Check out the forest the size of México you probably never heard about
A new study has found that a forest the size of Mexico can store twice as much carbon as once thought, doubling the financial incentive for conservation.
Humanity has been working to slow and reverse climate change due to manmade emissions. Part of that effort includes a global “carbon credits” program, established and regulated under Article 6 of the 2015 Paris Agreement, whereby countries can sell excess credits to companies or other countries in order to they can offset their own emissions.
So the results of a first-of-its-kind study that was published in Communications Earth & Environment could be a bonanza for those countries that share the Miombo woodlands, as well as the roughly 300 million humans and wildlife that rely on it.
It has been found that the dry tropical forests spanning large areas of southern Africa are storing potentially more than twice as much above ground carbon in its biomass as was previously thought.
This means that while “nothing has actually changed on the ground,” one of the paper’s authors, Professor Mathias Disney of University College London, told CNN, “if you double the amount of carbon that’s stored across these woodlands... you’ve essentially doubled their dollar value overnight”
That means the financial incentive to protect and retore the woodland, which has lost nearly a third of its forest cover over the last 40 years, has doubled, as well as the cost of continuing to chop down trees.
Where is the Miombo forest?
The Miombo, named after the oak-like miombo trees, covers roughly 1.9 million square miles, an area about the size of Mexico, spanning across parts of Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
It is home to some of the most iconic megafauna on Earth “including antelopes, giraffes, rhinos, lions and some of the largest populations of elephants in Africa.” It is also the site of what is considered one of the largest mammal migrations in the world.
Every year from October to December, some 10 million fruit bats travel from various parts of the Miombo’s dry woodlands to gather in the swamp forest located in Zambia’s Kasanka National Park within the greater area that the Miombo covers.
It is also home to some 8,500 plant species, more than 300 of which are trees. These provide materials for building and charcoal, as well as medicines for the communities that inhabit the Miombo woodlands. A study published by The Royal Society in 2016 estimated the value of these biomass resources at $9 billion per year to the livelihoods of Miombo’s inhabitants.
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