Opportunities and Threats ‘Fertilizers for Forests’: systematic use of fertilizers can mitigate deforestation in West Africa and help fight global warming As the world grapples with the challenge of feeding an ever growing population in the face of dwindling natural resources confounded by climate change, findings from a recent research that we conducted show that science-based farming methods integrating the systematic use of fertilizer by farmers can significantly reduce the need to clear forests for agriculture, one of the identified culprits of global warming. Findings of the research, published in the latest issue of Environmental Management Journal, shows that the use of fertilizers and improved cocoa varieties by smallholder farmers could have averted the destruction of some 2.1 million ha of the Guinean rainforest of West Africa and the subsequent release of 1.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere valued at over US$ 1.6 billion. At the beginning of the 21st century, only 18 percent – or about 113,000 sq km – of the original rainforest that once stretched from Guinea to Cameroon remained. This forest is one of the 25 UNidentified global biodiversity hotspots that collectively contain 60
Ducks fly across a lake toward a patch of the remaining Guinean rainforest in Nigeria. Photo by O Adebayo, IITA.
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