This archive report was first published on 7 August 2019.
Last week, Ethiopia made history by planting over 350 million trees in 12 hours, a world record that surpasses India's previous record of 66 million trees planted in the same timeframe in 2017.
For Ethiopia, this tree-planting effort is not just about combating climate change; it's a matter of survival. The country's forested land has decreased dramatically, from almost a third of the country at the start of the 20th century to less than four percent today.
With a large and fast-growing population, waste lands, and disappearing water resources, Ethiopia is plagued by drought, increasingly deadly conflict over land, and meager economic opportunities. Hundreds of its young people still make the deadly trek through Yemen to reach the Gulf, and as far as Libya, to gamble on the perilous trip on rickety, overcrowded boats over the Mediterranean to Europe.
Having already grown 2.6 billion trees, the plan is to bring that number to 4 billion and possibly more. This is remarkable, considering that an estimated 3.5 billion to 7 billion trees are cut down worldwide each year.
However, Ethiopia is not alone in losing its forest. In the past 100 years, West Africa has lost about 90 percent of its forest cover. Countries like Ghana and the Ivory Coast have no forests left outside of reserves, and those in reserves are being hacked down by encroachers and loggers.
Uganda is following a similar path, with its forest cover having fallen from 64 percent in 1900 to 9 percent today. Somalia is all but a wasteland.
But growing trees depends on two things that many African governments struggle with: low to zero levels of corruption and sufficient levels of political credibility. When money is released to buy seedlings and support tree planting, it needs to go to trees, not into corrupt officials' pockets.
As Charles Onyango-Obbo notes, 'Successful tree-planting, much like Rwanda-style communal cleaning of towns and cities, don't reveal how much a people are green fingered. They mostly tell you something about the state of the political market, and how honest a broker people think the state is.'
— Charles Onyango-Obbo is publisher of data visualiser Africapaedia and Rogue Chiefs.
