After years of serving as Mali’s minister of the environment, Aida M’bo now spends her time planting trees in a fight that many in the arid west African country acknowledge they are losing.
“Deforestation is an important issue in Mali,” M’bo said, standing in front of the Zamblara forest.
For decades it has been classified as protected, but like many forests in the vast Sahel, it could be wiped out.
Photo: AP
“It is mainly due to the excessive wood-cutting,” M’bo said.
Even some of her fellow tree-planters that day were to blame. Salimata Diabate, who took part in the ceremony last month, lives nearby and sells firewood from the forest in the Sikasso region, long considered Mali’s breadbasket.
While Diabate expressed concern about the threats to Mali’s forests, she said people like her in the countryside have no choice but firewood for cooking.
“Things like cooking gas and solar panels are better, but it’s too expensive for rural women,” she said.
The loss of forests has become a pressing issue across Africa as the Sahara Desert continues to creep southward. Over the past three decades, nearly 20,000km2 of forest have been lost in Mali, according to environmental nonprofit Tree Aid.
M’bo’s nonprofit, Energia, is financially supported by the Great Green Wall, an initiative by African countries launched in 2007 that aims to plant trees in a nearly line about 8,000km long across the continent, creating a natural barrier to hold back the desert.
However, millions of the trees died as temperatures rose and rainfall diminished. As a result, only 4 percent of the Great Green Wall’s original goal has been met, and an estimated US$43 billion would be needed to achieve the rest.
In Mali, the initiative is facing an additional challenge: the population’s dependency on firewood.
Lassana Coulibaly, who lives in the town of Senou near the capital, Bamako, spends his days chopping up and reselling wood he buys from people who cut it from a nearby forest.
“This how we make a living on a daily basis,” he said.
He does not believe the forest will disappear.
A 2019 study by the African Energy Commission found that 64 percent of Mali’s total fuel consumption was of biomass, primarily firewood and charcoal for household use.
Despite being one of Africa’s top gold producers, Mali ranks among the world’s least-developed nations, with almost half of its 23 million population living below the national poverty line. The problem is worse in rural areas, where subsistence farming — many people’s only real option for survival — is threatened by armed conflict.
The country has been plagued by an insurgency fought by armed groups, including some allied with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group, and two military coups since 2020.
Mali is also among several countries in the Sahel that have experienced record-breaking floods this year, with more than 1,000 people killed and hundreds of thousands displaced across the region.
Khady Camara, an environmental activist based in Senegal, said that forests can help to weather the effects of climate change by absorbing water to prevent floods, and by absorbing carbon that would otherwise end up in the atmosphere as part of heat-trapping gas.
“We need to give more priority to our forests, but we also need to set up new forests and give priority to natural regeneration,” said Camara, whose organization Vacances Vertes has planted 150,000 trees in Senegal.
She said the effects of climate change on the Sahel region can’t be overstated and the causes often come from far beyond the African continent.
“Africa produces only 3 percent of greenhouse gases. Ninety percent is from the West,” she said. “If we continue like this, I’m saying to myself that this will be the disappearance of Africa, and of Africans.”
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS