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Uganda will lose its entire forest cover in the next 50 years if the government does not embark on immediate efforts to halt rapid deforestation, a forestry expert warned yesterday.
Forests and tree planting can help mitigate the effects of global warming by increasing carbon storage and cutting greenhouse gas emissions, experts say. Tropical deforestation accounts for a fifth of emissions from human activities.
“We have been observing using satellite imagery that over the last 15 years we have lost more that 1.5 million hectares of forest cover,” Xavier Mugumya, Uganda’s forest management specialist at the National Forest Authority, told Reuters.
“Uganda is likely to have very low if not completely no forest cover within 50 years if nothing is done to reverse this trend,” he said in an interview.
The east Africa nation’s forest cover has fallen to 3.5 million hectares in 2005, Mugumya said. Trees soak up carbon dioxide as they ...