Thursday, December 23, 2021

Covid 19: the pandemic that raised the bar on environmental challenges in the East Africa sub region

 

The East Africa sub region had observed increased direct environmental impacts, which have been accelerated as a result of the pandemic. Instituted border closure between countries in the sub region had a devastating impact on cross border trade and in a way caused a spike in illegal timber trade through porous border crossings. There was inadequate collaboration between forest agencies and inadequate border patrols were conducted during the pandemic. For instance, the legal trade between Kenya and Tanzania was stalled as no trucks were allowed to enter the border in both countries. There were also other negative forces to the environment that preceded Covid-19 such as climate-induced extreme weather events like floods in Kenya, swarms of locusts that invaded northern Kenya and large parts of Uganda and Southern Sudan, increased incidents of forest fires, and damage by pests and diseases. The environmental impact was huge due to low adaptation capabilities of the EAC member states and similarly at community level.

Forest protections in Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania were impacted as a result of lockdown such that inadequate forest governance including surveillance activities were conducted by forest staff and guards in state managed reserves. Silvicultural operations such as thinning and pruning in plantations were suspended and deprioritized due to social distancing. Some large private sector companies and medium landholders engaged forest workers in small groups to keep the social distance as advised by the health authorities. However, in some countries like Tanzania and Burundi, which did not undertake total lockdown; small to medium landholding operations were not affected directly by operational aspects but rather by declined demand due the pandemic, hence forced to downsize their operations. Many of the field operations such as tree planting and silvicultural activities that include thinning, pruning, de-branching were in operation although with observance of social distancing.

It was observed and reported in some countries in the East Africa, illegal harvesting activities were on rise by 20% from the usual reported number of incidents, and all were associated with less surveillance and patrol activities in the protected areas. The pandemic affected much of the afforestation and planting activities.  The pandemic happened at the peak planting season and only 80 percent of the  planted targets were reached and in late season times, and therefore missing the country’s long term ambitious target of planting for restorations per their annual targets.

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