As an illustration of the multitude of ecosystem services trees can offer, "moisture from the canopy of East African forests provide 35 percent of the rain in West Africa," writes Cathy Watson in the Star newspaper. She was covering the IUFRO-FORNESSA Congress held at the World Agroforestry Centre, Nairobi. Their ability to provide rain makes trees key to adaptation strategies for a region experiencing increasing episodes of droughts.
Forester Mercy Derkyi suggests in the article that, the effective use of trees as part of Africa’s climate change strategy depends largely on who owns the trees. If rural smallholder farmers do not have a sense of ownership for trees on their farms, "there is little incentive for them to protect mature trees."
Sadly, the challenges farmers face when wanting to protect mature trees is amplified when they decide to plant trees. One of these hurdles is land title issues. According to Cathy, few farmers hold land titles in sub-Saharan Africa and many of them are often discouraged by government regulation from leaving the land idle so that it can regenerate.
Lack of land titles and demotivating regulations not only hamper the mitigation of climate change, but also makes it very challenging for Africa to play its part in achieving the RIO+20 goal of "restoring 150 million hectares of deforested and degraded land by 2020."
All is not lost however, because Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) mechanisms are changing attitudes to re-greening and safeguarding of forests. The Star articles suggests that PES is a timely hope for a region in which wood provides up to 95 percent of energy and forestry is desperately underfunded.
