Overcoming poverty through ‘regreening’

August 14, 2015

Mongabay

Overcoming poverty through ‘regreening’

Many parts of Africa have been deforested by the expansion of agricultural land. This loss of trees has many detrimental effects. Soil erosion increases because trees no longer block wind and their roots no longer hold soil together. Soil fertility decreases because the input of nutrients in the form of organic matter like leaves from trees vanishes. Renewable sources of fuel and building materials are lost when trees are removed to convert land to agricultural landscapes.

Chris Reij and Robert Winterbottom, senior fellows of the World Resources Institute, have written a report detailing efforts to reverse the trend of deforestation in agricultural landscapes in Africa, a practice that they define as “regreening.”

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