Environment

(Sheila McKinnon photo)

Africans live close to their natural environment. In truth, all people depend on the environment; but whereas, for example, most North Americans do not cut down their own trees to build their own dwellings, most Africans do. Rural Africans, who make up the majority of the continent's population, are personally, immediately dependent on the lands and the plants that surround them.

Environmental destruction has been afoot in Africa for decades. "Over the past 30 years, soil structure has been damaged, nutrients have been depleted and susceptibility to erosion has been increased," states UNEP's Africa Environment Outlook 2006.

• Already, about 66 percent of Africa is classified as arid or semiarid, with extreme variability in rainfall.
• Desertification threatens a significant portion of Africa's currently fertile land. The most vulnerable areas are along desert margins, home to some 22 million people.
• Of all the forests and woodlands that were extant in Africa in 1950, nearly one-quarter had been degraded by the early 1980s.
• Between 1980 and 1995, Africa lost 10.5 percent of its forests: the highest forest-loss rate in the developing world and in sharp contrast to the net afforestation in developed countries. Between 1990 and 2000 alone, forest loss was over 50 million hectares (125 million acres).

For a food-short, energy-short Africa, whose population and hence environmental demands are burgeoning, those trends eventually could spell disaster.

 

Statistics: UNEP

 

(Updated, Dec. 17, 2007)