About 40% of the earth comprises dryland ecosystems which are often overexploited and subjected to degrading conditions like overgrazing, deforestation, all of which have led to desertification.
This is especially alarming seeing as forests are also essential to combating climate change due to their natural ability to absorb about 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually.
It is for this reason that this piece will focus on assisted natural regeneration and how it can be adapted to, not only solve the desertification problem by restoring degraded lands, but also mitigate climate change.
You see, the climate plays an important role in plants as it directly influences regeneration by providing temperature and moisture to aid the biological processes that govern each stage of their reproductive cycle.
With climate change, however, the environmental conditions which these plants (their flowers and seedlings) need to grow are altered – extreme weather conditions like high temperature and intense rainfall – which then leads to death or damage of the flowers and seedlings.
While planting trees is important, regeneration is better and cheaper because trees can grow on their own and forests restore themselves with little human assistance.
But since we’re losing forests faster than they are regenerating, who says humans can’t give nature a little help?
That is why assisted natural regeneration is one of the surest and safest ways to restore degraded land and save our planet.
Assisted natural regeneration is a highly flexible approach that entails a series of activities aimed at driving and encouraging the natural regeneration of forests.
It is a combination of human intervention by planting and passive restoration where trees naturally recover by eliminating barriers and threats to their growth.
Through this process, humans assist nature through their knowledge of the land and use such knowledge to plant trees that best adapt to location (yup…it doesn’t work for every landscape) while also limiting the factors that harm young trees and prevent them from growing.
For example, they prevent the spread of wildfires in forests by building firebreaks and ridding the forest of dry leaves that could fuel such fires in the case of an eventual fire outbreak.
Also, people can build fences to prevent cattle from eating saplings and also get rid of grasses that are harmful to such saplings so as to give them room to grow.
Finally, people can plant trees to fill up gaps in the forest in cases when natural regeneration does not quickly increase enough tree cover on its own or the species of trees that are needed for that location refuse to grow on their own.
Assisted natural regeneration can play a critical role in helping countries achieve their national and global climate, biodiversity and restoration commitments.