Sat, Dec 15, 2018 page6

• The Aussie farmer with 240 million trees to his name

  • The Guardian
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  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.

  

  Agronomist Tony Rinaudo, known as the “forest maker,” receives the Right Livelihood Award in Stockholm on Nov. 23.

  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.
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