Elephants show UN deforestation headache

August 26 2008 at 04:35PM

By Alister Doyle

Afiaso, Ghana - Rising elephant numbers in a protected forest park in Ghana are angering farmers whose crops are being raided in an unwanted side-effect of a plan to slow deforestation.

Locals in Afiaso, a village of 620 people in southern Ghana with no electricity nor running water, grumble that they are seeing limited benefits from agreeing to cooperate in protecting Kakum National Park forest, which starts 2 km away.

"We used to cut down a lot of trees to plant cocoa. Cutting down trees used to be normal," chief Nana Opare Ababio, 47, told reporters sitting with the village elders as children danced and banged drums alongside. On racks, cocoa beans dried in the sun.

Now, he said, villagers were respecting the park boundary.

"Money has not flowed to the village," he said, despite cooperation in helping protect the forest and a 2006 law meant to give local communities a share of park income such as from limited logging that does not damage the forest.

Finding new ways to slow the felling of the world's forests is a focus of 160-nation UN climate talks being held in Accra, about 200 km to the east. Deforestation accounts for almost 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

But Afiaso may show some of the difficulties - such as ensuring that money reaches poor local communities who are the ones slowing deforestation and dependent on farming maize, cocoa, plantains and cassava.

And in Afiaso there are the elephants.

"Elephants come to raid our crops. Then we have to buy food elsewhere," complained one man at a village meeting.

Protected in the park, elephant numbers in Kakum rose to 206 in the last census in 2006 from 189 in 2000, according to Daniel Ewur, the park manager. The animals break out of their forest stronghold and eat crops.

Still, cooperation with the park has brought jobs for some people in the village and locals believe re-growth of forests in the protected area in recent years has helped stabilise once unpredictable rains and benefited crops, Ababio said.

And local children will grow up seeing animals that might otherwise have been driven to extinction, even though some complain the deal has cut hunting rights. The forest is home to rare species including the Diana monkey and the bongo antelope.

This shows the complexity of working out how to slow deforestation, said Emily Brickell, forests campaigner for the WWF environmental group after visiting Afiaso.

A new global deal to safeguard forests could cost between $20 and $30-billion a year, she said. In Afiaso, villagers said their priorities for any cash were a bungalow for a teacher or a new clinic.

"There seemed to be a lot of will and support for the idea that the communities should be receiving benefits," Brickell said of talks between park officials and villagers in Afiaso.

At the UN meeting, cash to slow deforestation is seen as a way to get many developing nations to do more to slow climate change that could aggravate water and food shortages through heatwaves, droughts, floods and rising sea levels.

Worldwide, the annual net loss of forest area between 2000 and 2005 was 7,3 million hectares a year - an area about the size of Sierra Leone or Panama - according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Trees soak up carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, as they grow and release it when they burn or rot. Slowing slash and burn policies by many farmers to clear land for crops would protect the climate.

At the talks in Accra, many delegations have stressed that local communities and indigenous peoples should benefit, from the Amazon to the Congo.

"There is an overall understanding that (aiding local people) is an important part of what we should do," said Luiz Figueiredo Machado, a Brazilian diplomat who chairs a group at the talks looking at ways to fight deforestation.

And in Afiaso, part of the answer may be pepper.

"We learnt from experts in Zambia that elephants don't like pepper," said park manager Ewur.Farmers were now mixing pepper with grease and then smearing it on rags that are hung from nylon ropes around fields with crops.

"Elephants have a very good sense of smell and stay away from the pepper. I've tried it myself - it was 100 percent successful," he said.

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Deforestation accounts for almost 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

Trees don't emit CO2.

It is just absurd that they claim to know anything, much less what deforestation does to the CO2 balance in the world, which would be extremely difficult to measure.

To think anyone knows what the average earth air or ground temperature at this moment might be much less 20 or 30 years from now is absolute folly.

It appears that the green movement has become the sanctuary of pseudo science and scientists and TV reporters who wouldn't recognize the difference between night and day.

Remember the Montreal Protocol? The chlorofluoro carbon refrigerants were eating up the ozone layer? After billions of dollars changing over to new refrigerants, it had no effect. Oops.

Hey, but if they can sell all these disastrously expensive, tax subsidized
alternatives like ethanol, wind, and solar because it makes people feel good about themselves, and raise your taxes at the same time as the only solution to our energy needs, more power to them. Saeed might be laughing himself silly.

It is truly embarrassing that there are so many blindly gullible people in this country. It has all truly given science a bad name.

Will,

I love this quote below. How in the world would anyone think that a patch of trees stabilize unpredictable rain?

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Still, cooperation with the park has brought jobs for some people in the village and locals believe re-growth of forests in the protected area in recent years has helped stabilise once unpredictable rains and benefited crops, Ababio said.

JPK

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To think anyone knows what the average earth air or ground temperature at this moment might be much less 20 or 30 years from now is absolute folly.

I'm not convinced it can be dismissed so easily. Consider a bath tub filling with water from a spigot. At any given point and time, it's not possible to accurately predict the exact water level; the waves bouncing around are partly random. However, it is accurate to say the bath tub is filling and will overflow, and from observed trends, it is possible to estimate when overflow will occur. The atmosphere is far more complicated, but simple calculations might correctly indicate the trends; I'm not sure.

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all these disastrously expensive, tax subsidized alternatives like ethanol, wind, and solar because it makes people feel good about themselves

Agreed.