Through the cacophony of the UN’s global climate talks, an Australian farmer is quietly spreading his plan to reforest the world.
Over more than 30 years in west Africa, Tony Rinaudo has regenerated more than 6 million hectares — an area nearly as large as Tasmania.
His farmer-managed natural regeneration technique is responsible for 240 million trees regrowing across the parched continent — but it nearly never happened.
Photo: AFP
Having grown up in Victoria’s Myrtleford, Rinaudo in 1981 moved to Niger, one of the world’s poorest countries, inspired by his Christian faith and a desire “somewhere, somehow to make a difference.”
However, after two years of intense tree planting and trying to coax some life from the arid landscape regularly devastated by severe drought, he despaired.
“I was in charge of a reforestation project that was failing miserably. It wasn’t that I was particularly dumb, it was the same story all over west Africa. And I remember the frustration that just hit me: north, south, east, west, was a barren landscape, and I knew perfectly well that 80 or 90 percent of the trees I was carrying [in my car] for planting would die,” Rinaudo said.
Crouching in the sand to reduce his tires’ air pressure, he looked more closely at the few low desert bushes scattered around the landscape, the only thing that would grow there.
Rinaudo knew they were not small bushes, but trees that had been hacked down. Looking more closely, he realized that, if pruned and allowed to grow, they stood a chance of flourishing.
“In that moment, everything changed. We didn’t need to plant trees, it wasn’t a question of having a multi-million dollar budget and years to do it, everything you needed was in the ground,” he said.
The root system of the chopped-down trees remained alive under the ground — Rinaudo describes it as an “underground forest” — it just needed to be pruned and allowed to grow.
“Nature would heal itself, you just needed to stop hammering it,” Rinaudo said.
Thirty years later, his technique has a name: farmer-managed natural regeneration.
It is an “embarrassingly simple solution” to what appeared to be an intractable problem, he said.
However, it involved overturning generations of accepted wisdom and a resistance to giving some land back to nature.
“When you’ve got people who are on the edge of starvation every year, not just in famine years, you’ve got this perception that you need every square inch of farmland to grow food crops, and here’s this nut telling people they should sacrifice some of their land for trees,” he said.
Rinaudo — known then as “the crazy white farmer” — managed to convince 10 farmers in as many villages to back his plan to allow trees to regrow.
A drought was the catalyst for a work-for-food program, which brought reluctant farmers into the fold, but when the farming yields were at first no worse, then better, then dramatically so, the technique took off.
The reforestation can be seen on satellite images.
At the UN’s global climate talks in Katowice, Poland, this week, Rinaudo quietly took his farming message from meeting room to meeting room, delegation to delegation.
The trees improve farming yields, reduce ground temperatures and hold water in the soil, he said.
They provide firewood and make farming, in places where the temperature regularly reaches 40°C, more comfortable, but the trees also act as a powerful carbon sink, and with the potential to draw in billions more tonnes of carbon, Rinaudo said.
For his work on regeneration, Rinaudo was recognized this year in the Right Livelihood Awards, often described as the alternative Nobel, and focused on fields such as environmental protection, human rights, sustainability and peace.
Working with World Vision, Rinaudo has taken his technique across the world, from arid Somaliland to tropical East Timor.
There are 2 billion hectares of degraded land in the world and much of it can be restored to help pull carbon from the atmosphere, he said.
Regeneration is not the silver bullet for climate change — no such thing exists — but it could be a powerful tool to assist.
“We can do this very cheaply, we can do this very quickly and we can do this at scale,” he said.
DOUBLE-MURDER CASE: The officer told the dispatcher he would check the locations of the callers, but instead headed to a pizzeria, remaining there for about an hour A New Jersey officer has been charged with misconduct after prosecutors said he did not quickly respond to and properly investigate reports of a shooting that turned out to be a double murder, instead allegedly stopping at an ATM and pizzeria. Franklin Township Police Sergeant Kevin Bollaro was the on-duty officer on the evening of Aug. 1, when police received 911 calls reporting gunshots and screaming in Pittstown, about 96km from Manhattan in central New Jersey, Hunterdon County Prosecutor Renee Robeson’s office said. However, rather than responding immediately, prosecutors said GPS data and surveillance video showed Bollaro drove about 3km
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday took to the streets of Spain’s eastern city of Valencia to mark the first anniversary of floods that killed 229 people and to denounce the handling of the disaster. Demonstrators, many carrying photos of the victims, called on regional government head Carlos Mazon to resign over what they said was the slow response to one of Europe’s deadliest natural disasters in decades. “People are still really angry,” said Rosa Cerros, a 42-year-old government worker who took part with her husband and two young daughters. “Why weren’t people evacuated? Its incomprehensible,” she said. Mazon’s
‘MOTHER’ OF THAILAND: In her glamorous heyday in the 1960s, former Thai queen Sirikit mingled with US presidents and superstars such as Elvis Presley The year-long funeral ceremony of former Thai queen Sirikit started yesterday, with grieving royalists set to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures, and lavished with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits hanging in public spaces and private homes nationwide. Sirikit, the mother of Thai King Vajiralongkorn and widow of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late on Friday at the age of 93. Black-and-white tributes to the royal matriarch are being beamed onto towering digital advertizing billboards, on
POWER ABUSE WORRY: Some people warned that the broad language of the treaty could lead to overreach by authorities and enable the repression of government critics Countries signed their first UN treaty targeting cybercrime in Hanoi yesterday, despite opposition from an unlikely band of tech companies and rights groups warning of expanded state surveillance. The new global legal framework aims to bolster international cooperation to fight digital crimes, from child pornography to transnational cyberscams and money laundering. More than 60 countries signed the declaration, which means it would go into force once ratified by those states. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the signing as an “important milestone,” and that it was “only the beginning.” “Every day, sophisticated scams destroy families, steal migrants and drain billions of dollars from our economy...
RSS