would do well to remind themselves that only 3% of Europe’s forests remain intact, and North America isn’t doing much better.

SPEKBOOM: A miracle plant?

If Woolworths’ website (and similar sources) is to be believed, the simple act of purchasing a spekboom — R39.99 for a plastic pot wrapped in brown paper; R129.99 for the curiously named "Spekboom in Venda Pot Plant" — makes you some kind of eco-hero. Spekboom, the product blurb crows, is "touted as a plant that aids in removing carbon emissions from the air, aiding in the slowing of atmospheric CO² pollution".

Though this is true (by definition, all plants capture carbon), the full story is more complicated.

"In its natural habitat, spekboom is a wonder plant," says ecologist Anthony Mills, who has dedicated much of his career to re-establishing spekboom thickets in the Eastern Cape. An ingenious quirk that allows the plant to photosynthesise through the night allows it to flourish in hot, dry, frost-free coastal plains — a harsh habitat where very few other large plant species can survive, let alone thrive. But plant a spekboom in Mediterranean Cape Town or frost-prone Joburg and the plant might not do nearly as well. And "it definitely won’t capture any more carbon than the lavender bush next to it", says Mills.

Just 100 years ago, spekboom thickets covered an area larger than Northern Ireland. A place such as Jansenville — which today features yellowed grasslands and scrubby koppies — should actually look more like the Addo Elephant National Park, where the spekboom can grow dense enough to obscure a pachyderm.

If Mills’s mass-planting outfit AfriCarbon is successful, the area could capture 400Mt of CO² — enough to offset the UK’s annual carbon emissions and still leave a tip. Selling carbon credits could also bring in millions of rands of additional annual revenue for the region’s livestock farmers.

The problem is that new spekboom plantings are magnets to sheep, goats and kudu, and few farmers can afford to keep animals off the land until the plants have established themselves.

If you want to help spekboom live up to its wonder-plant reputation, you might consider taking the pot plant out your shopping trolley, and getting involved with a company such as AfriCarbon, which aims to restore degraded spekboom thickets and generate carbon credits — all while bringing jobs to rural South Africans and profits to investors.