Across the continent they are disappearing. Masukus and baobabs. jackalberry, marula, and Natal mahogany – tall trees that for centuries spread their limbs and provided shelter, fuel, and food for man and beast.
Now, however, Africa’s forests are coming under increasing pressure as population growth and globalization increase the rate at with which the lumberjacks’ axes are falling – and that should concern everyone, especially businessmen and women here in the U.S.
To understand why, it is first important to get a sense of the sheer scale of deforestation taking place. In Malawi, for instance, population growth in this mostly rural, landlocked country has put immense pressure on local resources. Farming – which is the primary economic activity in Malawi – has expanded deeply into marginal, heavily-wooded forestland even as the wood burning for light and heat remains common.
As a result, Malawi’s forests are lost at a rate of nearly 3.9 percent each year, double the rate just seven years ago. This means that at the present rate of forestland loss, Malawi could become treeless in a decade. By 2024, Malawi’s once-verdant forests could be lost – replaced with scrub land subject to heavy erosion, nutrient leaching, and acute loss of biodiversity – a disaster for a country where 84 percent of the population is rural and dependent upon forest wood for fuel and livelihood.
Driven largely by poverty and a lack of alternative means of making a living, Malawians are about to repeat the mistake that Haiti made in the 20th century. There, population growth, dismal governance and bone-grinding poverty provided few economic alternatives to felling Haiti’s trees — which went from covering 60 percent of the country in the 1920s to just 2 percent today. The transformation of Haiti from a sylvan paradise to a dusty moonscape has by all accounts been a catastrophe. Hurting everything from flood control to agricultural productivity, deforestation is a leading cause of Haiti’s enduring poverty.
Malawi, however, is just one of many African countries going down this route to rapid forestland loss. The verdant Congo Basin – which encompasses an area the size of Western Europe – and West Africa are also losing trees at a slowing, though still precipitous rate. Though the rate of forest loss in Africa has slowed by some 50 percent compared to previous decades, it is still much higher than in other regions of the world. This means that by 2050, Africa’s once primeval forests will, for all intents and purposes, be lost; there will be no part of the African forest ecosystem that is not in one way or another heavily impacted by human logging or other forms of economic activity.
All this is bad news for Africans, whose denuded forests will translate into lower agricultural productivity, income loss from timber exports and the elimination of a major source of household fuel amongst a host of other ills. What does it mean, however, for Americans an ocean away — especially their bottom lines? It turns out, in a globalized world, economics and environments are intimately linked in many — potentially very costly ways.
First, globalization has linked international commodity markets much more intimately than they were in the past. Combined with a global depletion of tropical forests around the world – such as deforestation in the Amazon basin and Southeast Asia – Africa’s loss of forests will put something of a pinch on global wood-product prices as consumers in booming Asia and elsewhere look to other markets to fill their needs. North America, with its plentiful woodlands — also a region that’s recently bounced back from deforestation — could become such a source. While good for U.S. lumber companies, this shift by world consumers to wood products sourced from North America would nonetheless put upward pressure on prices paid here in the U.S. on everything from construction lumber to office paper.
Second, the felling of Africa’s forests and the harms that will follow from it will necessarily make countries like Malawi poorer, less stable places for investment, trade, and commerce. Such instability can promote conflict in the form of ethnic rebellions over access to diminishing resources, or provoke refugee flight as people leave their failing countries to seek out safety and opportunity abroad. This in turn could put pressure on surrounding countries, even prosperous and well-governed ones, and therefore increase the risk of engaging in business there.
As an example of what can happen when one country falls into the abyss, consider Central Africa, where a Hutu-led genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda killed hundreds of thousands of people in 1994. The ripple effect of that event has cursed Central Africa to this day – setting off a string of wars and rebellions in the eastern portion of the vast Democratic Republic of the Congo estimated to have killed two million or more people.
Finally, forest loss in Africa combined with that elsewhere in the tropics will impact the global climate as the world’s tropical forests or “lungs,” soak up large amounts of the carbon released into the air by human economic activity. Their loss will mean the disappearance of a large carbon sink that would otherwise sequester carbon into growing trees and tropical soils – making climate change worse.
If it’s true that global climate change is already happening at a pace faster than that recorded in the past 65 million years, the accumulated impact of forest loss could be profound as the century progresses. One implication, scientists say, is that ideal growing conditions for many plants will shift northward – potentially hurting agricultural output as nutrient-rich cropland in the Southern U.S. is abandoned for less naturally fertile soil further north. Even if output is not significantly impacted in the aggregate, shifting production further north could devastate southern farmers. They, unlike plants, are tied to their particular patch of soil.
It is also growing apparent that climate change could be particularly bad in the America West, where drought conditions are predicted to worsen. Already, reservoirs fed by the heavily dammed Colorado River are at their lowest point in decades, and in New Mexico persistent drought has forced farmers to drain aquifers and sell off their water rights to oil and gas companies. Combined with impacts on America’s coasts due to climate-change-induced sea level rise, the loss of Africa’s great forests could meaningfully impact how climate change plays out over the long run in the U.S., and that’s of interest to everyone.